Baudrillard K

Semiotic Capitalism K
NC Shells
Marx So Hard NC
Consumption, not production, is the heart of capitalism
postmodern capitalism is a system of circulating symbols, not
commodities. The production of desire is the root of capitalist
alienation.
Robinson 12
Andrew Robinson (Political Theorist, Activist; Writer @ Ceasefire Magazine). Jean
Baudrillard: Critique of Alienation Draft 1. Ceasefire Magazine, 14 April 2012,
https://ceasefiremagazine.co.uk/in-theory-baudrillard-3 //dtac
While his theory of symbolic exchange provides an unusual account of how a non-alienated society might work,
Baudrillards critique of alienation provides his account of how capitalism today actually functions. This work has
evolved significantly over time. From an activist point of view, his early work is arguably more accessible and
useful. This early work gives a glimpse of a more politically radical Baudrillard, a sense of what Baudrillard might
look like when paired with Situationism or autonomism. In The Consumer Society, a work from Baudrillards early
consumerism is assessed in terms of the

replacement of use-values with sign-values. In designer goods and brand-names,
such as Nike trainers and Apple Ipods, the brand does not actually add any use-value. It is a way of
conveying or possessing particular signs, so as to project a particular self-image or pursue
social status. In a system of sign-values, people consume the relations between
objects not only the objects. Sign-value is also open to endless slippage: any object can in principle
period when he was more sympathetic to Marxism,
signify happiness, functionality, prestige and so on. It is quite similar to Barthesian myths. Baudrillard also tends to
the slippage of signification stems from an unmeetable

desire for social meaning. Because the desire is unmeetable, needs are insatiable. In
endorse the Lacanian view that
this work, Baudrillard is trying to answer the classic question of the New Left: why workers and other oppressed
consumer society
operates as a kind of social status competition, which carries a particular ideology.
This prefigures his later break with Marxism. Already Baudrillard is suggesting that consumption, rather
than production, is at the heart of capitalism. Baudrillard uses the word ambience for
capitalisms control of society through its incorporation into consumption . It produces
a kind of diffuse, mobile experience of life. The lack of situatedness is partly compensated by the
role of objects. In consumer society, we are surrounded by objects often objects split from
their place and function. We become object-like from living among objects, much as
groups fall for capitalist ruses and remain attached to the system. His hypothesis is that
wolf-children become wolf-like. The code is substituted for the referential dimension of language. People are caught
The system destroys direct

personal ties an{d} social relations. It then systematically creates simulated
relations which can be consumed, instead of those it has destroyed. It also eliminates the singular,
in a world much of which is merely an internal, technical product of the code.
radically different content of each person, putting in its place differential signs. And it eliminates real conflict,
Everyday life is constructed through a split between

the everyday and the abstract or transcendent sphere of the social, political, historical or cultural. The
closure of the everyday sphere, the exclusion from history, is tolerable only because it is
accompanied by alibis or simulations of participation. The exclusion from history is also given
putting abstract competition in its place.
value, because it is identified with security in contrast to the scary historical events shown on TV.
Ignore the proletariat and class divisionscategories of

labor and production shut off desire and buy into the
systems construction of workersstruggle not against the
boss, but against being enclosed as labor!
Robinson 12
Baudrillard: Marx and Alienation Draft 2. Ceasefire Magazine, 20 April 2012,
In The Mirror of Production, Baudrillard offers a challenging critique of Marxism which radicalises certain of its
Baudrillard criticises Marxism for ignoring the underlying

level at which people are constructed as workers. He argues that categories of
labour and production actually capture and repress desire , particularly when
applied to non-capitalist societies. They produce a framework of scarcity, counterposed to
symbolic exchange. It then reads capitalist dynamics back into earlier social forms, including indigenous
social forms. This ignores the ways in which indigenous cosmologies provide an outer
perspective on western culture. This outer perspective is more radical than inner critiques. Instead
of a primary dispute between workers and bosses about the exploitation of labour-power,
Baudrillard sees a primary divide between conformity inside the system , by
those interpellated as labour-power, and subversion by those outside. These exclusionary
boundaries are structured primarily around the exclusion of symbolic exchange and
symbolic power. The proletariat does not escape capitalist power because it
is within production. The truly radical class struggle is the struggle
against being enclosed as labour. Similarly, instead of the economy being the last instance,
Baudrillard insists that separation and alienation are the last instance. The (orthodox) Marxist
emphasis on the economy is ideological. It covers-up the operation of the
system as a totality. Use-value, for instance, is an effect of exchange-value. It cannot be accorded
independence as a category. In fact, capitalism does not unleash most peoples creative forces at all only a
few people are encouraged to develop their capabilities. Rather, it depends above all on conformity.
Production counterposes itself to desire. It is reproduced, as a code, in an
in-depth imperialism in everyday life. Capitalism can extract creative power only if it is
theories while criticising others.
incorporated as production. Ultimately, this process if self-destructive. The suppression of symbolic exchange
means that production cannot obtain the meaning it is directed towards. Capitalism is unable to produce real
radical struggle against capitalism, on an

should focus itself at the point of exclusion. It should be a
struggle against enclosure, against redefinition of oneself as labourpower. Baudrillard expands his transformation of Marxism in his later work, particularly his discussion of workers
and symbolic exchange. Baudrillard claims that workers have always been primarily excluded ,
incarcerated and excommunicated by the system not exploited. Class struggle has always been
a struggle against being treated as subhuman or relegated to a marked term. The core of
capitalism is not exploitation but the code of normality. This account is based on a political history of
labour. Baudrillard traces the origins of the working-class in historical forms of slavery. He argues that the first
workers were prisoners-of-war who were conserved or spared so as to be put to work. He
concludes from this that labour is really a deferred death. This deferred death
separates the economic order from the symbolic order. It removes the slave from
the symbolic order by removing death. This means that we are all hostages of
power. It also means we cant destroy power without removing the deferral of
commitment or participation. In this work, Baudrillard calls for a
immanent level. This struggle
death. Today this hostage status comes from the compulsion to be social and communicative to manage ones
desire, capital, health and so on. To fail to do so is taken to be self-destruction. This extends to a demand that one
reveal ones secret (even if one has none) for instance in polls and statistics. The command to communicate leads
to a compulsory extraversion of all interiority. (This puts a whole different spin on the spread of CCTV, the niqab
ban, anti-masking laws and so on). Baudrillard speaks of a society of forced confessions, compulsory statements of
Capital gives labour as a

gift (think of the idea of job creation). The worker, in return, gives capital to the capitalist.
Wages symbolically buy back domination. This relation replaces the original reversibility of
symbolic exchange with a dialectic. It is this slide from the symbolic into the economic which
allows concentrated power to exist. Otherwise it would be instantly cancelled out by reverse,
truth, obliged revelations but in a context where there is nothing to reveal.
reciprocal gestures.
Liberation is impossiblegroups are re-encoded as alibis for

powerresistance merely simulates liberation, ultimately
reifying the system.
Robinson 12
Similarly, groups supposedly liberated such as women, black people, and young people are denied
the effects of liberation by being re-encoded in terms of myths. Once labelled as irresponsible, peoples liberation is
attached to a coded meaning which demands and bars responsibility and social power.
Real liberation is avoided by giving people an image of themselves to consume
women are given the image of Woman, the young an image of Youth, technological change by
Technology (gadgets), and so on. Liberation is thus nullified, and re-encoded as a role
and as narcissism. Concrete gains for liberation movements are side-effects of this
immense strategic operation to disempower oppressed groups through
their reduction to a function or role. We are drip-fed little bits of democracy and progress
to ensure the systems survival. They operate as its alibis. Even if income
equality is encouraged, the system can survive by moving inequality elsewhere,
to status, style, power and so on. At this point in his work, Baudrillard still believes in desire, happiness, the real,
history and so on. He sees them as alienated in the systems insistence on artificial, simulated and quantitative
The system only knows about its own survival. It doesnt understand
the social or individual forces which operate inside it. Hence, changing its contents
never changes how it works. The system tries to conjure away the real and history with signs
representing them replacing them with the truer than true and so on. Simulations are objects which
offer many signs of being real, when in fact they are not.
versions of them.
The alternative is to reject the affirmative and engage in

radical passivity. This is a fatal strategydisengagement
exhausts the system; reform breathes life into the system
which makes violence inevitable.
Bifo 11
Franco Bifo Berardi, After the Future (2011) pp. 106-108 dml
not even the system, can avoid the symbolic obligation, and it is in this trap
that the only chance of a catastrophe for capital remains. The system turns on itself ,
as a scorpion does when encircled by the challenge of death. For it is summoned to answer, if it is
not to lose face, to what can only be death. The system must itself commit
suicide in response to the multiplied challenge of death and suicide. So hostages are
Nothing,
taken. On the symbolic or sacrificial plane, from which every moral consideration of the innocence of the victims is
ruled out the hostage is the substitute, the alter-ego of the terrorist, the hostages death for the terrorist. Hostage
and terrorist may thereafter become confused in the same sacrificial act. (Baudrillard 1993a: 37) In these
Baudrillard outlines the end of the modern dialectics of revolution

against power, of the labor movement against capitalist domination, and predicts
the advent of a new form of action which will be marked by the sacrificial gift of
death (and self-annihilation). After the destruction of the World Trade Center in the most important terrorist act
impressive pages
ever, Baudrillard wrote a short text titled The Spirit of Terrorism where he goes back to his own predictions and
recognizes the emergence of a catastrophic age.
When the code becomes the enemy the only
strategy can be catastrophic: all the counterphobic ravings about exorcizing evil: it is because it is there,
everywhere, like an obscure object of desire. Without this deep-seated complicity, the event would not have had the
resonance it has, and in their symbolic strategy the terrorists doubtless know that they can count on this
unavowable complicity. (Baudrillard 2003: 6) This goes much further than hatred for the dominant global power by
the disinherited and the exploited, those who fell on the wrong side of global order. This malignant desire is in the
An allergy to all definitive order, to all definitive

is happily universal, and the two towers of the World Trade Center embodied perfectly, in their very
double-ness (literally twin-ness), this definitive order: No need, then, for a death drive or a
destructive instinct, or even for perverse, unintended effects. Very logically inexorably the increase
in the power heightens the will to destroy it. And it was party to its own destruction.
very heart of those who share this orders benefits.
power
When the two towers collapsed, you had the impression that they were responding to the suicide of the suicide-
The
West, in position of God (divine omnipotence and absolute moral legitimacy), has
become suicidal, and declared war on itself. (Baudrillard 2003: 6-7) In Baudrillards catastrophic
vision I see a new way of thinking subjectivity : a reversal of the energetic subjectivation that
animates the revolutionary theories of the 20th century, and the opening of an implosive theory of
subversion, based on depression and exhaustion . In the activist view exhaustion is seen
as the inability of the social body to escape the vicious destiny that capitalism has
prepared: deactivation of the social energies that once upon a time animated democracy and political struggle.
But exhaustion could also become the beginning of a slow movement towards a
wu wei civilization, based on the withdrawal, and frugal expectations of life
and consumption. Radicalism could abandon the mode of activism, and adopt
the mode of passivity. A radical passivity would definitely threaten the ethos of
relentless productivity that neoliberal politics has imposed. The mother of all the
bubbles, the work bubble, would finally deflate. We have been working too much
during the last three or four centuries, and outrageously too much during the last thirty years. The current
depression could be the beginning of a massive abandonment of competition,
consumerist drive, and of dependence on work. Actually, if we think of the geopolitical struggle
of the first decade the struggle between Western domination and jihadist Islam we recognize that the most
powerful weapon has been suicide. 9/11 is the most impressive act of this suicidal war, but
thousands of people have killed themselves in order to destroy American military
hegemony. And they won, forcing the western world into the bunker of paranoid
security, and defeating the hyper-technological armies of the West both in Iraq, and in Afghanistan. The suicidal
implosion has not been confined to the Islamists. Suicide has became a form of political action
planes with their own suicides. It has been said that Even God cannot declare war on Himself. Well, He can.
everywhere. Against neoliberal politics, Indian farmers have killed themselves.

