2AC DOC

2AC Alt FailsYour ballot should evaluate competing institutional arrangements without prioritizing competing “narratives” – lack of a blueprint kills solvencySayer 95 Andrew Sayer Reader in Political Economy @ Lancaster Radical Political Economy: A Critique p. 7-8

Radical political economy is of course a critical social science, both explaining and criticizing the practices it studies, with the explicit

aim of reducing illusion and freeing people from domination and unwanted forces. But it can only hope to have an emancipatory effect if it considers its own critical standpoints and the alternative social arrangements they imply. Unfortunately it rarely does this, with the result that its stand- points and implicit alternatives are often contradictory, infeasible , or undesirable even if they are feasible . Marxist-influenced work still bears the traces of the tension between the standpoints of a socialist or communist society which has pre-industrial communitarian qualities and one in which the forces of production are developed beyond current levels of industrialization. More generally, there is a strong modernist tendency in which it is assumed that problems can be progressively unravelled without creating new ones at the same time, as if eventually all trade-offs or dilemmas could be overcome through a triumph of reason. We shall argue through substantive examples that such optimism is not only misplaced but likely to be counterproductive, limiting progress. There are always likely to be 'dilemmas of development' (Toye, 1987. The problem of critical standpoints has become more acute in recent years, indeed it is central to the crisis of the Left. There is no longer asingle standpoint or alternative (socialism/communism) counterposed to a single, overarching target (capitalism). Now there are many targets -patriarchy, racism, homophobia, militarism, industrialism - and corre- spondingly many critical standpoints with complex relations between them. That critical social science is no longer seen as synonymous with a socialist perspective is a sign of considerable progress, and cause for optimism too, as failure on the traditional front of class politics is compensated by progress on other, newer fronts such as the politics of gender. But it is also a source of heightened uncertainty. While there was always a problem of inconsistencies between critical standpoints, it has deepened and widened with the rise of 'green' concerns, for they bring into question the feasibility and desirability of non-capitalist as well as capitalist industrial societies. Is the problem capitalism, industrial society in general, or modernity?; and what are the alterna- tives? Equally, increasing awareness of problems of ethnocentrism and value pluralism throws doubt over the familiar, implicit critical stand- points of Western radical social science. How do we decide what is a problem? What if we cannot reach a consensus on this? Until recently, it seemed that the problems or targets of critical social science could be relied upon to emerge from the investigation of existing practices, where one would encounter the felt needs, frustrations and suffering of actors, and in discovering the sources of these problems, work out what changes

would lead towards emancipation (e.g. Fay, 1975, 1987; Collier, 1994h(. This was coupled with an implicit view that emancipation was a form of escape from domination, illusion and unwanted constraints, with little or no acknowledgement that it depended on the construction of superior, alternative, progressive frameworks which could replace the old ones . But it is now increasingly apparent that normative questions of possible alternatives and what is good or bad about them cannot be evaded . How, without addressing such questions, could one decide what constitutes a superior alternative? Should there be a presumption in favour of community as a basis of social organiz- ation over other forms? Does liberalism provide the best framework

for multicultural societies? What should be people's rights and responsibili- ties? What are our responsibilities to distant others, future generations, and to other species? There is little hope of achieving the goal of an emancipatory social science if it shuns normative discussions of issues such as these.

No prior questions – “epistemology first” makes problem-driven approaches impossible.Owen 2 David Owen, 2 Reader of Political Theory at the Univ. of Southampton, Millennium Vol 31 No 3 2002 p. 655-7

Commenting on the ‘philosophical turn’ in IR, Wæver remarks that ‘[a] frenzy for words like “ epistemology” and “ontology ” often signals this philosophical turn’, although he goes on to comment that these terms are often used loosely.4 However, loosely

deployed or not, it is clear that debates concerning ontology and epistemology play a central role in the contemporary IR theory wars. In one respect, this is unsurprising since it is a characteristic feature of the social sciences that periods of disciplinary disorientation involve recourse to reflection on the philosophical commitments of different theoretical approaches, and there is no doubt that such reflection can play a valuable role in making explicit the commitments that characterise (and help individuate) diverse

theoretical positions. Yet, such a philosophical turn is not without its dangers and I will briefly mention three before

turning to consider a confusion that has, I will suggest, helped to promote the IR theory wars by motivating this philosophical turn. The first danger with the philosophical turn is that it has an inbuilt tendency to prioritise issues of ontology and epistemology over explanatory and/or interpretive power as if the latter two were merely a simple function of the former. But while the explanatory and/or interpretive power of a theoretical account is not wholly independent of its ontological and/or epistemological commitments (otherwise criticism of these features would not be a criticism that had any

value), it is by no means clear that it is, in contrast, wholly dependent on these philosophical commitments . Thus , for example, one need not be sympathetic to r ational c hoice t heory to recognise that it can provide powerful accounts of certain kinds of problems , such as the tragedy of the commons in which dilemmas of

collective action are foregrounded. It may, of course, be the case that the advocates of rational choice theory cannot give a good account of why this type of theory is powerful in accounting for this class of problems (i.e., how it is that the relevant actors come to exhibit features in these circumstances that approximate the assumptions of

rational choice theory) and, if this is the case, it is a philosophical weakness—but this does not undermine the point that, for a certain class of problems , rational choice theory may provide the best account available to us . In other

words, while the critical judgement of theoretical accounts in terms of their ontological and/or epistemological sophistication is one kind of critical judgement, it is not the only or even necessarily the most important kind . The second danger run by the philosophical turn is that because prioritisation of ontology and epistemology promotes theory-construction from philosophical first principles, it cultivates a theory-driven rather than problem-driven approach to IR. Paraphrasing Ian Shapiro, the point can be put like this: since it is the case that there is always a plurality of possible true descriptions of a given action, event or phenomenon, the challenge is to decide which is the most apt in terms of getting a perspicuous grip on the action, event or phenomenon in question given the purposes of the inquiry; yet, from this standpoint, ‘theory-driven work is part of a reductionist program’ in that it ‘dictates always opting for the description that calls for the

explanation that flows from the preferred model or theory’.5 The justification offered for this strategy rests on the mistaken belief that it is necessary for social science because general explanations are required to characterise the classes of phenomena studied in similar terms. However , as Shapiro points out, this is to misunderstand the enterprise of science since ‘ whether there are general explanations for classes of phenomena is a question for social-scientific inquiry, not to be prejudged before conducting that inquiry ’ .6 Moreover, this strategy easily slips into the promotion of the pursuit of generality over that of empirical validity . The third danger is that the preceding two combine to encourage the formation of a particular image of disciplinary debate in IR—what might be called (only slightly tongue in cheek) ‘the Highlander view’—

namely, an image of warring theoretical approaches with each, despite occasional temporary tactical alliances,

dedicated to the strategic achievement of sovereignty over the disciplinary field. It encourages this view because the turn to, and prioritisation of, ontology and epistemology stimulates the idea that there can only be one theoretical approach which gets things right, namely, the theoretical approach that gets its ontology and epistemology

right. This image feeds back into IR exacerbating the first and second dangers, and so a potentially vicious circle arises.

Elites crush the alt Scott 6 Allen Scott Urban Planning @ UCLA in Economic Geography: Past Present and Future eds. Sharmistha Bagchi-Sen and Helen Smith

In a series of recent writings, Barnes (e.g. 1996, 2001, 2003), has pursued a related line of investigation opened up by the cultural turn. Barnes' work is much influenced by Derrida and Rorty, and is centrally focused on the metaphorical and narratological character of geographical writing. There is actually much of interest in the approach Barnes takes. He has many useful things to say about the ideologies and working habits of economic geographers, as well as about the rhetorical devices that they deploy in their written reports. This helps among other things to keep us focused on the critical idea that our intellectual encounters with the real are always deeply theory-dependent (Sunley 1996). But as

the plot thickens - or thins, according to your taste - we steadily lose sight of economic geography as a discipline with concrete substantive concerns (such as regional development or income inequalities), for these simply

dissolve away into the primacy of the text and its metaphorical perplexities. I am perfectly prepared to admit that there may

be strong elements of metaphor in, for example, a geography of hunger, but I certainly have no sympathy for the idea that hunger

is just a metaphor, if only on the ad hominem grounds that it has painful physical manifestations and morbid long-term effects. Here, the legitimate claim that we can only know the world through socially-constructed codes of reference seems to have given way to the sophism that all we can know about the world is the codes themselves . An even more extreme case of the solipsism that haunts much of the cultural turn can be found in the book by Gibson-Graham (1996) about strategic possibilities for progressive social change in contemporary capitalism. The central arguments of the book hinge upon the proposition that the criteria for validating a theory are purely internal to the theory to be validated. As Gibson -Graham writes (p. 60): 'We cannot argue that our theory has more explanatory power or greater proximity to the truth than other theories because there is no common standard which could serve as the instrument of such a metatheoretical validation process'. If this proposition were indeed true it would presumably undermine much of the point in Gibson-Graham proceeding any further in her argument, though she does in fact continue on for another 200-odd pages. In the course of this discussion , the relativism of her main thesis is steadily transformed from a merely academic exercise into a political

agenda of sorts. Thus, she announces (p. 260), 'the way to begin to break free of capital ism is to turn its prevalent representations on their heads'. Presto. No t even a hint about a possible transitional program, or a few suggestions

about, say, practical reform of the banking system. The claim is presented in all its baldness, without any apparent consciousness that

attempts to break free of any given social system are likely to run into the stubborn realities of its indurated social and property relations as they actually exist . More generally, Gibson -Graham's argument leads inexorably beyond the perfectly acceptable notion that all intellectual work is theory dependent and into those murky tracts of idealist philosophy where reality is merely a reflection of theory, and where theory produces social change independently of concrete practice and

disciplined attention to the refractory resistances of things as they really are . So, quite apart from its dysfunctional depreciation of the role of economic forces and structural logics in economic geography, the cultural turn also opens a door to a disconcerting strain of philosophical idealism and political volun tarism in modern

geography. The net effect is what we might call economistic grand theory in reverse: a remarkable failure to recognize sensible boundaries

as to just what precisely a cultural theory of the economy can achieve, and a concomitant over-promotion of the notion that social and economic transformation involves nothing more than the unmediated power of theoretical ideas . Again, nothing in this argument is intended to deny the important continuities and intersections between culture and economy or the significance of the econ omy as a site of cultural practices; neither is it in any sense an attempt to eject the study of cultural economy from geography. The problem is not 'culture' but the cultural turn as it has emerged out of cultural studies with its militant project of reinterpreting all social relations as cultural relations, and its na"ive, if understandable, attempt to humanize the iron cage of capitalist accumulation by unwarranted culturalization of its central economic dynamics (Eagleton 2003; Rojek and Turner 2000).

The alt fractures coalitions, which strengthens right wing populismGoldfarb 17 (Jeffrey, Michael E. Gellert Professor of Sociology The New School for Social Research, “What Do You Mean When You Use the Term Neoliberalism?”, Public Seminar; open, critical, challenging, confronting the pressing issues of the day and fundamental problems of the human condition, expanding the project of The New School for Social Research, 4/7/17, http://www.publicseminar.org/2017/04/what-do-you-mean-when-you-use-the-term-neoliberalism/#.WWeqEYQrJHM) JA

A Question to My American Friends, Colleagues, Students and Comrades on the Academic Left. The term “neoliberalism” drives me crazy, specifically when used in the U.S.. It explains too much with too little, concealing crucial distinctions, as it frustrates crucial coalitions against the clear and present danger of the new authoritarianism of Trump , Le Pen, Orban, Kaczynski, et al.. Further, it’s meaningless for much of the American citizenry beyond academic and leftist circles. It’s “ elite-speak ,” confusing at best, destructive , at worst . I, of course, know, that many of my friends, colleagues, students and comrades, whom I respect, use the term. While I understand and often appreciate what they are getting at, I worry about the consequences, intended and unintended, of using the term. I have to this point expressed my reservations only in informal conversations and in discussions in the classroom. I suspect my students think I am a little odd when I insist that I don’t know what neoliberalism means. The ramblings of their cranky professor? Indeed, I am now writing here at the insistence of students in my Media and Publics seminar, but I am sure students in my other recent classes will also appreciate my coming out on this. The center of my bewilderment is with the “liberalism” that the “neo” is intended to specify. Is it the liberalism of the United States or liberalism as the term is used in much of the rest