Against exploitation hundreds of workers and employees have killed themselves in
the French factories of Peugeot, and in the offices of France Telecom. In Italy, when the 2009 recession
destroyed one million jobs, many workers, haunted by the fear of unemployment, climbed on the roofs of the
Is it possible to divert this implosive trend from the

direction of death, murder, and suicide, towards a new kind of autonomy, social creativity
and of life? I think that it is possible only if we start from exhaustion, if we emphasize
the creative side of withdrawal. The exchange between life and money could be
deserted, and exhaustion could give way to a huge wave of withdrawal from the
sphere of economic exchange. A new refrain could emerge in that moment, and wipe out
the law of economic growth. The self-organization of the general intellect could
abandon the law of accumulation and growth, and start a new concatenation, where
collective intelligence is only subjected to the common good.
factories, threatening to kill themselves.
Utilitearin em up NC
alienation.
Robinson 12


consumer society


Alienation divorces the self from the body, subjecting the

latter to hostile disciplinethis sets the stage for symbolic
capitalism, breeds the micro-fascist desire for purification, and
nullifies value to life.
Robinson 12
Alienation impacts especially on how we relate to our bodies. The body in capitalism
is both capital and fetish, object of investment and consumption. Its many uses include
fashion, adverts, mass culture, discourses of hygiene, diet and therapy, cults of youth and femininity, and sacrificial
It is exploited in a managed narcissism, perfected externally so as to

to produce socially valued signs to appear as happy, healthy, young, spontaneous,
beautiful and so on. The various uses of the body are replaced by a single signifying function.
Appearances such as fitness are deemed near-necessities in environments such as management.
They express hostility to the body, seen as a menacing object which needs
to be watched over by the self. The body is turned into a package, like clothes, and
consumed like an object. Ones relationship to it thus becomes neurotic and
repressive. The body is socially encoded so as to meet normative demands to
produce and consume. This is even more alienating that the use of the body as source of labour-power. It is
only after the body is reinvested in this way that the demand for objects as signs occurs.
People will only pursue objects as signs once their body is seen as an
object. Similarly, sexuality is turned into an instrumental code of signs instead of individual desires. Especially in
practices such as slimming.
exploit it
downturn periods, sexuality becomes frenetic but anxious. The profound contradictions of sexual problems and
desires are covered-up. External censorship is replaced with an internalised censorship prohibiting liberation. A
private, narcissistic, personalised sexuality protects the status quo from the effects of sexual liberation. Sex is
There is also a new kind of imaginary

subject or self generated by consumerism. Consumer society portrays all its objects
for sale as carefully formulated for an impersonal you to whom they are addressed. It is a
kind of myth which presents consumption as common sense, consuming the
spectacle of consumption itself. Without the myth of consumption, it would not exist as an integrative
social function. It would simply be a set of differentiated needs and desires. The word consumption actually
expresses a restructuring of social ideology. It is not in fact a victory of objects, or of earthly pleasures. Rather, it is
a set of reified social and productive relations and forces. In this world, revolutions are
replaced by fashion cycles. Even the retraining of workers is little more than a fashion cycle. Its a
way of imposing low-intensity constraints and a threat of exclusion so
as to ensure conformity. Baudrillard is highly critical of the view that consumerism amounts to
liberation. It is true that certain older regimes of authoritarianism have decayed. But the new regime is also a
system of control. Repression persists, but it moves sideways. The image of a sterile,
hygienic body and fear of contamination establishes an inner control which removes
desire from the body. The ranking of bodies in terms of status leads to a re-racialisation. Puritanism
becomes mixed-up with hedonism in this ranking process. The body as locus of desire
remains censored and silenced, even when it appears to undergo hedonistic release.
Sexuality is expressed in consumption so it cant disrupt the status quo. What is now censored is the
symbolic structure and the possibility of deep meaning. Living representations are
everywhere but in the sex-act itself. It is overwhelmed by signs.
turned into empty signs. Because of this change, the old resistances to repression
no longer work.

Bifo 11
suicide in response to the multiplied challenge of death and suicide. So hostages are
Nothing,

impressive pages


double-ness (literally twin-ness), this definitive order: No need, then, for a death drive or a
power
The

Passivity kills the economy, but thats goodgrowth is

unsustainable and immediate collapse can avert extinction
from ecological destruction and warming
Barry 14
Dr. Glen Barry (President and Founder of Ecological Internet; Ph.D., Land Resources,
Univ. Wisconsin-Madison). Earth In Overshoot; Human Growth Is Killing Her. 18
May 2014, http://www.countercurrents.org/barry180514.htm
The global ecological system is collapsing and dying under the cumulative filth of 7
billion people INEQUITABLY devouring their ecosystem habitats. It is impossible to
avoid global ecosystem collapse if humanity continues to breed like bunnies; tolerates
exorbitant inequality, abject poverty and conspicuous overconsumption; and destroys the
ecosystems and climate that rich or poor are habitat for all of us. As I have written previously and will
write again, the human family either comes together to address converging ecology, rights, and injustice crises
largely brought on by inequitable overpopulation or faces global ecological collapse and the end of being.
It is
not possible to go from 1 to 7 billion people in 135 years while still growing
exponentially without profound impacts upon natural ecosystems that provide air, water, food and
livelihoods. If you dont understand this, you are uneducated, dumb, and/or indoctrinated; you need to study
ecology and get out and see the world. Or go and look at an overgrazed cow pasture and extrapolate.
Merging
climate, food, water, ocean, soil, justice, poverty, and old-growth forest crises all which
are to some degree caused by inequitable overpopulation are destroying ecosystems and threaten
to pull down our one shared biosphere. Earth has lost 80% of her old-growth forests, 50% of
her soil, 90% of the big fish and many water, land, and ocean ecosystems, as well as atmospheric
stability, as human population has soared more than sevenfold. The human family is living far beyond
its means, devouring natural capital principal and ravaging its own ecosystem habitats, which can
only end in ecological, social and economic collapse. Earth's carrying capacity has been
exceeded, and we must equitably and justly bring down human population and consumption inequity or else face
We can start the necessary social change or an angry Earth

will sort it out herself by killing billions; as we possibly pull down the biosphere
with us, ending most or even all life, during a prolonged collapse. Earth is not designed for 7
billion people (and growing), some of them destroying ecosystems globally as they live in opulence, others more
global ecosystem collapse.
locally through their grinding poverty and need to survive. Overpopulated, inequitable, unjust human industrial
a brief era of
opulence for some and abject misery for many, before collapsing the biosphere
and causing the end of being for all. Together the human family must find a way to first limit and
then reduce human population to avoid collapsing the biosphere. Infinite economic growth in a
finite world is impossible; either we embrace a steady state economy
together, or we die. Solutions to overpopulation to ensure humanitys cumulative consumption remains
growth ravages ecosystems; destroying all that is natural, indigenous and good, heralding
within Earth's carrying capacity include more equity (fewer extremes, basic needs met, hard work rewarded,
without communism or authoritarian regimes), educating all girls, free birth control, and lower taxes and more
social benefits for families with one to two children. Ensuring every girl in the world is educated and empowered to
make her own life decisions, especially about fertility, is the key. Those who cling to ancient superstitions or
contemporary greed to resist these policies must be ridiculed and ignored or overthrown. There are many other
common sense ways to keep population in balance with ecosystems. Some obvious and essential global ecological
solutions include agroecology, ending fossil fuel dependence, protecting and restoring ecosystems including ending
old-growth forest logging, and an embrace of ecology, truth, justice, wisdom, and love as the meaning of life. The
human animal is fundamentally an ecological being as with all organic life, part of and springing from natural
ecosystems. Without natural ecosystems and a healthy atmosphere, there is nothing .
Tragically, centuries of advancement in human rights and welfare are at risk as climate and ecosystem collapse are
The global
ecological system upon which all life depends is being systematically dismantled in
the name of "development". Whatever became of aspirations for real human advancement in justice,
being misdiagnosed and met with authoritarianism rather than ecologically based policies.
rights and duties, truth, equity, love and peace? Instead most postmodern humanity seems only to want more stuff,
Now is the time for moral and

political courage as together we stop and reverse abrupt climate change, ecosystem
collapse, and rising tyranny by rationally and logically using humanitys accumulated wisdom and
knowledge to craft and implement together the required social change for global
ecological sustainability. Again, to survive and achieve universal well-being, humanity must
choose ecology by leaving fossil fuels in the ground, protecting and restoring natural ecosystems,
embracing organic permaculture, and reducing our own numbers equitably and justly or, it cannot be said
enough, we face ecological collapse and the end of being. There is no other
way. The challenge of the present and perhaps all time left to us is to remain free. Together, as one human family,
self-aggrandizement, and comfort at any price including our shared future.
we must embrace our duty to protect nature, end fossil fuels, reduce human numbers, and share with other people
There is nothing normal about being well adjusted and silent as

ecosystems and climate collapse globally, threatening the imminent death
of us all. Living in such a manner can no longer be tolerated as acceptable. As global ecosystems
and society collapse, chances for future survival and well-being depend critically
upon holding onto our shared humanity as together we restore ecosystems, care for each other and all
life, and find new ways to live well sustainably.
and kindred species.
NC Tricks
Dedev NB
Passivity kills the economy, but thats goodgrowth is
unsustainable and immediate collapse can avert extinction
from ecological destruction and warming
Barry 14
Dr. Glen Barry (President and Founder of Ecological Internet; Ph.D., Land Resources,
Univ. Wisconsin-Madison). Earth In Overshoot; Human Growth Is Killing Her. 18
May 2014, http://www.countercurrents.org/barry180514.htm
The global ecological system is collapsing and dying under the cumulative filth of 7
billion people INEQUITABLY devouring their ecosystem habitats. It is impossible to
avoid global ecosystem collapse if humanity continues to breed like bunnies; tolerates
exorbitant inequality, abject poverty and conspicuous overconsumption; and destroys the
ecosystems and climate that rich or poor are habitat for all of us. As I have written previously and will
write again, the human family either comes together to address converging ecology, rights, and injustice crises
It is
not possible to go from 1 to 7 billion people in 135 years while still growing
exponentially without profound impacts upon natural ecosystems that provide air, water, food and
largely brought on by inequitable overpopulation or faces global ecological collapse and the end of being.
livelihoods. If you dont understand this, you are uneducated, dumb, and/or indoctrinated; you need to study
Merging
climate, food, water, ocean, soil, justice, poverty, and old-growth forest crises all which
are to some degree caused by inequitable overpopulation are destroying ecosystems and threaten
to pull down our one shared biosphere. Earth has lost 80% of her old-growth forests, 50% of
her soil, 90% of the big fish and many water, land, and ocean ecosystems, as well as atmospheric
stability, as human population has soared more than sevenfold. The human family is living far beyond
its means, devouring natural capital principal and ravaging its own ecosystem habitats, which can
only end in ecological, social and economic collapse. Earth's carrying capacity has been
ecology and get out and see the world. Or go and look at an overgrazed cow pasture and extrapolate.
exceeded, and we must equitably and justly bring down human population and consumption inequity or else face
We can start the necessary social change or an angry Earth

will sort it out herself by killing billions; as we possibly pull down the biosphere
with us, ending most or even all life, during a prolonged collapse. Earth is not designed for 7
billion people (and growing), some of them destroying ecosystems globally as they live in opulence, others more
global ecosystem collapse.
locally through their grinding poverty and need to survive. Overpopulated, inequitable, unjust human industrial
a brief era of
opulence for some and abject misery for many, before collapsing the biosphere
and causing the end of being for all. Together the human family must find a way to first limit and
then reduce human population to avoid collapsing the biosphere. Infinite economic growth in a
finite world is impossible; either we embrace a steady state economy
together, or we die. Solutions to overpopulation to ensure humanitys cumulative consumption remains
growth ravages ecosystems; destroying all that is natural, indigenous and good, heralding
within Earth's carrying capacity include more equity (fewer extremes, basic needs met, hard work rewarded,
without communism or authoritarian regimes), educating all girls, free birth control, and lower taxes and more
social benefits for families with one to two children. Ensuring every girl in the world is educated and empowered to
make her own life decisions, especially about fertility, is the key. Those who cling to ancient superstitions or
contemporary greed to resist these policies must be ridiculed and ignored or overthrown. There are many other
common sense ways to keep population in balance with ecosystems. Some obvious and essential global ecological
solutions include agroecology, ending fossil fuel dependence, protecting and restoring ecosystems including ending
old-growth forest logging, and an embrace of ecology, truth, justice, wisdom, and love as the meaning of life. The
human animal is fundamentally an ecological being as with all organic life, part of and springing from natural
ecosystems.
Without natural ecosystems and a healthy atmosphere, there is nothing .
Tragically, centuries of advancement in human rights and welfare are at risk as climate and ecosystem collapse are
The global
ecological system upon which all life depends is being systematically dismantled in
the name of "development". Whatever became of aspirations for real human advancement in justice,
being misdiagnosed and met with authoritarianism rather than ecologically based policies.
rights and duties, truth, equity, love and peace? Instead most postmodern humanity seems only to want more stuff,
Now is the time for moral and

political courage as together we stop and reverse abrupt climate change, ecosystem
collapse, and rising tyranny by rationally and logically using humanitys accumulated wisdom and
knowledge to craft and implement together the required social change for global
ecological sustainability. Again, to survive and achieve universal well-being, humanity must
choose ecology by leaving fossil fuels in the ground, protecting and restoring natural ecosystems,
embracing organic permaculture, and reducing our own numbers equitably and justly or, it cannot be said
enough, we face ecological collapse and the end of being. There is no other
way. The challenge of the present and perhaps all time left to us is to remain free. Together, as one human family,
self-aggrandizement, and comfort at any price including our shared future.
we must embrace our duty to protect nature, end fossil fuels, reduce human numbers, and share with other people
There is nothing normal about being well adjusted and silent as

ecosystems and climate collapse globally, threatening the imminent death
of us all. Living in such a manner can no longer be tolerated as acceptable. As global ecosystems
and society collapse, chances for future survival and well-being depend critically
upon holding onto our shared humanity as together we restore ecosystems, care for each other and all
life, and find new ways to live well sustainably.
and kindred species.
Links
Capitalism
alienation.
Robinson 12


consumer society


Economy / Growth
Economic rationality imposes a violent calculative logic on an
irrational worldmakes violence and collapse inevitable.
Bifo 11
Franco Bifo Berardi, After the Future pp. 110-114 (of my copy), dml
The fantastic collapse that has shaken the global economy since September 2008 has
opened a new phase in the history of the world . After some months of amazement and confusion,
media, political institutions and economists have started to repeat the self-reassuring mantra:
recovery is coming soon. I do not know what will happen next, but I think that the word recovery
means very little in the current situation. What is sure, in my opinion, is that the workers will not
recover if neoliberal ideology is not abandoned, and if the myth of growth is not
substituted with a new kind of narration. Unemployment is rising everywhere and salaries are falling.
And the huge debt accumulated for the rescue of the banks is weighing upon the future of
society. More than ever, economic rationality is at odds with social rationality. Economic
science is not part of the solution to the crisis: it is the source of the problem. On July
18th 2009 the headline of The Economist read: What went wrong with economics? The text is
an attempt to downplay the crisis of the Economics profession, and of economic knowledge.
For neoliberal economists the central dogma of growth, profit and competition cannot be
questioned, because it is identified with the perfect mathematical rationality of the
market. And belief in the intrinsic rationality of the market is crucial in the economic
theology of neoliberalism. But the reduction of social life to the rational exchange of
economic values is an obsession that has nothing to do with science. Its a political
strategy aimed to identify humans as calculating machines, aimed to shape
behavior and perception in such a way that money becomes the only motivation of
social action. But it is not accurate as a description of social dynamics, and the
conflicts, pathologies, and irrationality of human relationships. Rather, it is an attempt at creating the
anthropological brand of homo calculans that Foucault (2008) has described in his seminar of 1979/80, published
This attempt to identify human beings with calculating