of the world? If it is the global definition of liberalism, “neoliberalism” refers to the radical application of market logic and practices to broader and broader previously nonmarket activities: from family life, to the arts and sciences, and education, and even to geopolitics (Trump’s transactional approach to foreign policy). It further, centrally, refers to the radical commitment to let the market run wild without political interference. If the referent is to the distinctively American approach to liberalism, “neoliberalism” is manifested in the political innovations in the tradition of The New Deal to work on the relationship between state and market mechanism to accomplish what the rest of the world understands as social democratic ends. These two definitions clearly are not the same. Without recognizing the distinction between these meanings, you cannot tell the difference between a realistic project of the left and a destructive utopian project of the right . Without recognizing the distinction between the meanings, in the U.S., you cannot tell the difference between the positions of the Democratic and Republican parties, while differences among progressives are exaggerated . Then there is the problem that the term neoliberalism is next to meaningless beyond academic circles. For most Americans, the term liberalism refers to a set of policies that involve government in their lives in the pursuit of public goods: Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, the Environmental Protection Agency, public education, Amtrak, food stamps, gun controls, and the like. Following this commonsense, Obamacare is judged as an extension of liberal policies, (neoliberal?) as it involves the government more actively in healthcare. Also following this logic, Obamacare could be judged, then, wanting on new (neo?) liberal grounds, because it does not go far enough, i.e. toward a single payer plan, or “Medicare for all.” The rejection of these policies, because they involve state encroachment into the lives of individual citizens, because they compromise their liberty, is the conservative position in the United States. Naming what is understood by Americans as conservative, as neoliberal, is only meaningful for people who have their heads in different times or different places, who know something about the history of 19th century liberalism and who know quite a lot about political discourse around the world. I am tempted to call people who do this rootless cosmopolitans (with my tongue embed in my cheek). Intellectuals is my less sarcastic name for them, as I defined the term in my book Civility and Subversion: The Intellectual in Democratic Society. But to be a democratic intellectual, you must not only draw upon your experience and knowledge from other times and places, but also connect with your compatriots. In the U.S., when you use the term neolibe ralism as a name for the prevailing order of things, and as the source of just about every major problem, you create a chasm between yourself and other Americans. This fundamentally undermines the democratic task, to engage in mutually meaningful public debate and action that moves people to support progressive policies, foreign and domestic, to address the problems of social injustice, concerning economic inequalities, issues of race, gender and sexuality. Your criticism of neoliberalism may work, despite its imprecision, in the lecture halls of universities, as you present brilliant speeches carefully de-constructing the limits of liberal feminism and the like, and on Facebook, as you exchange smart critical observations on your page to the approval of all your “friends.” But you’re preaching to the already convinced, and making sure that those who are not convinced stay away. With these concerns in mind, I wrote this piece to ask the question in the title, wanting an answer or set of answers, which might convince me that I am mistaken. Just to be clear, I use my preferred term “market fundamentalism” as a sensible alternative for neoliberalism. I too am worried by those who think that the free market is the answer to all problems, those who believe in market magic. I ask my critical readers: am I missing something? Where am I going wrong in my understanding? This is an honest question, I would happy to be convinced. But as you are trying to convince me, keep in mind my political concerns. I think

that using the term neolib eralism to identify both those who would utilize the market to extend the New Deal tradition and those who turn to the market as the answer to all social, political and cultural problems , in the American context, the Clintons and Obama, on the one hand, with Reagan, the Bushes and Ryan- Trump , on the other, is a major problem. This identification covers up the major political conflicts of our times , as it divides the left so that it can be conquered . In a future post, I hope to explore more fully the advantage of focusing critical attention upon the dangerous combination of market fundamentalism, nationalism, xenophobia and the new authoritarianism, the very peculiar threat of the Trump regime. My last question: is there an understanding of neoliberalism that can help with this?

2AC Case OWUS-led liberalism’s on the brink – alt accelerates transition warsSmith 16 (Noah Smith, assistant professor of finance at Stony Brook University and a freelance writer for a number of finance and business publications, “Freedom Is Receding Around the World,” Bloomberg View, July 8, 2016, http://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-07-08/freedom-is-receding-around-the-world)

Brexit’s real importance probably comes not from its direct effects, but from its symbolism. It’s a sign of a much bigger, broader trend -- a global political regime change . The shift was happening before Brexit, and it will continue after. It’s something we should be worried about. In the after math of World War II , the globe was divided into two main blocs -- a U.S.-led group that embraced liberal democracy , capitalism and free trade , and a Soviet-and- Chinese -led group that favored autocracy, economic isolationism and various forms of communism. Neither side was particularly unified, and neither one lived up fully to its professed ideals. But gradually, the liberal bloc succeeded economically and socially , and the other one failed. As this became apparent, many countries started changing their institutions to be more like the U.S. China and other authoritarian countries liberalized their economies, while many others converted from autocracy to democracy. In recent years, that trend has halted , and the institutional tide now appears to be moving in the other direction. Illiberalism -- political autocracy and restriction of civil liberties -- are on the rise. Many organizations track these trends, and they tend to have different definitions of democracy and freedom. But they all seem to agree on the broad trend. For example, Freedom House, an organization sponsored by the U.S. government, says that freedom in the world has been declining for the past 10 years. Since 2006, the number of countries it records as having experienced declines in freedom has been greater than the number of countries where freedom has advanced: If you weight the world by population rather than by the number of countries, the retreat for democracies is less dramatic, but still clear. The Economist Intelligence Unit maintains democracy index, which it says has been "in limbo" or declining since the index was created in 2006. Reporters Without Borders, an international nonprofit, sees a “deep and disturbing decline” in press freedom around the globe. And the widely used Polity IV data set shows the number of democratic countries stagnating or falling in almost all regions of the globe since the early 2000s. The World Economic Forum believes that the liberal order is being “challenged by a variety of forces.” Brexit is widely seen as a harbinger of this trend. In the New Yorker magazine, Benjamin Wallace-Wells writes that “the liberal project is increasingly an American one.” The New York Times’ Roger Cohen sees the potential of a return to pre-World War II authoritarianism in Europe. In Foreign Policy, Harvard international relations professor Stephen Walt says that Brexit, and the rise of Donald Trump in the U.S., show that the benefits of liberalism were oversold and that a backlash is in progress. I’m not so sure that Brexit is a manifestation of illiberalism. Yes, the pro-Brexit camp was partly motivated by fear and dislike of immigrants, but the vote was democratic, and the EU has long suffered from a “democratic deficit.” Trump is a clearer danger. His divisive vilification of America’s minority groups, his campaign’s social media ties to white supremacist groups and the authoritarian attitude of his support base, are all red flags signaling that a significant part of the U.S. isn't a fan of the liberal ideals that the country promoted in the 20th century. This is a bad development. Of course, human rights and civil liberties are immeasurably valuable in their own right. But a less liberal world is also a more dangerous one. As psychologist Steven Pinker extensively documented in his book “The Better Angels of Our Nature,” war has declined a great deal since the end of World War II. There are many theories for why this has happened, but two of the leading ones are the d emocratic p eace t heory and the c apitalist p eace t heory . The former holds that democracies tend not to fight each other, and the latter says that countries with freer markets have fewer disputes. Evidence generally supports both theories, mean ing that the U.S.-led liberal project has reduced war via multiple channels. But as Pinker cautions, the decline of w ar is no historical certainty . The pattern could reverse at any time. If the U.S.-led liberal order is really collapsing , it could herald perilous times ahead. One especially fraught spot is the South China Sea. China has claimed most of that body of water as its sovereign territory, which has presented a challenge to the U.S.-backed postwar convention of freedom of the seas. With many smaller nations --

including some U.S. allies like the Philippines -- pressing their own rival claims in the area, the South China Sea is a tinderbox that could produce armed conflict between China and the U.S. Such a clash, between the world’s largest economies and most powerful militaries, could easily spiral into a broader conflict or touch off a descent into geopolitical anarchy. If the mercurial and pugnacious Trump pulls off an upset win in November, this threat to global prosperity and security rises. Meanwhile, the South China Sea is far from the only hot spot; a Russian invasion of the Baltic countries, which are part of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, could also trigger a major conflict and reverse the gains of the past 70 years. And if the advance of illiberalism continue, the flashpoints could easily multiply as democracy and capitalism lose their power as engines of peace.

Extinction outweighs quality of life Paterson 3 [Department of Philosophy, Providence College, Rhode Island Craig, “A Life Not Worth Living?”, Studies in Christian Ethics, http://sce.sagepub.com ]

Contrary to those accounts, I would argue that it is death per se that is really the objective evil for us, not because it deprives us of a prospective future of overall good judged better than the alter- native of non-being. It cannot be about harm to a former person who has

ceased to exist, for no person actually suffers from the sub-sequent non-participation. Rather, death in itself is an evil to us because it

ontologically destroys the current existent subject — it is the ultimate in metaphysical lightening strikes.80 The evil of death is

truly an ontological evil borne by the person who already exists, independently of calculations about better or worse

possible lives. Such an evil need not be consciously experienced in order to be an evil for the kind of being a human person is. Death is an

evil because of the change in kind it brings about, a change that is destructive of the type of entity that we essentially are. Anything, whether caused naturally or caused by human intervention (intentional or unin- tentional) that drastically interferes in the process of maintaining the person in existence is an objective evil for the person. What is crucially at stake here, and is dialectically supportive of the self-evidency of the basic good of human life, is that death is a radical interference with the current life process of the kind of being that we are. In consequence, death itself can be credibly thought of as a ‘primitive evil’ for all persons, regardless of the extent to which they are currently or prospectively capable of participating in a full array of

the goods of life.81 In conclusion, concerning willed human actions, it is justifiable to state that any intentional rejection of human life itself cannot therefore be warranted since it is an expression of an ultimate disvalue for the subject, namely, the destruction of the present person; a radical ontological good that we cannot begin to weigh objectively against the travails of life in a rational manner. To deal with the sources of disvalue (pain, suffering, etc.) we should not seek to

irrationally destroy the person, the very source and condition of all human possibility .82

2AC Epistemology ShieldStriving for competitiveness is inevitable – alt can’t overcome the squo.Voinescu & Moisoiu 15 (Razvan Voinescu and Cristian Moisoiu, The Institute for World Economy, “Competitiveness, Theoretical and Policy Approaches: Towards a more competitive EU,” Procedia Economics and Finance, 22 (2015), pg. 513)

International competitiveness has long been a major preoccupation of economic thought and has been receiving increasing attention from scientists, policy makers, businesses and general population alike. From a theoretical perspective, any rapid assessment would reveal an obvious lack of consensus regarding the exact meaning of competitiveness. Robert Z. Lawrence (1993) stated that “competitiveness, particularly with reference to an entire economy, is hard to define. Indeed, competitiveness, like love or democracy, actually has several meanings.” Theoretical origins of the concept of competitiveness can be traced in the economics of foreign trade and its role in national and international economic welfare. More recent theoretical debates enlarge on the conceptual complexity of countries’ competitiveness with existing approaches ranging from an exclusively microeconomic perspective to an all-encompassing micro- and macro-economic perspective. Such conceptual diversity also has practical implications. In an ever more globalised economic environment, economies face various competitiveness related risks and opportunities. Intensity and directions of goods, services, labour and capital flows between open economies have both increased and become more unstable with positive outcomes for some and negative for other economies and nations. National policy makers have been pay ing increasing attention to various international competitiveness rankings and aim at improving their country’s relevant policies in the quest for competitiveness gains. At the global level, international economic organizations take increasing competitiveness of nations as a prereq uisite for the stability and growth of global economy and for the deeper integration of the developing economies in the

international economic flows. Companies and general population pay particular attention to international comparison of nations’ competitiveness with the aim of both rapidly identifying business opportunities and having a more clear understanding of their nation’s relative welfare status, which, in turn, helps them shape their expectations from governments’ policies.

Even if our epistemology’s suspect, it’s useful – global institutions act as if competitiveness is true by assessing economic governance through relative productivity based on an “general equilibrium model” – that’s Martin and Camagni – the alt can’t solveCameron & Palan 4 (Angus Cameron, University of Leicester, Ronen Palan, University of Birmingham, The imagined economies of globalization, pgs. 3-4)

Social scientific theories are, therefore, very different from theories in the physical sciences – something often overlooked in the globalization debate. Social scientific theories are not purely descriptive, nor are they purely

prescriptive – they are part of the very process of societal change they claim to describe and analyse. As Andrew Sayer notes, ‘People are self- interpreting beings who can learn from and change their interpretations so that they can act and respond in novel ways , thereby

producing novel stimuli for subsequent actions’ (Sayer 1992, 234). This is true even if the theories in question are wrong . Even if globalization could be demonstrated to be no more than a ‘myth’ as some have indeed claimed (Shipman

2002), this would not invalidate the theory. Rather, the question needs to be posed differently. The issue here is not simply whether or not a given theory is true in the conventional sense – that is, an empirically testable proposition – but whether the stories contained within it are believed by sufficient numbers of people prepared to invest serious time and money in them . If enough such people exist , and if they command sufficient economic, political, social and cultural resources, then any myth , however outrageous or outlandish, to some extent becomes a ‘reality ’ . If the president of Honeywell believes in a ‘global’ future, and manages to persuade his board of directors to share his vision and if

they are collectively prepared to do something about that ‘future’, then that future comes one step closer. If enough policy-makers

and CEOs believe that in thirty years time 80 per cent of goods and services produced will enter international trade flows , then it is incumbent on them that they prepare their states and companies for that eventuality . In the course of that preparation, they will effect important changes in the nature of that objective ‘reality’ for which they are preparing. Of course, the ‘reality’ that eventually arises from their attempts to enact a theory may bear little resemblance to what they actually predicted and prepared for – indeed it is highly unlikely to do so. But the fact remains that theories and perceptions must be considered important causal factors in the changes that we witness – even the most ‘objective’ social scientist to some extent sees that which they expect and/or have been prepared to see (cf. Feyerabend 1993).