devices has produced cultural devastation, and has finally been showed to have
been based upon flawed assumptions. Human beings do calculate, but their
calculation is not perfectly rational, because the value of goods is not determined
by objective reasons, and because decisions are influenced by what Keynes named animal spirits. We
will never really understand important economic events unless we confront the fact
that their causes are largely mental in nature, say Akerlof and Shiller (2009: 1) in their book
with the title The Birth of Biopolitics.
Animal Spirits, echoing Keyness assumption that the rationality of the market is not perfect in itself. Akerlof and
Numbers cannot make the

beast lie down and be quiet or sit up and do tricks . At best, economics is a neurosis of
money, a symptom contrived to hold the beast in abeyance . Thus economics shares the
Shiller are avowing the crisis of neoliberal thought, but their critique is behave.
language of psychopathology inflation, depression, lows and highs, slumps and peaks, investments and losses.
the economic process has been a process of

production of scarcity (scarcification). The enclosures were intended to scarcify the land,
and the basic means of survival, so that people who so far had been able to
cultivate food for their family were forced to become proletarians , then salaried industrial
workers. Capitalism is based on the artificial creation of need, and economic science is
essentially a technique of scarcification of time, life and food. Inside the condition of scarcity
human beings are subjected to exploitation and to the domain of profit-oriented
(Sordello 1983) From the age of the enclosures in England
activity. After scarcifying the land (enclosures) capitalism has scarcified time itself, forcing
people who dont have property other than their own life and body, to lend their life-time to
capital. Now the capitalist obsession for growth is making scarce both water and air.
Economic science is not the science of prediction: it is the technique of
producing, implementing, and pushing scarcity and need. This is why Marx did not speak
of economy, but of political economy. The technique of economic scarcification is based
on a mythology, a narration that identifies richness as property and acquisition, and
subjugates the possibility of living to the lending of time and to the transformation
of human activity into salaried work. In recent decades, technological change has slowly eroded the
very foundations of economic science. Shifting from the sphere of production of material
objects to the semiocapitalist production of immaterial goods, the Economic
concepts are losing their foundation and legitimacy. The basic categories of
Economics are becoming totally artificial. The theoretical justification of private property, as you
read in the writings of John Locke, is based on the need of exclusive consumption. An apple must be privatized, if
what happens when goods are

immaterial, infinitely replicable without cost? Thanks to digitalization and immaterialization of the production
process, the economic nomos of private property loses its ground, its raison detre, and it can
be imposed only by force. Furthermore, the very foundation of salary, the relationship
between time needed for production and value of the product, is vanishing. The
immaterialization and cognitivization of production makes it almost impossible to quantify
the average time needed to produce value. Time and value become
incommensurable, and violence becomes the only law able to determine price and
salary. The neoliberal school, which has opened the way to the worldwide deregulation of social production, has
you want to avoid the danger that someone else eats your apple. But
fostered the mythology of rational expectations in economic exchange, and has touted the idea of a selfregulation
self-regulation is a lie. In order to increase

exploitation, and to destroy social welfare, global capitalism has used political
institutions like the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organization, not to mention the
military enforcement of the political decisions of these institutions. Far from being
self-regulated, the market is militarily regulated . The mythology of free individuals
loyally competing on the base of perfect knowledge of the market is a lie , too. Real
human beings are not perfect rational calculating machines. And the myth of
rational expectations has finally crashed after the explosion of the real estate
mortgage bubble. The theory of rational expectation is crucial in neoliberal thought:
the economic agents are supposed to be free to choose in a perfectly rational way
the best deal in selling and buying . The fraud perpetrated by the investment agencies has destroyed
the lives of millions of Americans, and has exposed the theoretical swindle. Economic exchange cannot
be described as a rational game, because irrational factors play a crucial role in
social life in general. Trickery, misleading information, and psychic manipulation are not exceptions, but the
professional tools of advertisers, financial agents, and economic consultants. The idea that social
relationships can be described in mathematical terms has the force of myth, but it is
not science, and it has nothing to do with natural law . Notwithstanding the failure of the theory,
neoliberal politics are still in control of the global machine, because the criminal
class that has seized power has no intention of stepping down, and because the
social brain is unable to recompose and find the way of self-organization. I read in the New York Times
on September 6th 2009: After the mortgage business imploded last year, Wall Street investment banks
began searching for another big idea to make money. They think they may have found one. The bankers plan to
buy life settlements, life insurance policies that ill and elderly people sell for cash, depending on the life
of the market, first of all the labor-market. But
expectancy of the insured person. Then they plan to securitize these policies, in Wall Street jargon, by packaging
hundreds of thousands together into bonds. They will then resell those bonds to investors, like big pension funds,
who will receive the payouts when people with the insurance die. The earlier the policyholder dies, the bigger the
return, though if people live longer than expected investors could get poor returns or even lose money. Imagine that
I buy an insurance policy on my life (something I would absolutely not do). My insurer of course will wish me a long
life, so Ill pay the fee for a long time, while he should pay lots of money to my family if I die. But some enlightened
finance guru has the brilliant idea of insuring the insurer. He buys the risk, and he invests on the hope that I die
soon. You dont need the imagination of Philip K. Dick to guess the follow up of the story: financial agents will be
The talk of recovery is based on necronomy, the economy of

death. Its not new, as capitalism has always profited from wars, slaughters and
genocides. But now the equation becomes unequivocal. Death is the promise, death is
the investment and the hope. Death is the best future that capitalism may secure. The
motivated to kill me overnight.
logic of speculation is different from the logic of spectacle that was dominant in late-modern times. Spectacle is the
Speculation is the
subjugation of the future to its financial mirror, the substitution of present life with
future money that will never come, because death will come before . The lesson that we
must learn from the first year of the global recession is sad: neoliberal folly is not going away, the
financial plungers will not stop their speculation, and corporations will not stop their
exploitation, and the political class, largely controlled by the corporate lobbies, is unwilling or
unable to protect society from the final assault. In 1996 J. G. Ballard (1996: 188) wrote: the most
perfect crime of all when the victims are either willing, or arent aware that they are victims. Democracy
seems unable to stop the criminal class that has seized control of the economy,
because the decisions are no longer made in the sphere of political opinion, but in
the inaccessible sphere of economic automatism. The economy has been declared
the basic standard of decision, and the economists have systematically identified
Economy with the capitalist obsession of growth. No room for political choice has
been left, as the corporate principles have been embedded in the technical fabric of language and imagination.
mirrorization of life, the transfer of life in the mirror of spectacular accumulation.
Marxism
Ignore the proletariat and class divisionscategories of
labor and production shut off desire and buy into the
systems construction of workersstruggle not against the
boss, but against being enclosed as labor!
Robinson 12
Baudrillard: Marx and Alienation Draft 2. Ceasefire Magazine, 20 April 2012,
In The Mirror of Production, Baudrillard offers a challenging critique of Marxism which radicalises certain of its
Baudrillard criticises Marxism for ignoring the underlying

level at which people are constructed as workers. He argues that categories of
labour and production actually capture and repress desire , particularly when
applied to non-capitalist societies. They produce a framework of scarcity, counterposed to
symbolic exchange. It then reads capitalist dynamics back into earlier social forms, including indigenous
social forms. This ignores the ways in which indigenous cosmologies provide an outer
perspective on western culture. This outer perspective is more radical than inner critiques. Instead
of a primary dispute between workers and bosses about the exploitation of labour-power,
Baudrillard sees a primary divide between conformity inside the system , by
those interpellated as labour-power, and subversion by those outside. These exclusionary
boundaries are structured primarily around the exclusion of symbolic exchange and
symbolic power. The proletariat does not escape capitalist power because it
is within production. The truly radical class struggle is the struggle
against being enclosed as labour. Similarly, instead of the economy being the last instance,
Baudrillard insists that separation and alienation are the last instance. The (orthodox) Marxist
emphasis on the economy is ideological. It covers-up the operation of the
system as a totality. Use-value, for instance, is an effect of exchange-value. It cannot be accorded
independence as a category. In fact, capitalism does not unleash most peoples creative forces at all only a
few people are encouraged to develop their capabilities. Rather, it depends above all on conformity.
Production counterposes itself to desire. It is reproduced, as a code, in an
in-depth imperialism in everyday life. Capitalism can extract creative power only if it is
theories while criticising others.
incorporated as production. Ultimately, this process if self-destructive. The suppression of symbolic exchange
means that production cannot obtain the meaning it is directed towards. Capitalism is unable to produce real
radical struggle against capitalism, on an

should focus itself at the point of exclusion. It should be a
struggle against enclosure, against redefinition of oneself as labourpower. Baudrillard expands his transformation of Marxism in his later work, particularly his discussion of workers
and symbolic exchange. Baudrillard claims that workers have always been primarily excluded ,
incarcerated and excommunicated by the system not exploited. Class struggle has always been
a struggle against being treated as subhuman or relegated to a marked term. The core of
capitalism is not exploitation but the code of normality. This account is based on a political history of
labour. Baudrillard traces the origins of the working-class in historical forms of slavery. He argues that the first
workers were prisoners-of-war who were conserved or spared so as to be put to work. He
concludes from this that labour is really a deferred death. This deferred death
separates the economic order from the symbolic order. It removes the slave from
commitment or participation. In this work, Baudrillard calls for a
immanent level. This struggle
the symbolic order by removing death. This means that we are all hostages of
power. It also means we cant destroy power without removing the deferral of
death. Today this hostage status comes from the compulsion to be social and communicative to manage ones
desire, capital, health and so on. To fail to do so is taken to be self-destruction. This extends to a demand that one
reveal ones secret (even if one has none) for instance in polls and statistics. The command to communicate leads
to a compulsory extraversion of all interiority. (This puts a whole different spin on the spread of CCTV, the niqab
ban, anti-masking laws and so on). Baudrillard speaks of a society of forced confessions, compulsory statements of
Capital gives labour as a

gift (think of the idea of job creation). The worker, in return, gives capital to the capitalist.
Wages symbolically buy back domination. This relation replaces the original reversibility of
symbolic exchange with a dialectic. It is this slide from the symbolic into the economic which
allows concentrated power to exist. Otherwise it would be instantly cancelled out by reverse,
truth, obliged revelations but in a context where there is nothing to reveal.
reciprocal gestures.
Resistance / Reform
Liberation is impossiblegroups are re-encoded as alibis for
powerresistance merely simulates liberation, ultimately
reifying the system.
Robinson 12
Similarly, groups supposedly liberated such as women, black people, and young people are denied
the effects of liberation by being re-encoded in terms of myths. Once labelled as irresponsible, peoples liberation is
attached to a coded meaning which demands and bars responsibility and social power.
Real liberation is avoided by giving people an image of themselves to consume
women are given the image of Woman, the young an image of Youth, technological change by
Technology (gadgets), and so on. Liberation is thus nullified, and re-encoded as a role
and as narcissism. Concrete gains for liberation movements are side-effects of this
immense strategic operation to disempower oppressed groups through
their reduction to a function or role. We are drip-fed little bits of democracy and progress
to ensure the systems survival. They operate as its alibis. Even if income
equality is encouraged, the system can survive by moving inequality elsewhere,
to status, style, power and so on. At this point in his work, Baudrillard still believes in desire, happiness, the real,
history and so on. He sees them as alienated in the systems insistence on artificial, simulated and quantitative
The system only knows about its own survival. It doesnt understand
the social or individual forces which operate inside it. Hence, changing its contents
never changes how it works. The system tries to conjure away the real and history with signs
representing them replacing them with the truer than true and so on. Simulations are objects which
offer many signs of being real, when in fact they are not.
versions of them.
Impacts
TopAlienation
Alienation divorces the self from the body, subjecting the
latter to hostile disciplinethis sets the stage for symbolic
capitalism, breeds the micro-fascist desire for purification, and
nullifies value to life.
Robinson 12
Alienation impacts especially on how we relate to our bodies. The body in capitalism
is both capital and fetish, object of investment and consumption. Its many uses include
fashion, adverts, mass culture, discourses of hygiene, diet and therapy, cults of youth and femininity, and sacrificial
It is exploited in a managed narcissism, perfected externally so as to

to produce socially valued signs to appear as happy, healthy, young, spontaneous,
beautiful and so on. The various uses of the body are replaced by a single signifying function.
Appearances such as fitness are deemed near-necessities in environments such as management.
They express hostility to the body, seen as a menacing object which needs
to be watched over by the self. The body is turned into a package, like clothes, and
consumed like an object. Ones relationship to it thus becomes neurotic and
repressive. The body is socially encoded so as to meet normative demands to
produce and consume. This is even more alienating that the use of the body as source of labour-power. It is
only after the body is reinvested in this way that the demand for objects as signs occurs.
People will only pursue objects as signs once their body is seen as an
object. Similarly, sexuality is turned into an instrumental code of signs instead of individual desires. Especially in
practices such as slimming.
exploit it
downturn periods, sexuality becomes frenetic but anxious. The profound contradictions of sexual problems and
desires are covered-up. External censorship is replaced with an internalised censorship prohibiting liberation. A
private, narcissistic, personalised sexuality protects the status quo from the effects of sexual liberation. Sex is
There is also a new kind of imaginary