2AC Solvency Mech ShieldPlan spills over to basic supports like health care, food security, and quality of life which decelerates structural violence indicated in their Sparke evLiu 6 Goodwin Liu, Assistant Professor of Law, University of California, Berkeley. Education, Equality, and National Citizenship, The Yale Law Journal, http://toped.svefoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/Adequacy-14thAmend-Liu080111.pdf

B. Beyond Education The constitutional vision sketched here raises another question of limits generally applicable to theories of positive social and economic rights . As Justice Powell said in refusing to recognize education as a fundamental right under the Equal Protection Clause , “the logical limitations [of the] theory are difficult to perceive. How , for instance, is education to be distinguished from the significant personal

interests in the basics of decent food and shelter ?”361 One could readily imagine that a conscientious legislator, upon a diligent inquiry into the prerequisites for equal citizenship, would feel duty-bound to address more of the nation’s opportunity structure than K-12 education. At one level, it may be argued that the adequacy of educational opportunity is uniquely a matter of governmental concern because government has made schooling compulsory and has long assumed primary responsibility for its finance and provision. This is a contingent fact of our present social organization—schooling was a largely private function in many parts of the country before the twentieth century362—but the expectation and reality of the government’s dominant role in providing education seem firmly entrenched. Even the most ardent critics of the government’s monopoly power over schools, such as Milton Friedman, accept that “both the imposition of a minimum required level of schooling and the financing of this schooling” by the government are justified by the positive externalities arising from education’s role in “promoting a stable and democratic society.”363 For all but the small minority of children whose families can afford private tuition or home-schooling,364 participation in the public system is, by necessity and by law, compulsory. This fact alone suggests that government has a special responsibility to ensure educational adequacy apart from other facets of

human welfare. At another level, however, the duty to ensure educational adequacy rests on a normative, not factual, basis with broader sweep . While a decent education is essential to effective citizenship, “[e]mpirical examination might well buttress an assumption that the ill-fed, ill-clothed, and ill-housed are among the most ineffective participants in the political process” and in other domains that confer social regard.365

On my account of the Constitution’s citizenship guarantee , federal responsibility logically extends to areas beyond education . Importantly, however, the duty of government cannot be reduced to simply providing the basic necessities of life. Welfare provision in the form of cash assistance, food stamps, and public housing may prevent destitution (a worthy objective in its own right),366 but such provision, with its accompanying stigma of dependence and bureaucratic control, does not assure its beneficiaries the

dignity of full membership in society. Beyond a minimal safety net , the legislative agenda of equal citizenship should extend to systems of support and opportunity that , like education, provide a foundation for political and economic autonomy and participation . The main pillars of the agenda would include basic employment supports such as expanded health insurance , child care , transportation subsidies , job training , and a robust earned income tax credit . Further, the citizenship guarantee would find expression in antidiscrimination laws that promote inclusion in social, economic, and political spheres .367 The multiplicity and monetary cost of the duties I have posited for Congress may strike some as evidence that they cannot all be matters of

constitutional obligation. However, the duty to enforce the national citizenship guarantee is no less a duty for being multifaceted and potentially expensive. Professor Black, in defending what he called the “affirmative constitutional duty of Congress . . . to ensure . . . a decent livelihood for all ,”368 drew the following analogy to the President’s duty to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed”369: The President cannot do everything imaginable to bring it about that the laws be faithfully executed; he is limited by his own physical and mental powers, by other claims on these, and by the amplitude of the means put at his disposal by Congress. The duty has to be a duty to act prudently within these limits, without ulterior motive, sensitive to the force of the powerful conscience-stirring word “faithfully.” It cannot be any more—or, I should think, any less—

than that. But is it not a duty?370 Section 5’s invitation to Congress to enact “appropriate” enforcement legislation likewise calls for prudent, good-faith action to make real the broad guarantees of the Fourteenth Amendment. The duty is not neatly bounded, and it will cost money. But in these respects, it is no different from other constitutional duties requiring government affirmatively to act , for example, to protect private property, contractual freedom, national security, or traditional “negative” rights such as freedom of

speech and due process of law.371 The discharge of such duties involves an essential if inexplicit balance. On one hand, enforcement of constitutional norms, like law enforcement generally, requires discretion as to what is reasonable, feasible, and likely to be effective. On the other hand, as Professor Black observed, “the decently eligible range of means and measures is one thing when you are under no duty at all to act, and quite another when you are under a serious duty to act effectively.”372 In sum, substantial or indefinite cost is a feature common to a

broad range of constitutional duties. Here, as elsewhere, such duties call on the conscientious legislator to combine seriousness of purpose with considerations of prudence, efficacy, and good faith .

“Neolib Bad” is a staler meme than the aff – it’s epistemologically bankrupt cuz it replaces empirics and specificity for totalizing abstraction, and underestimates the power of the constitutional guarantee to constrain elite influence Barnett 10 (Clive Barnett, Faculty of Social Sciences @ The Open University, “Publics and Markets: What’s wrong with Neoliberalism?”, The Handbook of Social Geography, edited by Susan Smith, Sallie Marston, Rachel Pain, and John Paul Jones III. London and New York: Sage)

In theories of neolib eralism and neoliberalization, the theoretical preference for very high levels of abstraction is associated with a tendency to make a geographical virtue out of the consistent failure to theorize the state as anything other than a functional attribute of the reproductive requirements of capital. Particular state-formations and patterns of political contention are acknowledged only as local, territorialized, contextual factors that help to explain how the universalizing trajectory of neoliberalism, orchestrated from the centre and organised through global networks, nonetheless always generate ‘hybrid’ assemblages of neoliberalism.¶ This style of theorizing makes it almost impossible to gainsay the highly generalised claims about neoliberalism as an ideology and neoliberalization as a state-led project by referring to empirical ev idence that might seem to contradict these grand concepts. For example, it is almost taken-for-granted that the hegemony of neoliberalism is manifest in the reduction of state expenditures on welfare in face of external pressures of neoliberal globalization. Empirical evidence for welfare state decline is, in fact, far from conclusive. Welfare regimes have actually proved highly resilient in terms of both funding and provisioning (see Taylor-Gooby 2001). At the same time, the extent to which open market economies foster rather than menace high-levels of national welfare provision is also hotly debated (Taylor-Gooby 2003). In both cases, the idea of any straightforward shift from state to market seems a little simplistic (Clarke 2003). But from the perspective of geography’s meta-theories of neoliberalization, all of this is so much grist to the contextualizing mill. Contrary evidence can be easily incorporated into these theories precisely because they layer levels of conceptual abstraction onto scales of contextual articulation.¶ Presenting differential state-formation as a contextual variable is related to a much broader displacement of political action in general to a lower level of conceptual abstraction in theories of neoliberalism. One aspect of this is the persistent treatment of a broad range of social movement activity as primarily a secondary response to processes of neoliberalization. But more fundamentally, Marxist political-economies of neolib eralism pay almost no attention, at a conceptual level, to the causal significance of the institutional and organisational forms that shape political action (Hay 2004). This is indicative of a broader failure to think through how distinctive forms of contemporary democratic politics shape pathways of economic development and capital accumulation. Theories of neoliberalism take for granted