subject or self generated by consumerism. Consumer society portrays all its objects
for sale as carefully formulated for an impersonal you to whom they are addressed. It is a
kind of myth which presents consumption as common sense, consuming the
spectacle of consumption itself. Without the myth of consumption, it would not exist as an integrative
social function. It would simply be a set of differentiated needs and desires. The word consumption actually
expresses a restructuring of social ideology. It is not in fact a victory of objects, or of earthly pleasures. Rather, it is
a set of reified social and productive relations and forces. In this world, revolutions are
replaced by fashion cycles. Even the retraining of workers is little more than a fashion cycle. Its a
way of imposing low-intensity constraints and a threat of exclusion so
as to ensure conformity. Baudrillard is highly critical of the view that consumerism amounts to
liberation. It is true that certain older regimes of authoritarianism have decayed. But the new regime is also a
system of control. Repression persists, but it moves sideways. The image of a sterile,
hygienic body and fear of contamination establishes an inner control which removes
desire from the body. The ranking of bodies in terms of status leads to a re-racialisation. Puritanism
becomes mixed-up with hedonism in this ranking process. The body as locus of desire
remains censored and silenced, even when it appears to undergo hedonistic release.
Sexuality is expressed in consumption so it cant disrupt the status quo. What is now censored is the
everywhere but in the sex-act itself. It is overwhelmed by signs.
the possibility of deep meaning. Living representations are

turned into empty signs. Because of this change, the old resistances to repression
no longer work.
symbolic structure and
VTL
Consumer capitalism replaces individual value with hollow
conformity and simulationdestroys value to lifeonly
passivity solves.
Robinson 12
Baudrillard also sees communication and sociality being corrupted into sign-values to be
consumed. This occurs through the consumption of services based on sociability. The
loss of genuine, spontaneous, reciprocal human relations (which require a symbolic dimension) is
covered up by the standardised production of signs of social warmth and
participation. As with the smile of the salesman , receptionist or PR executive, or the have a
nice day of McDonalds, it simulates intimacy. These simulated signs are what now
counts as abstract interpersonal skills. In practice, Baudrillard observes, such false sociality
is shot through with the flaws of the mode of production, including aggression and
frustration. It turns into an entire value-system dressed-up as functionality. It has a
constant repressive effect, pacifying social relations. The act of conforming to a
model is presented as narcissistic self-assertion through small signified differences.
People think they are creating themselves when in fact they are
consuming themselves, or their images. For example, femininity and masculinity
are models which govern, rather than express, women and men. Baudrillard believes that
such models shape how people see each other, regardless of whether people actually conform to them. Similarly,
sites such as holiday resorts are constructed as planned communities and total environments
realising a particular ideal of abstract happiness. These sites replace distinct
elements with homogeneous ones. People set up signs of happiness in the hope that happiness will
alight on them. There is a fun system of enforced enjoyment, which imposes a duty (not a right) to happiness and
Consumption is a morality, an institution and a system of

values with functions of social integration and control. The anarchic consumer, free to consume
or not, is a thing of the past. People are now pressured to consume in standard ways and even to
seek out new experiences. Yet this pressure destroys enjoyment from the inside.
Consumption is haunted by its inner puritanism, rendering it compulsive
and limitless. It is both lived as an affirmative myth, and endured as a kind
of social adaptation to a new collective regime. At the same time as
socialising people, it atomises people into private consumption. Beauty products and the
denies any right not to be happy.
like often claim to be drawing out an inherent personality, or recovering one which has been lost. In fact they are
differences are derived from

a model and are only artificially diversified. They mark conformity with the code,
not individuality. Baudrillard writes of monopoly concentration of the production of differences. The
products of the industrial mass-production of systematic differences. These
system is based on abolishing real difference (and for instance nature) so as to usher in a process of differentiation
Difference within the code is based on the smallest marginal

difference, used as a sign of hierarchy. Excessive social contact due to urbanism leads to
psychological pauperisation. People gain an increased need for objects as signifiers
of differentiation. Consumption actually excludes the possibility of
enjoyment. This is because consumption is always collective, at least indirectly,
(and naturalisation, etc).
whereas enjoyment is personal. The disappearance of altruistic forms of integration leads to an

expanded role for state repression. Atomisation leads to bureaucratic control, disguised as
freedom. Credit is used to condition people into capitalistic forms of action. The people or consumers are
glorified as long as they do not try to exercise their putative sovereignty on a political or social stage, and instead
Consumer goods are experienced as miraculous, because their production is

concealed. They seem as if they come from technology, progress or growth. In fact we
have only the signs of affluence, coexisting with ever more impoverished social
relations. Competition, generalised across social life as consumption as well as production is ranked,
leads to generalised fatigue. Such fatigue is really a resistance, akin to a
slowdown by workers or boredom in school. Such resistance, as the only resistance available,
becomes habitual and grows into peoples bodies. It is a partial revolt necessary to
prevent total breakdown, which is also instantly available as a source of discontent in crisis situations. The real
social effect of the pursuit of system-promoted goals is an exhausting rat-race. The system of
unstable, precarious employment creates generalised insecurity and
generalised competition for status. The constant treadmill of work, retraining and statuscompetition leaves some on the scrapheap and others successful but exhausted. But the ideology of
consumption lulls people into believing that they are affluent, fulfilled, happy and
liberated.
stick to consuming.
Alternative
PassivityBifo
Bifo 11
suicide in response to the multiplied challenge of death and suicide . So hostages are
Nothing,

impressive pages
No need, then, for a death drive or a
power
double-ness (literally twin-ness), this definitive order:
The


Answers
Cap Good
(Extend Robinson impacts).
(Extend Dedev).
Capitalism creates a global war economy and destroys value to
life.
Robinson 14
(William I. Robinson, professor of sociology, global and international studies, and Latin American studies at the
University of California at Santa Barbara, Global Capitalism Is In the Midst of Its Most Severe Crisis 02 Jul 2014,
KB)
US intervention around the world clearly

entered a qualitatively new period after September 11, 2001. This new period
should be seen in the context of emergent 21st century global capitalism. Global
capitalism is in the midst of its most severe crisis in close to a century, and in many ways
the current crisis is much worse than that of the 1930s because we are on the
precipice of an ecological holocaust that threatens the very earth system
and the ability to sustain life, ours included, because the means of violence and
social control have never before been so concentrated within a single powerful
state, and because the global means of communication is also extraordinarily
concentrated in the hands of transnational capital and a few powerful states. On the
other hand, global inequalities have never been as acute and grotesque as they
are today. So, in simplified terms, we need to see the escalation of US interventionism and
the untold suffering it brings about, including what you mention the killing of unarmed
civilians, the destruction of the environment, forced migration and displacement,
undermining democracy as a response by the US-led transnational state and the
transnational capitalist class to contain the explosive contradictions of a global
capitalist system that is out of control and in deep crisis. You ask me who is going to
compensate for these losses. That will depend on how the worlds people respond. There is currently a
global revolt from below underway, but it is spread unevenly across countries
and has not taken any clear form or direction. Can the popular majority of humanity force the
However, and this is the key point I wish to highlight here,
transnational capitalist class and the US/transnational state to be accountable for its crimes? Mao Zedong once said
that power flows through the barrel of a gun. What he meant by this, in a more abstract than literal way, I believe,
is that in the end it is the correlation of real forces that will determine outcomes. Because the United States has
overwhelming and full spectrum military dominance, it can capture, execute, or bring to trial people anywhere
around the world it has free license, so to speak, to act as an international outlaw. We dont even have to take
the more recent examples. In December 1989 the United States undertook an illegal and criminal invasion of
Panama, kidnapped Manuel Noriega whether or not he was a dictator is not the point, as the United States puts in
power and defends dictators that defend US and transnational elite interests, and brought him back to US territory
for trial. What country in the world now has the naked power flowing through the barrel of a gun to invade the
United States, capture George Bush, Dick Chaney, Donald Rumsfeld, and other war criminals, and bring them
somewhere to stand trial for war crimes and crimes against humanity? Q: In your writings, youve warned against
the growing gap between the rich and the poor, the slant accumulation of the global wealth in the hands of an
affluent few and the impoverishment of the suppressed majority. What do you think are the reasons for this stark
inequality and the disturbing dispossession of millions of people in the capitalist societies? You wrote that the
participants of the 2011 World Economic Forum in Davos were worried that the current situation raises the specter
We have never in the history of

humanity seen such a sharp social polarization between the haves and the
have-nots, such grotesque levels of inequality, within and among countries. There have been
countless studies in recent years documenting the escalation of inequalities, among
of worldwide instability and civil wars. Is it really so? A:
them, the current bestseller by Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century. The pattern we see is that
the notorious 1 percent monopolizes a huge portion of the wealth that humanity
produces and transnational corporations and banks are registering record profits , but as
well that some 20 percent of the population in each countries has integrated into the global economy as middle
80 percent has experienced rising levels of

insecurity, impoverishment, and precariousness, increasingly inhabiting what some have called
a planet of slums. The apologists of global capitalism point to the rise of a middle
class in China to claim that the system is successful. But in China, 300-400 million
people have entered the ranks of the global middle and consuming class while the
other 800-900 million have faced downward mobility, immiseration, insecurity,
unemployment and extreme levels of exploitation. Such is this exploitation that a couple years
ago, you may remember, Foxcomm workers preferred to commit suicide by jumping off the
roof of their factories than to remain in their labor camps. This is the Foxcomm that
makes your iPads and iPhones. The 80 percent is then subject to all sorts of sophisticated systems of
social control and repression. We are headed in this regard towards a global police state,
organized by global elites and led by the US state, to contain the real or potential
rebellion of a dispossessed majority . Such structures of inequality and exploitation cannot be
contained over time without both ideological and coercive apparatuses; conformity to a system of
structural violence must be compelled through direct violence , organized by states and
class and affluent consumers while the remaining
private security forces. Edward Snowden revealed the extent to which we are now living in a global social control
state, a global panoptical surveillance state. George Orwell wrote about such a state in his famous novel 1984.
The Orwellian society has arrived. Yet it is worse than Orwell imagined, because
at least the members of Orwells society had their basic needs met in return for
their obedience and conformity. How do we explain such stark inequality? Capitalism is a system that
by its very internal dynamic generates wealth yet polarizes and concentrates that wealth. Historically a deconcentration of wealth through redistribution has come about by state intervention to offset the natural tendency
States have turned to an array of

redistributive mechanisms both because they have been pressured from below
to do so whether by trade unions, social movements, socialist struggles, or so on or because states must do
for capital accumulation to result in such polarization.
so in order to retain legitimacy and preserve at least enough social peace for the reproduction of the system. A
great variety of redistributive models emerged in the 20th century around the world, and went by a great many
names socialism, communism, social democracy, New Deal, welfare states, developmental states, populism, the
social wage, and so on. All these models shared two things in common. One was state intervention in the economy
to regulate capital accumulation and thus to bring under some control the most anarchic and most destructive
elements of unrestrained capitalism. The other was redistribution through numerous policies, ranging from
minimum legal wages and unemployment insurance, to public enterprises, the social wages of public health,
education, transportation, and housing, welfare programs, land reform in agrarian countries, low cost credit, and so
on. But capital responded to the last major crisis of the system, that of the 1970s, by going global, by breaking
free of nation-state constraints to accumulation and undermining models of state regulation and redistribution. Neoliberalism is a set of policies that facilitate the rise of transnational capital. As transnational capital has broken free
the natural tendency for capitalism to concentrate wealth

has been unleashed without any countervailing restraints. The result has been this
dizzying escalation of worldwide inequalities as wealth concentrates within the transnational
of the confine of the nation-state,
capitalist class and, to a much lesser extent, the better off strata of middle classes and professionals. There are
other related factors that account for the intensification of worldwide inequalities. One is the defeat of the
worldwide left in the late 1980s and early 1990s, which led the ruling groups to declare that global neo-liberal
capitalism was The End of History. A second is the rise of a globally integrated financial system in which capital in
its liquid, that is money, form can move frictionless across the planet with no controls whatsoever. Transnational
finance capital has become the hegemonic fraction of capital on a global scale, and it engages in unfathomable
levels of speculation, turning the global economy into one giant casino. Transnational finance capital has come to
control the levers of the global economy, to get around and to undermine any effort at regulation, and to
concentrate wealth in its liquid form in a way that would have been unimaginable just a few years ago. A third
Hundreds of millions of people, perhaps billions,

have been made superfluous, thrown off the land or out of productive
employment, replaced by machines and rising productivity, marginalized and
relegated to migration and to trying to scratch by an existence in the planet of
slums. In turn, this mass of humanity places those that are employed in a very
vulnerable situation, drives down wage levels everywhere, facilitates the
flexibilization and precarious nature of wage labor, and thereby further
aggravating inequalities. Q: In one of your articles, you talked of an ever-expanding military-prisonfactor is the rise of a mass of surplus humanity.
industrial-security-financial complex that generates enormous profits through waging wars, selling weapons and
then taking part in reconstruction activities in the war-torn countries. How does this complex operate? Is it really
We cannot understand intensified militarization and the

rise of this complex outside of the crisis of global capitalism. This crisis is
structural, in the first instance. It is what we call a crisis of over-accumulation. The rise of the
global economy driven by new technologies, especially computer, information, and communications
reliant on waging wars? A:
technologies, but also by the revolution in transportation and containerization, by robotics, aerospace,
has allowed the

transnational capitalist class to restructure and reorganize the whole world
economy, and to bring about a huge increase in productivity worldwide and an enormous expansion of the
capacity of the global economy to churn out goods and services. But extreme inequality and social
polarization in the global system means that the global market cannot absorb the
expanding output of the global economy. The result is a stagnation that is
becoming chronic. The gap between what the global economy can produce and
what the global market can absorb is growing and this leads to a crisis of
overproduction: where and how to unload the surplus? How can transnational capital continue
to accumulate and generate profits if this output is not unloaded, that is, profitably marketed? Unloading the
surplus through financial speculation, which has skyrocketed in recent years, only aggravates
the solution, as we saw with the collapse of 2008. Now, if only 20 percent of humanity can
biotechnology, nanotechnology, and more recently, by 3D printing, among other aspects,
consume in any significant quantity it is not very profitable to go into the business of mass, inexpensive public
transportation, health and education, or the production of practical goods that the worlds population needs
because very simply even if people need these things they do not have the income to purchase them. A global
civilian economy geared to the basic needs of humanity is simply not profitable for the transnational capitalist class.
the mass production and distribution of vaccines and other medications