the capacity of states to implement particular policies in order to put in place the regulatory conditions for particular accumulation strategies. This overlooks the degree to which the time-space constitution of democratic politics in liberal democracies serve as “substantial impediments to the achievement of neo-liberal goals” (Johnston and Glasmeier 2007, 15). Given the territorialization of party support and the territorialized organization of electoral politics, liberal democracy generates strong pressures that militate against wholly flexible and open labour markets , sustain subsidies and protectionist measures, and support the promotion of investment in particular locations . In theories of neoliberalism, processes of free market reform in the USA and UK since the 1980s are considered models of more general tendential logics. But these examples might be quite specific outcomes of the balance of political forces in those polities when compared to the patterns of welfare reform and tax policy in European countries (Prasad 2005; see also Glyn 2007).¶ Taking into account the ways in which state action is constrained by the time-space constitution of electoral, representative democracy is particularly relevant for understanding why relatively wealthy, advanced industrial economies do not conform to the tendential logic predicted by political-economy theories of neoliberalization. These same constraints might be operative elsewhere too. It is routine to suggest that neoliberalism is ‘imposed’ on developing economies externally, through the Washington Consensus promulgated by the IMF, World Bank, and WTO. However, Stokes (2002) argues that patterns of neoliberalization in Latin America in the 1980s and 1990s can be explained in large part by analysis of the dynamics between electoral campaigning, party mobilisation, mandate and accountability as they played themselves out in periods of democratic transition and consolidation. In her account of ‘neoliberalism by surprise’, democratic governance, party competition, electoral accountability, and responsiveness to constituents’ interests all play crucial roles in explaining whether, how, and why neoliberal policies are adopted.¶ Strictly speaking, these sorts of considerations do not need to disturb the secure conceptual vantage-point offered by political-economy theorizations of neoliberalism. This paradigm is, as already suggested, internally attuned to recognize the variety and hybridity of neoliberalisms, and is able to ascribe this to the necessary articulation of generic neoliberal ideology, circulated globally, with territorialized logics operative at ‘lower’ geographical scales. Whether or not one finds this convincing comes down to a decision between different styles of theory. Political-economy approaches seek after high-level abstractions in order to identify fundamental features of phenomena (the logic of capital accumulation in Harvey, the capitalist state in Jessop, neoliberal ideology in Peck and Tickell). These abstract imperatives are then mapped empirically through a kind of deductive cascade, where they bump into other phenomena, like states, or racial formations, or gender relations. Because of their distinctive ontological features (e.g. their institutional qualities, their territorial qualities, their discursive qualities, and their identity-based qualities), these phenomena have never been amenable to the same sort of explanatory rationalism that allows the dynamics of capital accumulation to be defined so purely.¶ The effect of these theorizations is to de-politicize politics . If the dominant logic of state action can always be discerned from understanding the logic of capital accumulation and the balance of class forces, then that is really all one ever needs to really know (Clarke 2004a). This de-politicization of politics ‘out there’ is an effect of the inflation of the political force ascribed to the academic work of critique: analysis of politics is reduced to a matter of understanding how a logic already known

in advance is differentially enacted , so that the critical task of such analysis can be presented as a political act of exposing naturalized forms as social constructs.

2AC PermPerm do both

The plan’s challenge to privatized school choice is the direction of the alt, which solves 1NC Waddock by quote “focusing on collective value than shareholder wealth” Kelty 14 (Robert, Ed.D, Principal, Puente de Hozho Elementary School at the Flagstaff Unified School District, “HIDDEN IN PLAIN SIGHT: THE HISTORY OF NEOLIBERALISM AND THE APPARATUS OF SCHOOL PRIVATIZATION”, A Dissertation Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Education in Curriculum and Instruction, Northern Arizona University, January 2014) JA

That said, public education stakeholders need to further research , understand, and connect meta-governmentality to curriculum and instruction in the contemporary. Neoliberal ideas are directly connected to our phenomenological reasoning, daily experiences, and choice s in schools and classrooms . It is plain sight, and at times, it is difficult to differentiate from our common sense. It simply “is.” Nonetheless, neoliberalism can be named and identified. From Ludwig von Mises, to Friedrich Hayek, to the Colloque Walter Lippmann, to the Mont Pelerin Society, to Milton Friedman, to the neoliberal think tank technology and its connected prions, to William Simon, to Ronald Reagan, and many others, one can understand the slew of educational policies that incrementally suffocate the notion that every child is guaranteed a civil right to an education , free and public , under a state constitution and under the control of a democratic populace. Rather, what is witnessed is a new order that registers cognitive dissonance with many – government protecting and promoting the market from democratic infringement and the collectivist notions of democracy itself. However, democracy and its ideals are beautifully stubborn . For a neoliberal biopolitic to fully “become” – raising the ethics of competition, profit, and efficiency as the values of all values – the battle needs to continue.

2AC Neolib GoodNow, Neolib Good & Sustainable – alt accelerates inequality, ensures right-wing takeover Smith 17 (Noah Smith, Bloomberg View columnist, former assistant professor of finance at Stony Brook University, “Centrism Takes On the Extremes,” May 23, 2017, Bloomberg, https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-05-23/centrism-takes-on-the-extremes)

“Neoliberalism” isn’t the most well-defined of terms. It loosely refers to free-market economic ideas, combined with a technocratic, incrementalist approach to fixing market failures and redistributing wealth. Many criticize the term for being too vague, but it’s slowly catching on: Neoliberalism is essentially the centrist economic framework embraced by U.S. presidents like Bill

Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama. It’s also the paradigm that most academic economists implicitly use to think about policy -- they see themselves as advisers offering smart, often subtle advice to generally benevolent policy makers. In other words, neoliberalism is the model the U.S. has been operating under for decades, and it has had significant influence abroad as well. People on the socialist left , especially in the U.K., like to blame neoliberal ideology for many of the woes of the modern world . Meanwhile, on the right , protectionist and xenophobic ideas have rapidly replaced free-market libertarianism as the rallying cry of the Republican base. The neoliberal center is under assault from both sides. So some internet jokesters have decided it’s time to fight back. The neoliberal memes poke fun at both the socialist left and the populist right. They proudly defend taco trucks from Trump’s rhetorical assaults and tease left-leaning politicians like the U.K.’s Jeremy Corbyn and the U.S.’s Bernie Sanders. And they portray centrist leaders like Germany’s Angela Merkel, France’s Emmanuel Macron and Canada’s Justin Trudeau not as embattled apologists for a disintegrating order, but as saviors leading the strays back to the light:

This nascent pushback is long overdue. People in Western countries have been far too quick to throw centrist technocracy into the dustbin of history . Despite the deep wounds of

the Great Recession and the 2008 financial crisis, developed countries have not seen their economies collapse. Employment languished for almost a decade, but it’s now recovering to pre-crash levels: Meanwhile,

wages have begun to rise in the U.S. and are increasing faster for those at the bottom of the income distribution. Home prices and stock markets have fully recovered from

their recession-era lows. There are still plenty of economic problems to be dealt with, but it’s now clear that advanced economies based on neolib eralism have not suffered any kind of systemic collapse. Battered and scarred, the system built in the late 20th century still stands. And young radicals on

either side of the political divide should heed the warnings of history. The Great Depression, almost a

century ago, prompted many countries to turn to new and extreme political and economic philosophies -- communism,

fascism , or militarism . In the end, the country that came out of that era in by far the best shape was the U.S., whose leader, Franklin D. Roosevelt, was the original center-left technocrat. The New Deal has taken a lot of criticism from hardcore free-marketers in recent decades, but it was just the compromise the U.S. needed to steer a middle path between self-destructive extremist ideologies. Many will disagree, but to me FDR seems like the original

Neolib solves warming – alt can’t solve tipping point fast enough to avoid extinctionParenti & Emanuele 15 (Christian Parenti, former visiting fellow at CUNY's Center for Place, Culture and Politics, as well as a Soros Senior Justice Fellow, teaches in the Liberal Studies program at New York University, interview with Vincent Emanuele, writer, activist and radio journalist who lives and works in the Rust Belt, “Climate Change, Militarism, Neoliberalism and the State,” May 17, 2015, http://ouleft.sp-mesolite.tilted.net/?p=1980)

Many natural scientists are actually confirming a lot of left thought. For example, look at Stanford University primatologist Dr. Robert Sapolsky’s work. He’s essentially arguing that if baboons can drastically alter their social relations in short periods of time, humans don’t have any legitimate excuses for not doing so. What’s realistic to accomplish in the short-term, while understanding that capitalism must be eventually abolished in order to ensure the survival of the species and planet? Let’s be clear about short -term versus long-term . Capitalism is unsustainable. That much we understand. The science is very clear: We have to make drastic reductions in our greenhouse gas emissions. That could be done by creating a whole new social system, but I don’t think that the left has

the capacity to totally transform the economy into some socialist economy in time to avoid climate catastrophe. Capitalism does have a record of achieving environmental reforms at the local level. I would also draw a distinction between capital and capitalism. Capitalism is a social system that involves society, government, culture and capital. Capital does not have this capacity, but capitalism does. It’s been reformed throughout history. We’ve cleaned up our cities. They used to be completely filthy places where people and industries were polluting and dumping everywhere. Ultimately, capitalist society is unsustainable. You cannot have systems that just grow and grow forever on a finite planet. It’s that simple, really. We do not have a century or two centuries to deal with this. We have to deal with climate change, that is to say, mitigate g reen h ouse g a s emissions, immediately , if we are to buy ourselves some time to adapt. So, when I make the case for a kind of green developmentalist state that could force a reform of capitalism, I don’t say that because it’s my ideal version of society. But I don’t think it’s realistic to expect that we must change absolutely everything in order to change how humans get our energy. However, I do think it’s realistic to force the existing system to change where it gets energy from, so we can buy time and deal with all the other ecological and political problems. Even the best-case scenario tells us that certain aspects of climate change are already locked in place. We need to achieve very deep emissions reductions immediately. We have to be honest about the bad track record of socialism . This is another legacy of the Cold War. People have been taught not to identify with the history of actually existing socialism, so it’s easy to discard it. During the Cold War, the US left mostly condemned the record of existing socialism, and invoked some other form of anarchism or socialism. But this distancing and condemnation meant we haven’t admitted to the fact that changing class relations within society does not necessarily mean changing tech nologies and fuel sources. Look at our comrades in Latin America right now, in Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador: They are making real , if incremental, progress on the class front , but not at all in their relationship to fossil fuels . In other words, decarbonization is distinct and does not follow automatically , or naturally, from socialist political experiments. Back to my point about mitigation: Capitalist society can be forced to do things that capital doesn’t like . Really, that’s the entire history of capitalism: reforms and drastic leaps. Capital needs barriers to innovate. It needs regulations in order to create and be innovative . It needs political crises like war in order to innovate and create new infrastructures and technologies. Capital innovates beyond the barriers, but it requires limits to provoke that innovation. Regulation helps to ensure this process of innovation by containing capital and forcing it, like the flow of water, in different directions. We have the means to force capitalism to build a new energy sector . I don’t think that’s utopian, and I don’t think it’s the solution to our many problems. It’s simply something that can be done. And, it’s a realistic way to slow down ecological collapse and buy time to keep struggling on all fronts.

Competitiveness drives cooperation and equityWest 12 Martin West is assoc professor of education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and a faculty research fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research. “Education and Global Competitiveness.” In K. Hassett, ed. Rethinking Competitiveness. Washington DC: American Enterprise Institute Press. An excerpt of this paper also appears in: West, Martin R. 2012. Global Lessons for Improving U.S. Education. Issues in Science & Technology 28, no. 3:37-44 https://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/9544459/West%20Education%20and%20Global%20Competitiveness%20chapter%20for%20DASH.pdf?sequence=1

This is not to say, however, that America’s very real educational challenges are irrelevant to its economic performance going forward. On the contrary, the evidence that the quality of a nation’s education system is a key determinant of the future growth of its economy is increasingly strong (Hanushek and Woessmann 2011). If, following Xavier Sala-i-Martin (2010), the economist behind the World Economic Forum’s influential Global Competitiveness Index,

competitiveness is redefined as “the set of institutions, policies, and factors that set the sustainable current and medium-term levels of economic prosperity” (1), then the performance of national

education systems should be central to its measurement . To the extent that America’s education system stagnates as other countries advance, its relative standing in the world economy and global influence will no doubt suffer . Assertions of education’s importance for global competitiveness , however

misleading, can therefore be useful to the extent that they illustrate the potential for the American education system to perform at much higher levels and foster a sense of urgency about its improvement. Most Americans continue to assign high marks to their own local schools, even as they evaluate the nation’s schools more critically than ever (Bushaw and Lopez 2011). This pattern reflects and works to reinforce a reform agenda centered on increasing the performance of economically disadvantaged students, racial and ethnic minorities, and those at the bottom of the skill distribution. While this task is and must remain an urgent priority, defining the nation’s educational challenge solely in terms of domestic achievement gaps ignores the

gains that would result from improved performance and productivity across the American education system as a whole. Greater recognition of the “ global achievement gap ” may help to alter the perceptions of policymakers and the public and broaden support for politically controversial reforms (Wagner 2008). Discussions of educational competition can also be useful to the extent that they foster systematic investigation of the factors that lead to higher and more equitable levels of performance across countries. Identifying the determinants of the performance of national education systems is challenging, and naïve attempts at “global benchmarking” based on case studies of high-performing countries can yield misleading lessons. However, careful research exploiting the differences in how public education is governed and organized across countries can shed light on which strategies are most promising in the American context. As education researcher Arthur W. Foshay put it in 1962 after conducting the first cross-country study of student achievement, “If custom and law define what is educationally

allowable within a nation, the educational systems beyond one’s national borders suggest what is educationally possible” (quoted in Hanushek and Woessmann 2011, 90).