for communicable and treatable diseases that affect masses of poor people around the
world are simply not profitable and as a result we even have new pandemics of
diseases tuberculosis, measles, etc. that previously were under control. Yet it is
profitable for the global capitalist medical industry , including the giant pharmaceutical,
biotechnology and related branches to spend billions on developing plastic surgery and every
imaginable treatment for the vanity of a small portion of humanity, or to develop
incredibly expensive treatments for diseases that afflict the affluent. The lesson here is
that capital will seek to accumulate where it is profitable , according to the structure of the
market and of income, which in turn is shaped by the balance of class and social power and
what we call the relations of production and irrespective of rational use of resources
and irrespective of human need. It is in this context that it becomes quite profitable to
turn to wars, conflicts, systems of repression and social control to generate profit, to produce goods and
Look at it like this:
systems that can repress that 80 percent of humanity that is not your consumer, not your customer so to say,
because they do not have the purchasing power to sustain your drive to accumulate by producing goods and
services for them that they actually need. Global capitalism is a perverted and irrational system. Putting aside geo-
the surplus that the global economy has been and is producing but
that cannot be absorbed by the world market, has been channeled into wars and
conflicts that involve endless rounds of destruction and reconstruction , and new systems
of social control and repression, independent of geo-political considerations, that is, simply as a way of
sustaining capital accumulation and profit making in the face of stagnation
tendencies. The US invasions and occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan although
legitimated in the name of fighting terrorism have generated hundreds of
billions of dollars in contracts and profits for transnational capital. The prisonindustrial and immigrant-detention complexes in the United States and let us recall that the
United States holds some 25-30 percent of the worlds prisoners is enormously profitable for private
corporations that run almost all of the immigrant detention centers, some of the general prisons, supply
political considerations,
everything from guards to food, build the installations, erect border walls, and so on. Let us recall that the US
National Security Agency and we now know from Edward Snowden just how vast are its operations subcontracts
out its activities to private corporations, as do the CIA, the Pentagon, and so on. Global security corporations are
one of the fastest growing sectors of the global economy and there are now more private security guards in the
we are now living in a global war economy,

in which the threat of stagnation is offset in part by the militarization of global
economy and society and the introduction and spread of systems of mass social control.
Of course this involves all kinds of cultural, ideological, and political dimensions as well. A global war
economy based on a multitude of endless conflicts and the spread of social
control systems, from full-scale wars to the repression of racial minorities
and immigrants in the United States and Europe, must be ideologically
legitimated. This is where bogus and farcical wars on drugs and terrorism come in,
where enemies must be conjured up, in which populations must be led to believe
they are threatened, and so on. So the US public must believe that Iran is a threat, that
Putin is now the devil, and so on. One threat replaces another but the system
needs to keep a population in permanent compliance through the manipulation
of emotion and the senses. This transition into a permanent global war economy has
involved some shifts in the gravitational centers of capital accumulation , towards those
world than police officers. All of this is to say that
global corporate conglomerates involved in the production of war materials, of security, of engineering (for
example, Bechtel and Halliburton), and other activities that involve making profit out of conflict and control.
each drone that flies, each missile fired, each round of

ammunition, each tank deployed, each soldier equipped and fed, each prison that is
constructed, each surveillance system put into place, each border wall installed,
and so on and so forth, is produced in factories and through production chains by global
corporations whose supply, in turn, of raw materials, machinery and service inputs in
turn come from other global corporations or local firms. So the whole global economy is
kept running through violence and conflict. But the global war economy also
involves the global financial institutions that are at the very heart of the global
economy, together with the petroleum complex that is coming under much pressure from
the environmental movement yet is showing all-time record profits in the past few
years. This is a new transnational power bloc this complex of corporate
interests brought around a global war economy and global systems of repression
and social control, together with elites and state managers brought into or
representing the power bloc. Remember also that the polarization of the world population
into 20 percent affluent and 80 percent immiserated generates new spatial social
relations, so that the privileged occupy gated communities and those
displaced by gentrification must be violently suppressed and carefully controlled,
while surveillance systems and security guards must patrol and protect that 20
Remember by way of example that
percent. All this and much more are part of the militarization and securitization
of global society by the powers that be. We face new doctrines, ideologies and political
discourse that legitimize the construction of a global police state fourth generation
warfare, humanitarian intervention, the war on drugs, among others, and above all, the so-called
war on terror. I say so-called because, the US state is the biggest perpetrator of terror in the
world. It is not that Al-Qaida and other groups do not carry out condemnable
violence against innocent civilians. They indeed do. But if we define terrorism as the
use of violence against civilians for political objectives, then the US state is the
worlds leading terrorist. The powers that be in global society and that control the global political
discourse attach the label terrorist to violence that they do not approve of, and they attach the label of freedom
and democracy and security to violence that they do approve of, or that they commit themselves. Moreover,
increasingly terrorism is used to simply describe political dissent, so that legitimate social movements and
political struggles against global capitalism become labeled as terrorism in order to justify their suppression.
Cap GoodAsteroids
No asteroids impact
Everitt 8
[James Everitt, energy and environment organizer for Pickens Plan; If an asteroid hit the earth? published
12/20/2008; http://push.pickensplan.com/video/2187034:Video:1691581]
A computer video circulating the internet has rekindled fears that an asteroid will hit Earth and send mankind the
Based on NASA projections, there is indeed a chance that such an

asteroid will impact Earth in the next year. It is 1 in 2,518,072 This number is derived
from NASA calculations of the likelihood of a strike by any one of the six substantial
Near-Earth Objects (NEOs) whose current course could intersect our planet's in 2009. The most likely of the
bunch, an NEO named 2008 AO112, alone has a 1 in 4,000,000 chance of impacting Earth. In other words, there's
a 99.999975% chance the thing will miss us. By comparison, in the new year, based on
recent National Safety Council data, chances are less that you will be killed by an asteroid
than by the following: Motor vehicle accident: 1 in 6,539 Exposure to noxious substances: 1 in
12,554 Assault by firearm: 1 in 24,005 Accidental drowning: 1 in 82,777 Exposure to smoke, fire or flames: 1 in
92,745 Exposure to forces of nature (lightning, flood, storms, etc.): 1 in 136,075 Falling out of bed
or off other furniture: 1 in 329,819 Choking on food: 1 in 343,179 Air and space transport accidents: 1 in
502,554 Exposure to electric current, radiation, temperature, and pressure: 1 in 705,969 Being
bitten, stung or crushed by another person or animal : 1 in 1,841,659 Chances You'll Be Killed by
an Asteroid in 2009! Conclusion: It would be statistically unwise to sell your home (your chances
of selling it aside) and use the proceeds for a pre-asteroid splurge in the tropics.
Alternatively, if you are considering fleeing Earth, you are more likely to die by
spacecraft accident than by asteroid. And if you do so anyway, given the chance of
being bitten, stung or crushed by another person or animal, your chances are even
worse if you bring company.
way of the brontosaurus.
Cap GoodDisease
The logic of capital is what allows exclusionary medicine even
if they win capitalism betters the pharmaceutical industry the
only people who benefit from those advancements are the rich
No impact to disease they either burn out or dont spread
Posner 05
(Richard A, judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals, Seventh Circuit, and senior lecturer
at the University of Chicago Law School, Winter. Catastrophe: the dozen most
significant catastrophic risks and what we can do about them.
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_kmske/is_3_11/ai_n29167514/pg_2?
tag=content;col1)
the fact that Homo sapiens has managed to survive every disease to assail it in the
200,000 years or so of its existence is a source of genuine comfort, at least if the focus is on extinction
Yet
events. There have been enormously destructive plagues, such as the Black Death, smallpox, and now AIDS, but
none has come close to destroying the entire human race. There is a biological
reason. Natural selection favors germs of limited lethality ; they are fitter in an evolutionary sense
because their genes are more likely to be spread if the germs do not kill their hosts
too quickly. The AIDS virus is an example of a lethal virus, wholly natural, that by lying dormant yet infectious
in its host for years maximizes its spread. Yet there is no danger that AIDS will destroy the entire human race. The
likelihood of a natural pandemic that would cause the extinction of the human race is
probably even less today than in the past (except in prehistoric times, when people lived in small,
scattered bands, which would have limited the spread of disease), despite wider human contacts that make it more
difficult to localize an infectious disease. The reason is improvements in medical science. But the
comfort is a small one. Pandemics can still impose enormous losses and resist prevention and cure: the lesson of
the AIDS pandemic. And there is always a lust time.
Cap GoodSpace Col

Only rich get to go poor people would become slaves to build
the future for the wealthy
Disease would take us out bones lose mass, muscles atrophy,
blood production decreases, and latent viruses reactive and
spread that Matin and Lynch
Colonization's impossible
Stross 7
(Charlie, "The High Frontier, Redux," http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blogstatic/2007/06/the_high_frontier_redux.html)
I'm going to take it as read that the idea of space colonization isn't unfamiliar; domed cities on Mars, orbiting cylindrical space
habitats a la J. D. Bernal or Gerard K. O'Neill, that sort of thing. Generation ships that take hundreds of years to ferry colonists out to
other star systems where as we are now discovering there are profusions of planets to explore. And I don't want to spend much
time talking about the unspoken ideological underpinnings of the urge to space colonization, other than to point out that they're
there, that the case for space colonization isn't usually presented as an economic enterprise so much as a quasi-religious one. "We
can't afford to keep all our eggs in one basket" isn't so much a justification as an
appeal to sentimentality, for in the hypothetical case of a planet-trashing catastrophe, we (who currently inhabit the
surface of the Earth) are dead anyway. The future extinction of the human species cannot affect you
if you are already dead: strictly speaking, it should be of no personal concern. Historically,
crossing oceans and setting up farmsteads on new lands conveniently stripped of indigenous inhabitants by
disease has been a cost-effective proposition. But the scale factor involved in space travel is
strongly counter-intuitive. Here's a handy metaphor: let's approximate one astronomical unit
the distance between the Earth and the sun, roughly 150 million kilometres, or 600 times the distance from the Earth to the Moon
to one centimetre. Got that? 1AU = 1cm. (You may want to get hold of a ruler to follow through with this one.) The solar
system is conveniently small. Neptune, the outermost planet in our solar system, orbits the sun at a distance of almost exactly
30AU, or 30 centimetres one foot (in imperial units). Giant Jupiter is 5.46 AU out from the sun, almost exactly two inches (in old
money). We've sent space probes to Jupiter; they take two and a half years to get there if we send them on a straight Hohmann
transfer orbit, but we can get there a bit faster using some fancy orbital mechanics. Neptune is still a stretch only one spacecraft,
Voyager 2, has made it out there so far. Its journey time was 12 years, and it wasn't stopping. (It's now on its way out into
interstellar space, having passed the heliopause some years ago.) The Kuiper belt, domain of icy wandering dwarf planets like Pluto
and Eris, extends perhaps another 30AU, before merging into the much more tenuous Hills cloud and Oort cloud, domain of loosely
coupled long-period comets. Now for the first scale shock: using our handy metaphor the Kuiper belt is perhaps a metre in diameter.
The Oort cloud, in contrast, is as much as 50,000 AU in radius its outer edge lies half a kilometre away. Got that? Our planetary
solar system is 30 centimetres, roughly a foot, in radius. But to get to the edge of the Oort cloud, you have to go half a kilometre,
roughly a third of a mile. Next on our tour is Proxima Centauri, our nearest star. (There might be a brown dwarf or two lurking unseen
in the icy depths beyond the Oort cloud, but if we've spotted one, I'm unaware of it.) Proxima Centauri is 4.22 light years away.A
light year is 63.2 x 103 AU, or 9.46 x 1012 Km. So Proxima Centauri, at 267,000 AU, is just under two and a third kilometres, or two
miles (in old money) away from us. But Proxima Centauri is a poor choice, if we're looking for habitable real estate. While exoplanets
are apparently common as muck, terrestrial planets are harder to find; Gliese 581c, the first such to be detected (and it looks like a
it
takes us 2-5 years to travel two inches. But the proponents of interstellar travel are
talking about journeys of ten miles. That's the first point I want to get across: that if the distances
involved in interplanetary travel are enormous, and the travel times fit to rival the first Australian
settlers, then the distances and times involved in interstellar travel are mind-numbing. This is not to say that interstellar
travel is impossible; quite the contrary. But to do so effectively you need either (a) outrageous amounts of
cheap energy, or (b) highly efficient robot probes, or (c) a magic wand. And in the absence of (c) you're not going to get any
news back from the other end in less than decades. Even if (a) is achievable, or by means of (b) we can send selfpretty weird one, at that), is roughly 20.4 light years away, or using our metaphor, about ten miles. Try to get a handle on this:
replicating factories and have them turn distant solar systems into hives of industry, and more speculatively find some way to
transmit human beings there,
they are going to have zero net economic impact on our
circumstances (except insofar as sending them out costs us money). What do I mean by outrageous amounts of cheap
energy? Let's postulate that in the future, it will be possible to wave a magic wand and construct a camping kit that encapsulates all
the necessary technologies and information to rebuild a human civilization capable of eventually sending out interstellar
colonization missions a bunch of self-replicating, self-repairing robotic hardware, and a downloadable copy of the sum total of
human knowledge to date. Let's also be generous and throw in a closed-circuit life support system capable of keeping a human
occupant alive indefinitely, for many years at a stretch, with zero failures and losses, and capable where necessary of providing
medical intervention. Let's throw in a willing astronaut (the fool!) and stick them inside this assembly. It's going to be pretty boring
in there, but I think we can conceive of our minimal manned interstellar mission as being about the size and mass of a Mercury
capsule. And I'm going to nail a target to the barn door and call it 2000kg in total. (Of course we can cut corners, but I've already
invoked self-replicating robotic factories and closed-cycle life support systems, and those are close enough to magic wands as it is.
I'm going to deliberately ignore more speculative technologies such as starwisps, mind transfer, or AIs sufficiently powerful to
operate autonomously although I used them shamelessly in my novel Accelerando. What I'm trying to do here is come up with a
useful metaphor for the energy budget realistically required for interstellar flight.) Incidentally, a probe massing 1-2 tons with an
astronaut on top is a bit implausible, but a 1-2 ton probe could conceivably carry enough robotic instrumentation to do useful
research, plus a laser powerful enough to punch a signal home, and maybe even that shrink-wrapped military/industrial complex in
a tin can that would allow it to build something useful at the other end. Anything much smaller, though, isn't going to be able to
transmit its findings to us at least, not without some breakthroughs in communication technology that haven't shown up so far.
Now, let's say we want to deliver our canned monkey to Proxima Centauri within its own lifetime. We're sending them on a one-way
trip, so a 42 year flight time isn't unreasonable. (Their job is to supervise the machinery as it unpacks itself and begins to brew up a
bunch of new colonists using an artificial uterus. Okay?) This means they need to achieve a mean cruise speed of 10% of the speed
of light. They then need to decelerate at the other end. At 10% of c relativistic effects are minor there's going to be time dilation,
but it'll be on the order of hours or days over the duration of the 42-year voyage. So we need to accelerate our astronaut to
30,000,000 metres per second, and decelerate them at the other end. Cheating and using Newton's laws of motion, the kinetic
energy acquired by acceleration is 9 x 1017 Joules, so we can call it 2 x 1018 Joules in round numbers for the entire trip. NB: This
assumes that the propulsion system in use is 100% efficient at converting energy into momentum, that there are no losses from
friction with the interstellar medium, and that the propulsion source is external that is, there's no need to take reaction mass
along en route. So this is a lower bound on the energy cost of transporting our Mercury-capsule sized expedition to Proxima Centauri
in less than a lifetime. To put this figure in perspective, the total conversion of one kilogram of mass into energy yields 9 x 1016
Joules. (Which one of my sources informs me, is about equivalent to 21.6 megatons in thermonuclear explosive yield). So we require
the equivalent energy output to 400 megatons of nuclear armageddon in order to move a capsule of about the gross weight of a
fully loaded Volvo V70 automobile to Proxima Centauri in less than a human lifetime. That's the same as the yield of the entire US
Minuteman III ICBM force. For a less explosive reference point, our entire planetary economy runs on roughly 4 terawatts of
it would take our total planetary electricity production for a period of half a
5 days to supply the necessary va-va-voom. But to bring this back to earth with
a bump, let me just remind you that this probe is so implausibly efficient that it's veering back
into "magic wand" territory. I've tap-danced past a 100% efficient power transmission system capable of operating
electricity (4 x 1012 watts). So
million seconds roughly
across interstellar distances with pinpoint precision and no conversion losses, and that allows the spacecraft on the receiving end to
convert power directly into momentum. This is not exactly like any power transmission system that anyone's built to this date, and
I'm not sure I can see where it's coming from. Our one astronaut, 10% of c mission approximates well to an unmanned flight, but
what about longer-term expeditions? Generation ships are a staple of SF; they're slow (probably under 1% of c) and they carry a selfsufficient city-state. The crew who set off won't live to see their destination (the flight time to Proxima
Centauri at 1% of c is about 420 years), but the vague hope is that someone will. Leaving aside our lack of a proven track record at
building social institutions that are stable across time periods greatly in excess of a human lifespan, using a generation ship
A society of human beings are likely to

need more space and raw material to do stuff with while in flight; sticking a solitary
explorer in a tin can for forty-something years is merely cruel and unusual, but
doing it to an entire city for several centuries probably qualifies as a crime against
humanity. We therefore need to relax the mass constraint. Assuming the same super-efficient life support as our solitary
probably doesn't do much for our energy budget problem either.
explorer, we might postulate that each colonist requires ten tons of structural mass to move around in. (About the same as a large
trailer home. For life.) We've cut the peak velocity by an order of magnitude, but we've increased the payload requirement by an
order of magnitude per passenger and we need enough passengers to make a stable society fly. I'd guess a sensible lower
number would be on the order of 200 people, the size of a prehistoric primate troupe. (Genetic diversity? I'm going to assume we
can hand-wave around that by packing some deep-frozen sperm and ova, or frozen embryos, for later reuse.) By the time we work
up to a minimal generation ship (and how minimal can we get, confining 200 human beings in an object weighing aout 2000 tons,
for roughly the same period of time that has elapsed since the Plymouth colony landed in what was later to become
Massachusetts?) we're actually requiring much more energy than our solitary high-speed explorer. And remember,
this is only
what it takes to go to Proxima Centauri our nearest neighbour. Gliese 581c is five times as far away.
Planets that are already habitable insofar as they orbit inside the habitable zone of
their star, possess free oxygen in their atmosphere, and have a mass, surface
gravity and escape velocity that are not too forbidding, are likely to be somewhat
rarer. (And if there is free oxygen in the atmosphere on a planet, that implies something else the presence of pre-existing
photosynthetic life, a carbon cycle, and a bunch of other stuff that could well unleash a big can of whoop-ass on an unprimed human
immune system. The question of how we might interact with alien biologies is an order of magnitude bigger and more complex than
the question of how we might get there and the preliminary outlook is rather forbidding.) The long and the short of what I'm
trying to get across is quite simply that, in the absence of technology indistinguishable from magic
magic tech that, furthermore, does things that from today's perspective appear to play fast and loose with the laws of physics
interstellar travel for human beings is near-as-dammit a non-starter. And while I won't rule out the
possibility of such seemingly-magical technology appearing at some time in the future, the conclusion I draw as a science fiction
writer is that if interstellar colonization ever happens, it will not follow the pattern of historical colonization drives that are followed
by mass emigration and trade between the colonies and the old home soil. What about our own solar system? After contemplating
Exploring our own

solar system is a no-brainer: we can do it, we are doing it, and interplanetary exploration is probably going to be
seen as one of the great scientific undertakings of the late 20th and early 21st century, when the history books get written. But
when we start examining the prospects for interplanetary colonization things turn
gloomy again. Bluntly, we're not going to get there by rocket ship. Optimistic projects suggest that
the vastness of interstellar space, our own solar system looks almost comfortingly accessible at first .
it should be possible, with the low cost rockets currently under development, to maintain a Lunar presence for a transportation cost
of roughly $15,000 per kilogram. Some extreme projections suggest that if the cost can be cut to roughly triple the cost of fuel and
oxidizer (meaning, the spacecraft concerned will be both largely reusable and very cheap) then we might even get as low as
$165/kilogram to the lunar surface. At that price, sending a 100Kg astronaut to Moon Base One looks as if it ought to cost not much
more than a first-class return air fare from the UK to New Zealand ... except that such a price estimate is hogwash.
We
primates have certain failure modes, and one of them that must not be
underestimated is our tendency to irreversibly malfunction when exposed to
climactic extremes of temperature, pressure, and partial pressure of oxygen. While
the amount of oxygen, water, and food a human consumes per day doesn't sound
all that serious it probably totals roughly ten kilograms, if you economize and
recycle the washing-up water the amount of parasitic weight you need to keep
the monkey from blowing out is measured in tons . A Russian Orlan-M space suit (which, some would
say, is better than anything NASA has come up with over the years take heed of the pre-breathe time requirements!) weighs 112
kilograms, which pretty much puts a floor on our infrastructure requirements. An actual habitat would need to mass a whole lot
more. Even at $165/kilogram, that's going to add up to a very hefty excess baggage charge on that notional first class air fare to
New Zealand and I think the $165/kg figure is in any case highly unrealistic; even the authors of the article I cited thought
$2000/kg was a bit more reasonable. Whichever way you cut it,
sending a single tourist to the moon is
going to cost not less than $50,000 and a more realistic figure, for a mature reusable, cheap, rocket-based lunar transport
cycle is more like $1M. And that's before you factor in the price of bringing them back ...
The moon is about 1.3 light seconds away. If we want to go panning the (metaphorical) rivers for gold, we'd do better to send
teleoperator-controlled robots; it's close enough that we can control them directly, and far enough away that the cost of transporting
food and creature comforts for human explorers is astronomical. There probably are niches for human workers on a moon base, but
only until our robot technologies are somewhat more mature than they are today; Mission Control would be a lot happier with a pair
of hands and a high-def camera that doesn't talk back and doesn't need to go to the toilet or take naps.
When we look at
the rest of the solar system, the picture is even bleaker. Mars is ... well, the phrase "tourist
resort" springs to mind, and is promptly filed in the same corner as "Gobi desert". As Bruce Sterling has puts it: "I'll believe in
people settling Mars at about the same time I see people settling the Gobi Desert. The Gobi Desert is about a thousand times as
hospitable as Mars and five hundred times cheaper and easier to reach. Nobody ever writes "Gobi Desert Opera" because, well, it's
just kind of plonkingly obvious that there's no good reason to go there and live. It's ugly, it's inhospitable and there's no way to
make it pay. Mars is just the same, really. We just romanticize it because it's so hard to reach." In other words, going there to explore
But as a desirable residential neighbourhood it

has some shortcomings, starting with the slight lack of breathable air and the subAntarctic nighttime temperatures and the Mach 0.5 dust storms, and working down
from there. Actually, there probably is a good reason for sending human explorers to Mars. And that's the distance: at up to
is fine and dandy our robots are all over it already.
30 minutes, the speed of light delay means that remote control of robots on the Martian surface is extremely tedious. Either we
need autonomous roots that can be assigned tasks and carry them out without direct human supervision, or we need astronauts in
orbit or on the ground to boss the robot work gangs around. On the other hand, Mars is a good way further away than the moon, and
has a deeper gravity well. All of which drive up the cost per kilogram delivered to the Martian surface. Maybe FedEx could cut it as
Let me repeat myself: we are not going there

with rockets. At least, not the conventional kind and while there may be a role for
nuclear propulsion in deep space, in general there's a trade-off between
instantaneous thrust and efficiency; the more efficient your motor, the lower the
actual thrust it provides. Some technologies such as the variable specific impulse
magnetoplasma rocket show a good degree of flexibility, but in general they're not
suitable for getting us from Earth's surface into orbit they're only useful for
low as $20,000 per kilogram, but I'm not holding my breath.
trucking things around from low earth orbit on out.
Again, as with interstellar colonization, there are

other options. Space elevators, if we build them, will invalidate a lot of what I just said. Some analyses of the energy costs of space
elevators suggest that a marginal cost of $350/kilogram to geosynchronous orbit should be achievable without waving any magic
wands (other than the enormous practical materials and structural engineering problems of building the thing in the first place). So
we probably can look forward to zero-gee vacations in orbit, at a price. And space elevators are attractive because they're a scalable
technology; you can use one to haul into space the material to build more. So, long term, space elevators may give us notunreasonably priced access to space, including jaunts to the lunar surface for a price equivalent to less than $100,000 in today's
We're human beings. We

evolved to flourish in a very specific environment that covers perhaps 10% of our
home planet's surface area. (Earth is 70% ocean, and while we can survive, with assistance, in extremely
inhospitable terrain, be it arctic or desert or mountain, we aren't well-adapted to thriving there.) Space itself is a very
poor environment for humans to live in. A simple pressure failure can kill a
spaceship crew in minutes. And that's not the only threat. Cosmic radiation poses a
serious risk to long duration interplanetary missions, and unlike solar radiation and
radiation from coronal mass ejections the energies of the particles responsible make
shielding astronauts extremely difficult. And finally, there's the travel time. Two and a half
money. At which point, settlement would begin to look economically feasible, except ...
years to Jupiter system; six months to Mars. Now, these problems are subject to a variety of approaches including medical ones:
does it matter if cosmic radiation causes long-term cumulative radiation exposure leading to cancers if we have advanced sideeffect-free cancer treatments? Better still, if hydrogen sulphide-induced hibernation turns out to be a practical technique in human
there's not really any

economically viable activity on the horizon for people to engage in that would
require them to settle on a planet or asteroid and live there for the rest of their
lives. In general, when we need to extract resources from a hostile environment we tend
to build infrastructure to exploit them (such as oil platforms) but we don't exactly scurry to
move our families there. Rather, crews go out to work a long shift, then return home to take their leave. After all,
beings, we may be able to sleep through the trip. But even so, when you get down to it,
there's no there there just a howling wilderness of north Atlantic gales and frigid water that will kill you within five minutes of
exposure. And that, I submit, is the closest metaphor we'll find for interplanetary colonization. Most of the heavy lifting more than a
million kilometres from Earth will be done by robots, overseen by human supervisors who will be itching to get home and spend their
hardship pay. And closer to home, the commercialization of space will be incremental and slow, driven by our increasing dependence
But the
domed city on Mars is going to have to wait for a magic wand or two to do
something about the climate, or reinvent a kind of human being who can thrive in
an airless, inhospitable environment.
on near-earth space for communications, positioning, weather forecasting, and (still in its embryonic stages) tourism.
Multiple diseases destroy sustainability of life in space

Matin and Lynch 5
(2005, A. C. Matin, PhD in Microbiology, Professor of Microbiology and Immunology at Stanford University in
Stanford, California, and Susan V. Lynch, PhD, Molcular Microbiology, Assistant Professor In Residence, Division of
Gastroenterology, UC San Francisco, Investigating the Threat of Bacteria Grown in Space, Volume 71, Number 5,
2005/ASM News, http://www.asm.org/asm/files/ccLibraryFiles/Filename/000000001523/znw00505000235.pdf )
space is an inhospitable and dangerous frontier for those sent to

explore it. Hence, progress towards more safely navigating and perhaps colonizing
space are tasks that demand that we develop knowledge on several fronts , from
Although tantalizing,
designing radically new means of space transport to determining how space conditions influence biological
Several harmful effects of space on humans are documented . During extended

missions in space, for example, bones lose mass, predisposing space travelers not only to
fracture their bones but also to develop renal stones from resorbed bone material.
Moreover, muscles atrophy, decreased blood production and volume damage the
cardiovascular system, latent viruses (such as Varicella zoster, which causes shingles) tend to
reactivate, the incidence of diseases such as bacterial cystitis increases, wound
healing slows, pharmacologic agents act differently, and pyschological conditions
processes.
such as claustrophobia and anxiety tend to be accentuated , in part because of disrupted

sleep and dietary patterns. Amid these physical and psychological conditions, there is the added problem
that astronauts in space are exposed to intense radiation , involving high-energy protons and
nuclei of heavy elements with greater penetrating power and increased capacity to cause
malignancies and other problems, than they would be on earth. Additionally, the diminished gravity of
space and planets, referred to as microgravity, also poses a direct threat to human health.
Cap Inevitable
Inevitability debate:
The alt is to do nothing and engage in radical passivitythe
inevitability of capitalism is a trump, not a solvency problem
the point is that capitalism is so ubiquitous that instead of
rejecting it, we must exhaust the system by dis-engaging and
becoming radically passivethis is a solvency take-out for
their impacts and proves engagement only reinforces the
system.
And, if I win my ethics and value to life impacts, you pull the
trigger because even if passivity is difficult in other instances,
every chance matters and you vote neg.
Cap Sustainable
Sustainability debate misses the pointsure, the market will
sustain itself, but thats capitalisms cyclical and runaway
nature which relies on an ethos of labor that labels those who
are unproductive or unprofitable deviant, reducing life to
calculative value based on utilitythats Robinson.
Economic rationality imposes a violent calculative logic on an
irrational worldmakes violence and collapse inevitable.
Bifo 11
Franco Bifo Berardi, After the Future pp. 110-114 (of my copy), dml
The fantastic collapse that has shaken the global economy since September 2008 has
opened a new phase in the history of the world . After some months of amazement and confusion,
media, political institutions and economists have started to repeat the self-reassuring mantra:
recovery is coming soon. I do not know what will happen next, but I think that the word recovery
means very little in the current situation. What is sure, in my opinion, is that the workers will not
recover if neoliberal ideology is not abandoned, and if the myth of growth is not
substituted with a new kind of narration. Unemployment is rising everywhere and salaries are falling.
And the huge debt accumulated for the rescue of the banks is weighing upon the future of
society. More than ever, economic rationality is at odds with social rationality. Economic
science is not part of the solution to the crisis: it is the source of the problem. On July
18th 2009 the headline of The Economist read: What went wrong with economics? The text is
an attempt to downplay the crisis of the Economics profession, and of economic knowledge.
For neoliberal economists the central dogma of growth, profit and competition cannot be
questioned, because it is identified with the perfect mathematical rationality of the
market. And belief in the intrinsic rationality of the market is crucial in the economic
theology of neoliberalism. But the reduction of social life to the rational exchange of
economic values is an obsession that has nothing to do with science. Its a political
strategy aimed to identify humans as calculating machines, aimed to shape
behavior and perception in such a way that money becomes the only motivation of
social action. But it is not accurate as a description of social dynamics, and the
conflicts, pathologies, and irrationality of human relationships. Rather, it is an attempt at creating the
anthropological brand of homo calculans that Foucault (2008) has described in his seminar of 1979/80, published
This attempt to identify human beings with calculating

devices has produced cultural devastation, and has finally been showed to have
been based upon flawed assumptions. Human beings do calculate, but their
calculation is not perfectly rational, because the value of goods is not determined
by objective reasons, and because decisions are influenced by what Keynes named animal spirits. We
will never really understand important economic events unless we confront the fact
that their causes are largely mental in nature, say Akerlof and Shiller (2009: 1) in their book
with the title The Birth of Biopolitics.
Animal Spirits, echoing Keyness assumption that the rationality of the market is not perfect in itself. Akerlof and
Numbers cannot make the

beast lie down and be quiet or sit up and do tricks . At best, economics is a neurosis of
money, a symptom contrived to hold the beast in abeyance . Thus economics shares the
Shiller are avowing the crisis of neoliberal thought, but their critique is behave.
language of psychopathology inflation, depression, lows and highs, slumps and peaks, investments and losses.
the economic process has been a process of

production of scarcity (scarcification). The enclosures were intended to scarcify the land,
and the basic means of survival, so that people who so far had been able to
cultivate food for their family were forced to become proletarians , then salaried industrial
workers. Capitalism is based on the artificial creation of need, and economic science is
essentially a technique of scarcification of time, life and food. Inside the condition of scarcity
human beings are subjected to exploitation and to the domain of profit-oriented
activity. After scarcifying the land (enclosures) capitalism has scarcified time itself, forcing
people who dont have property other than their own life and body, to lend their life-time to
capital. Now the capitalist obsession for growth is making scarce both water and air.
Economic science is not the science of prediction: it is the technique of
producing, implementing, and pushing scarcity and need. This is why Marx did not speak
of economy, but of political economy. The technique of economic scarcification is based
on a mythology, a narration that identifies richness as property and acquisition, and
subjugates the possibility of living to the lending of time and to the transformation
of human activity into salaried work. In recent decades, technological change has slowly eroded the
very foundations of economic science. Shifting from the sphere of production of material
objects to the semiocapitalist production of immaterial goods, the Economic
concepts are losing their foundation and legitimacy. The basic categories of
Economics are becoming totally artificial. The theoretical justification of private property, as you
(Sordello 1983) From the age of the enclosures in England
read in the writings of John Locke, is based on the need of exclusive consumption. An apple must be privatized, if
you want to avoid the danger that someone else eats your apple. But
what happens when goods are
immaterial, infinitely replicable without cost? Thanks to digitalization and immaterialization of the production
process, the economic nomos of private property loses its ground, its raison detre, and it can
be imposed only by force. Furthermore, the very foundation of salary, the relationship
between time needed for production and value of the product, is vanishing. The
immaterialization and cognitivization of production makes it almost impossible to quantify
the average time needed to produce value. Time and value become
incommensurable, and violence becomes the only law able to determine price and
salary. The neoliberal school, which has opened the way to the worldwide deregulation of social production, has
fostered the mythology of rational expectations in economic exchange, and has touted the idea of a selfregulation
self-regulation is a lie. In order to increase

exploitation, and to destroy social welfare, global capitalism has used political
institutions like the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organization, not to mention the
military enforcement of the political decisions of these institutions. Far from being
self-regulated, the market is militarily regulated . The mythology of free individuals
loyally competing on the base of perfect knowledge of the market is a lie , too. Real
human beings are not perfect rational calculating machines. And the myth of
rational expectations has finally crashed after the explosion of the real estate
mortgage bubble. The theory of rational expectation is crucial in neoliberal thought:
the economic agents are supposed to be free to choose in a perfectly rational way
the best deal in selling and buying . The fraud perpetrated by the investment agencies has destroyed
the lives of millions of Americans, and has exposed the theoretical swindle. Economic exchange cannot
be described as a rational game, because irrational factors play a crucial role in
social life in general. Trickery, misleading information, and psychic manipulation are not exceptions, but the
professional tools of advertisers, financial agents, and economic consultants. The idea that social
relationships can be described in mathematical terms has the force of myth, but it is
of the market, first of all the labor-market. But
not science, and it has nothing to do with natural law . Notwithstanding the failure of the theory,
neoliberal politics are still in control of the global machine, because the criminal
class that has seized power has no intention of stepping down, and because the
social brain is unable to recompose and find the way of self-organization. I read in the New York Times
on September 6th 2009: After the mortgage business imploded last year, Wall Street investment banks
began searching for another big idea to make money. They think they may have found one. The bankers plan to
buy life settlements, life insurance policies that ill and elderly people sell for cash, depending on the life
expectancy of the insured person. Then they plan to securitize these policies, in Wall Street jargon, by packaging
hundreds of thousands together into bonds. They will then resell those bonds to investors, like big pension funds,
who will receive the payouts when people with the insurance die. The earlier the policyholder dies, the bigger the
return, though if people live longer than expected investors could get poor returns or even lose money. Imagine that
I buy an insurance policy on my life (something I would absolutely not do). My insurer of course will wish me a long
life, so Ill pay the fee for a long time, while he should pay lots of money to my family if I die. But some enlightened
finance guru has the brilliant idea of insuring the insurer. He buys the risk, and he invests on the hope that I die
soon. You dont need the imagination of Philip K. Dick to guess the follow up of the story: financial agents will be
The talk of recovery is based on necronomy, the economy of

death. Its not new, as capitalism has always profited from wars, slaughters and
genocides. But now the equation becomes unequivocal. Death is the promise, death is
the investment and the hope. Death is the best future that capitalism may secure. The
motivated to kill me overnight.
logic of speculation is different from the logic of spectacle that was dominant in late-modern times. Spectacle is the
Speculation is the
subjugation of the future to its financial mirror, the substitution of present life with
future money that will never come, because death will come before . The lesson that we
must learn from the first year of the global recession is sad: neoliberal folly is not going away, the
financial plungers will not stop their speculation, and corporations will not stop their
exploitation, and the political class, largely controlled by the corporate lobbies, is unwilling or
unable to protect society from the final assault. In 1996 J. G. Ballard (1996: 188) wrote: the most
perfect crime of all when the victims are either willing, or arent aware that they are victims. Democracy
seems unable to stop the criminal class that has seized control of the economy,
because the decisions are no longer made in the sphere of political opinion, but in
the inaccessible sphere of economic automatism. The economy has been declared
the basic standard of decision, and the economists have systematically identified
Economy with the capitalist obsession of growth. No room for political choice has
been left, as the corporate principles have been embedded in the technical fabric of language and imagination.
mirrorization of life, the transfer of life in the mirror of spectacular accumulation.
Cede The Political

Their method cannot solve their strategy of of calling upon
the law is an attempt to reinsert escaping subjectivities into
the subject-form- turns their offense
Tsianos et al. 8
Vassilis, teaches sociology at the University of Hamburg, Germany, Dimitris Papadopoulos teaches social theory at
Cardiff University, Niamh Stephenson teaches social science at the University of New South Wales. Escape Routes:
Control and Subversion in the 21st Century Pluto Press
To escape policing and start doing politics necessitates dis-identification the refusal of assigned, proper places for participation in society. As indicated earlier,
escape functions not as a form of exile, nor as mere opposition or protest, but as an interval which
interrupts everyday policing (Ranciere, 1998). Political disputes - as distinct from disputes
over policing - are not concerned with rights or representation or with the construction
of a majoritarian position in the political arena. They are not even disputes over the terms
of inclusion or the features of a minority. They occur prior to inclusion, beyond the
terms of the double-R axiom, beyond the majority-minority duality. They are disputes over the
existence of those who have no part (and in this sense they are disputes about justice in a
Benjaminian sense of the word, Benjamin, 1996a). Politics arises from the emergence of the
miscounted, the imperceptible, those who have no place within the normalising
organisation of the social realm. The refusal of representation is a way of
introducing the part which is outside of policing, which is not a part of community, which
is neither a minority nor intends to be included within the majority . Outside politics
is the way to escape the controlling and repressive force of contemporary
politics (that is of contemporary policing); or else it is a way to change our senses, our habits,
our practices in order to experiment together with those who have no part, instead
of attempting to include them into the current regime of control. This emergence
fractures normalising, police logic. It refigures the perceptible, not so that
others can finally recognise one's proper place in the social order, but to make evident
the incommensurability of worlds, the incommensurability of an existing
distribution of bodies and subjectivities with the principle of equality. Politics is a
refusal of representation. Politics happens beyond, before representation. Outside politics is the
materialisation of the attempt to occupy this space outside the controlling force of becoming majoritarian through
the process of representation. If we return to our initial question of how people contest control, then we can say that
when regimes of control encounter escape they instigate processes of naming and
representation. They attempt to reinsert escaping subjectivities into the
subject-form. Outside politics arises as people attempt to evade the imposition of
control through their subsumption into the subject-form. This is not an attempt simply to move
against or to negate representation. Nor is it a matter of introducing pure potential and imagination in reaction to
escape is a constructive and creative movement - it

is a literal, material, embodied movement towards something which cannot be
named, towards something which is fictional. Escape is simultaneously in the
heart of social transformation and outside of it. Escape is always here because it is nonthe constraining power of control. Rather,
literal, witty and hopeful.
Heg Good
Alt is an impact turn to interventionthe reason we dominate
is to establish an order in our likeness and maintain global
productivityalt solves these imperial desires by withdrawing
from the system.
Framework
Perm
Tech Solves Warming

(Extend Dedev).
Collapse is coming nowtech cant save us
Ahmed 14
Nafeez, PhD and executive director of the Institute for Policy Research & Development, 3-14-2014, "Nasa-funded
study: industrial civilisation headed for 'irreversible collapse'?," Guardian,
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth-insight/2014/mar/14/nasa-civilisation-irreversible-collapse-studyscientists, AB
A new study partly-sponsored by NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center has highlighted the
prospect that global industrial civilisation could collapse in coming decades
due to unsustainable resource exploitation and increasingly unequal wealth
distribution. Noting that warnings of 'collapse' are often seen to be fringe or
controversial, the study attempts to make sense of compelling historical data
showing that "the process of rise-and-collapse is actually a recurrent cycle found
throughout history." Cases of severe civilisational disruption due to
"precipitous collapse - often lasting centuries - have been quite common." The
independent research project is based on a new cross-disciplinary 'Human And Nature DYnamical' (HANDY) model,
led by applied mathematician Safa Motesharrei of the US National Science Foundation-supported National SocioEnvironmental Synthesis Center, in association with a team of natural and social scientists. The HANDY model was
created using a minor Nasa grant, but the study based on it was conducted independently. The study based on the
HANDY model has been accepted for publication in the peer-reviewed Elsevier journal, Ecological Economics. It finds
according to the historical record even advanced, complex civilisations are

susceptible to collapse, raising questions about the sustainability of modern
civilisation: "The fall of the Roman Empire, and the equally (if not more) advanced Han,
Mauryan, and Gupta Empires, as well as so many advanced Mesopotamian Empires, are all
testimony to the fact that advanced, sophisticated, complex, and creative civilizations can
be both fragile and impermanent." By investigating the human-nature dynamics of these
past cases of collapse, the project identifies the most salient interrelated factors which
explain civilisational decline, and which may help determine the risk of collapse today: namely,
Population, Climate, Water, Agriculture, and Energy . These factors can lead to
collapse when they converge to generate two crucial social features: "the stretching of
resources due to the strain placed on the ecological carrying capacity"; and "the
economic stratification of society into Elites [rich] and Masses (or "Commoners") [poor]" These
social phenomena have played "a central role in the character or in the process of the
collapse," in all such cases over "the last five thousand years." Currently, high levels of economic
stratification are linked directly to overconsumption of resources, with "Elites"
based largely in industrialised countries responsible for both: "... accumulated surplus is not evenly
distributed throughout society, but rather has been controlled by an elite. The mass of the population, while
that
producing the wealth, is only allocated a small portion of it by elites, usually at or just above subsistence levels."
The study challenges those who argue that technology will resolve these
challenges by increasing efficiency: "Technological change can raise the efficiency of
resource use, but it also tends to raise both per capita resource consumption
and the scale of resource extraction, so that, absent policy effects, the increases in
consumption often compensate for the increased efficiency of resource use."
Productivity increases in agriculture and industry over the last two centuries has come from
"increased (rather than decreased) resource throughput," despite dramatic
efficiency gains over the same period. Modelling a range of different scenarios, Motesharrei and
his colleagues conclude that under conditions "closely reflecting the reality of the world
today... we find that collapse is difficult to avoid." In the first of these scenarios, civilisation: "....
appears to be on a sustainable path for quite a long time, but even using an optimal depletion rate
and starting with a very small number of Elites, the Elites eventually consume too much,
resulting in a famine among Commoners that eventually causes the collapse of society. It is
important to note that this Type-L collapse is due to an inequality-induced famine that causes a loss of workers,
rather than a collapse of Nature." Another scenario focuses on the role of continued resource exploitation, finding
that "with a larger depletion rate, the decline of the Commoners occurs faster, while the Elites are still thriving, but
Elite wealth
monopolies mean that they are buffered from the most "detrimental effects of the
environmental collapse until much later than the Commoners", allowing them to "continue
'business as usual' despite the impending catastrophe ." The same mechanism, they
argue, could explain how "historical collapses were allowed to occur by elites who
appear to be oblivious to the catastrophic trajectory (most clearly apparent in the
eventually the Commoners collapse completely, followed by the Elites." In both scenarios,
Roman and Mayan cases)."
Transition Wars
Util
Violence Down
Their stats are bogus - its numerical whitewashing
Gregory 10
(Derek Gregory ,Prof. of Geography @ U. of British Columbia, War and peace, Transactions of the Institute of
British Geographers, Vol. 35.2)
Ferguson is not alone in his silence.
Many of those who regarded those continuing conflicts
as remote which excludes
the
millions
to whom those theatres were their homes
elected to repress or to re-script the role of the global North in provoking violence in the global South. Hence
Muellers (2009) claim that, asymptotically, war has almost ceased to exist, at least between advanced states or
civilised nations. Within those states, amnesia has now become so common that Judt (2008) describes the 20th
century as the forgotten century. We have become stridently insistent that the past has little of interest to teach
us, he writes: Ours, we assert, is a new world; its risks and opportunities are without precedent. He suggests that
in
our haste to put the twentieth century behind us, to lock horror and misery
in the attic-rooms of our memories and museums, we particularly the we that is US , so to speak have
forgot ten the meaning of war.
The parenthetical qualification is necessary because in Europe the
remains of two world wars are etched deep into the cultural landscape. There, some have seen salvation in Europes
construction of civilian states out of the wreckage the obsolescence of war is not a global phenomenon,
Sheehan (2007, xvii) argues, but a European one, the product of Europes distinctive history in the twentieth
century while others have sought redemption in the constitutively (core) European pursuit of Kants perpetual
modern war is not confined to those

terrible global conflicts, and their exorbitation of war as total war was not a bolt from the blue. Its
peace (Habermas 2006). But the meaning of
arc can be traced back to the Napoleonic wars. Bell locates the origins of a recognisably modern culture of war in
those ferocious campaigns and their extraordinary transformation in the scope and intensity of warfare (2007, 7).
It was then, too, that the ill-fated French occupation of Egypt in 1798 and the savage expeditions through the
Levant inaugurated what Said (1978, 87) saw as a modern, profoundly martial Orientalism that was to be
reactivated time and time again throughout the 20th and on in to our own century. We should remember, too, that
Napoleon also had to contend with insurgencies in Egypt and in Europe; 19th-century war cannot be reduced to a
succession of battles between the armies of contending states, any more than it can in subsequent centuries when,
as Judt (2008, 6) reminds, war has frequently meant civil war, often under the cover of occupation or liberation.
If these observations qualify the usual European genealogy of modern war, then its supersession cannot be a
European conceit either. Across the Atlantic a number of critics worry that, in the wake of 9/11,
States continues to prepare
its serial warriors
for perpetual war
the United
(Young 2005; Bromwich
2009). The Pentagon has divided the globe into six Areas of Responsibility assigned to unified combatant
commands like US Central Command, or CENTCOM (Morrissey 2009) and relies on a veritable empire of bases
to project its global military power (Figure 1).2 And yet Englehardt reckons that its hard for Americans to grasp that
Washington is a war capital, that the United States is a war state, that it garrisons much of the planet, and that the
norm for us is to be at war somewhere at any moment. (2009) Writing barely a year after the presidential election,
he ruefully observed that the Bush administration, the most militarily obsessed administration in our history, which
year after year submitted ever more bloated Pentagon budgets to Congress, was succeeded by the Obama
administration that had already submitted an even larger one. There are of course differences in foreign and
re-scripting the war in Afghanistan as the

good war, a war of necessity, even a Just War the comparison is with Bushs Iraq war continues to
license the re-scripting of a succession of other wars from Korea or
even the Philippines to Afghanistan (and beyond) as the imaginative scene for a heroic
military policy between the two, but
interventionism by the United States and its allies Kiplings savage wars of peace now waged by a stern but
kindly Uncle Sam (Boot 2003a) that endorses a hyper-masculinised military humanism (Barkawi 2004; Douzinas
2003). The shifting fortunes of inter-state wars and small wars since the Second World War have been charted by
two major projects: the Correlates of War project (COW) at the University of Michigan, devoted to the systematic
accumulation of scientific knowledge about war, and the joint attempt to establish an Armed Conflict Dataset by
the Uppsala Conflict Data Program in Sweden (UCDP), the International Peace Research Institute in Norway (PRIO)
and the Human Security Report Project in Canada (HSRP). Any quantitative assessment is a battlefield of its own,
involving disputes over definitions and data and, for that matter, over the reduction of military violence to abstract
metrics and body counts. This holds for individual wars think, for example, of the debates that have raged over
estimates of casualties in Iraq but it applies a fortiori to any global audit. The sources for such studies are
inevitably uneven and, as sterud (2008a 2008b) reminds us,
deaths from decentralized and
fragmented violence are
probably
underreported
relative to deaths from more centralized
screening and sorting devices that have

to be used in these approaches only compound the difficulty. Most
quantitative studies count as a war only armed conflicts that
produce at least 1000 deaths each year, which is a necessarily
arbitrary threshold, and the common restriction to battle-field or
battle -related deaths excludes many other deaths attributable to
and concentrated violence (2008a, 226). The
military or paramilitary violence . Although these tallies include civilians caught in the crossfire,
they exclude deaths from war-induced disease or starvation and, crucially, the deliberate
killing of unarmed civilians. These are serious limitations. To erase the deliberate
killing of civilians makes a mockery not only of the new wars I
describe below, which are widely supposed to focus on civilians as
targets, but also of old ones. What are we then to make of the bombing offensives of the
Second World War? For these reasons, I also rely on a third, more recent project, the
Consolidated List of Wars developed by the Event Data Project on Conflict and Security (EDACS) at the Free
University of Berlin. This provides a database that reworks the thresholds used in other projects and, in
distinguishing inter-state wars from other kinds of war, operates with a threshold of 1000 military or civilian deaths
(Chojnacki and Reisch 2008). These body counts (and the temporal limits their exclusions assign to war) are
defective in another sense, however, because casualties do not end with the end of war. Nixon (2007, 163) writes
about the slow violence of landmines, cluster bombs and other unexploded ordnance. It costs roughly 100 more to
remove a landmine than to lay it, and in consequence: One hundred million unexploded mines lie inches beneath
our planets skin. Each year they kill 24,000 civilians and maim many times that number. They kill and maim on
behalf of wars that ended long ago In neither space nor time can mine-terrorized communities draw a clear line
separating war from peace. (Nixon 2007, 163) But, as Nixon emphasises, other lines can be drawn. Unexploded
ordnance is heavily concentrated in some of the most impoverished places on the planet, often on the front lines of
the Cold War in the South, including Afghanistan (the most intensively mined state in the world), Cambodia, Laos,
Vietnam, Somalia, Angola, Mozambique, Nicaragua and El Salvador.
Landmines not only kill
directly; they also have a dramatic effect on
local political
ecologies , since they
are typically used to interdict land-based resources and hence food supplies. In Mozambique, for example, large
areas of prime agricultural land were sown with mines and have remained unworkable for years, which has forced
farmers to bring marginal lands into cultivation with serious consequences for land degradation and food security
(Unruh et al. 2003). Other slow killers that disproportionately ravage populations in the South also reach back to
attack those in the North. Thus Blackmore (2005, 16499) writes of war after war the long-term effects of
exposure to agents like dioxins or depleted uranium3 and there are countless killings out of place by veterans
returning to the North from war-zones in the South suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. These remarks are
not intended to disparage the importance of quantitative studies. While I despair of those who reduce war to a
mortuary balance-sheet what Arundhati Roy (2002, 111) called the algebra of infinite justice: How many dead
Afghans for every dead American? the raw numbers do mean something. But there is a world of meaning hidden
behind the tallies and tabulations, which can never summon up the terror, grief and suffering that constitute the
With these qualifications in place, the

most relevant findings from these projects for my purposes are
these. First, casting a long shadow over everything that follows,
more than two million battle deaths have occurred worldwide in
nearly every decade since the end of the Second World War. It bears
repeating that this figure underestimates the carnage because the
toll is limited to battle deaths.4 Second, the number of inter-state
wars has remained low since the end of the Second World War; they
declined and even briefly disappeared in the last decade of the 20th
century, but reappeared at the start of the present century. Third,
while intra-state wars were more frequent than inter-state wars
throughout the 19th and 20th centuries (with the exception of the
common currency of war (cf. Hyndman 2007).
1930s), by the end of the 20th century their numbers were increasing
dramatically , with a corresponding increase in intra-state wars that
drew in other states. The considerable rise in the number of armed
conflicts between the end of the Second World War and the end of
the Cold War was almost entirely accounted for by the increase in
conflicts within states in the global South (Sarkees et al. 2003, 614). The number of
intra-state wars declined steeply after 1992, though they continued to account for the vast majority of armed
conflicts around the world; some have seen this trend continuing into the 21st century in 2005 the Human
Security Report trumpeted a less violent world but others have detected a marked increase since the last fin de
sicle (Chojnacki and Reisch 2008; Harbom and Wallensteen 2009).
Violence DownPinker

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consumerism is assessed in terms of the

the slippage of signification stems from an unmeetable

The system destroys direct

Everyday life is constructed through a split between

Ignore the proletariat and class divisionscategories of

Baudrillard criticises Marxism for ignoring the underlying

radical struggle against capitalism, on an

Capital gives labour as a

Liberation is impossiblegroups are re-encoded as alibis for

The alternative is to reject the affirmative and engage in

Baudrillard outlines the end of the modern dialectics of revolution

When the code becomes the enemy the only

An allergy to all definitive order, to all definitive

everywhere. Against neoliberal politics, Indian farmers have killed themselves.

Is it possible to divert this implosive trend from the

consumerism is assessed in terms of the

the slippage of signification stems from an unmeetable

The system destroys direct

Everyday life is constructed through a split between

Alienation divorces the self from the body, subjecting the

It is exploited in a managed narcissism, perfected externally so as to

There is also a new kind of imaginary

The alternative is to reject the affirmative and engage in

Baudrillard outlines the end of the modern dialectics of revolution

When the code becomes the enemy the only

An allergy to all definitive order, to all definitive

Is it possible to divert this implosive trend from the

Passivity kills the economy, but thats goodgrowth is

We can start the necessary social change or an angry Earth

Now is the time for moral and

There is nothing normal about being well adjusted and silent as

We can start the necessary social change or an angry Earth

Without natural ecosystems and a healthy atmosphere, there is nothing .

Now is the time for moral and

There is nothing normal about being well adjusted and silent as

consumerism is assessed in terms of the

the slippage of signification stems from an unmeetable

The system destroys direct

Everyday life is constructed through a split between

This attempt to identify human beings with calculating

Numbers cannot make the

the economic process has been a process of

what happens when goods are

self-regulation is a lie. In order to increase

The talk of recovery is based on necronomy, the economy of

Baudrillard criticises Marxism for ignoring the underlying

radical struggle against capitalism, on an

Capital gives labour as a

It is exploited in a managed narcissism, perfected externally so as to

There is also a new kind of imaginary

the possibility of deep meaning. Living representations are

Consumption is a morality, an institution and a system of

differences are derived from

Difference within the code is based on the smallest marginal

whereas enjoyment is personal. The disappearance of altruistic forms of integration leads to an

Consumer goods are experienced as miraculous, because their production is

Baudrillard outlines the end of the modern dialectics of revolution

When the code becomes the enemy the only