2AC STOOFEconomic realities exceed discourseScott 6 Allen Scott Urban Planning @ UCLA in Economic Geography: Past Present and Future eds. Sharmistha Bagchi-Sen and Helen Smith

These brief remarks, schematic as they may be, already underline the obvious and pressing need for economic geographers to pay close

attention to the ways in which culture and economy intersect with one another in mutually constitutive ways. The urgency of this need is reinforced by the observation that the economic and the cultural come together with special intensity in place (Shields 1999), and that many of the key agglomerations constituting the focal points of the new economy around the world are critically dependent on the complex play of culture. Thus, to an ever-increasing degree, the productive performance of agglomerations like the City of London (Thrift: 1994), Hollywood (Scott 2002a), or Silicon Valley (Saxenian 1994) can only be understood in relation to their joint economic and cultural dynamics. Each of these places is shot through with distinctive traditions, sensibilities, and cultural practices that leave deep imprints on phenomena such as management styles, norms of worker habituation, creative and innovative energies, the design of final outputs, and so on, and these phenomena in turn are strongly implicated in processes of local economic growth and development. In view of the discussion above, it seems fairly safe to say that only a few die-hards and philistines are likely to make strenuous objections to attempts to bring culture more forcefully into the study of economic geography. In spite of the neologisms and cliche-ridden prose that Martin and Sunley (2001) rightly complain about, there is obviously a significant nexus of ideas in a more culturally inflected economic geography that responds in a very genuine way to major

problems posed by contemporary capitalist society. Once this point has been made, however, a number of the reforms of economic geography that have been most strenuously advocated under the rubric of the cultural turn are

rather less obviously acceptable, and have recently been subject to heated debate by economic geographers (see, for example, Martin and Sunley 2001; Plummer and Sheppard 2001; Rodriguez-Pose 2001; Sayer 1997; Storper 2001). This debate has tended to find its sharpest expression in relation to the curious reluctance by some proponents of the cultural turn to make any concession to the play of economic processes in economic geography except in so far as they are an expression of underlying cultural dynamics. In a number of their more fervent

statements, indeed, some of these proponents occasionally verge on an inversion of the classical Marxian conceit to the effect that culture flows uni-causally from the economy, by offering equally exaggerated claims about the influence of culture on the economy. In a statement that displays much enthusiasm about the study of culture and much

acrimony in regard to the discipline of economics, Amin and Thrift (2000) essentially recommend withdrawal from economic analysis, as such, and a wholesale re-description of economic realities in terms of cultural points of reference. Thus, in writing about the problem of eventuation they one-sidedly argue that 'acting into the words confirms the discourse and makes a new real ' (p. 6), so that in their formulation, the economy becomes nothing more than a series of 'performances' derived from a script. Elsewhere, Thrift: (2001) further proclaims that the new economy of the 1990s was fundamentally a rhetorical phenomenon. The argument here starts off promisingly enough with an examination of the role of the press, business consultants, financial advisors, and the like, in helping to foment the fast-paced, high-risk economic environment of the period, but then it veers into the blunt assertion that the new economy as a whole can be understood simply as a discursive construct. In

formulations like these, basic economic realities - the state of tech nology, the rhythms of capital accumulation and investment, the rate of profit , the flow of circulating capital , and so on - become just so much inert plasma to be written upon this way or that as cultural shifts occur and as revisions of the script are introduced. Certainly, words are a critical moment in the circuit of mediations through which economic reality operates, and there can be no doubt that many unique effects are

set in motion at this particular level of analysis. Conversely, and it is puzzling that so trivial and obvious a point should need to be made, there are also deeply-rooted economic logics and dynamics at work in the contemporary space-economy , and at

least some of these (such as the dynamics of industrial organization, or the increasing returns eft-ects that lie at the root of industrial districts

), require investigation on their own terms above and beyond invocations of the causal powers of discourse and culture.

Methodological nationalism is inevitable O’Dowd 10 Liam O’Dowd Sociology @ Queens (Belfast) “From a borderless world to a world of borders: bringing history back in” Environment and Planning D Advanced Online Publication 3-1-2010 p. 3-4

Devaluing state borders in contemporary border studies Influential studies of globalisation and critiques of `the container state', `embedded statism', methodological nationalism , and the `state as territorial trap' (for an early overview, see Brenner, 1999) have found a receptive audience, especially in European border studies. These critiques, allied to accounts of the demise of the

`Westphalian' or `Weberian' state, have become part of the conventional wisdom underlying studies of borders and globalisation. Europe and its borders are represented as the main exemplar and source of the new globalised, postnational, even cosmopolitan, world order (Balibar, 2004; Beck and Grande, 2007). Implicit in much of this commentary is that Europe, successively the progenitor of the great modern empires and the national state system, is once again accorded a vanguard role in postnational geopolitical change. In this vision, although state borders remain, albeit in reconfigured form, their status is in secular decline, not least because their functions have been diffused among other territorial and nonterritorial entities. Despite the diminishing role accorded to state borders in the emerging global order, they are retained, implicitly at least, as the hinge or fulcrum of contemporary border studies (and, indeed, of globalisation studies as such). The territorially bounded state remains an abiding reference point for the study of border change of the measur- ing stick by which contemporary social change

is assessed, even among those who are most critical of state-centric approaches. State borders continue to be deeply constitutive of the way in which contemporary social scientists think about social change, mobility and immobility, inclusion and exclusion, domestic and foreign, national and international, internal and external, us and them. For the critics of statism, it was only by the end of the 20th century that the social sciences had been able to break decisively with the state-centric epistemology which dominated the modern social sciences since their inception in

the late 19th century (Brenner, 1999, page 46). Even in Europe, however, the sternest critics of statism continue to think with state borders if not always about the historical ways in which they have come into being and how they continue to change . At one level, the extent to which states implicitly frame social science thinking is scarcely surprising given the heavy institutional dependence of the specialised social sciences on (particular) national states (Wimmer and Glick Shiller, 2002). Much contemporary analysis of borders and globalisation insists that escaping from the state-centric thinking is the sine qua non for grasping

the novelty and the promise of the new world order. Yet, `escape ' is far more difficult than such observers imagine. Contemporary social science (especially in Europe and the USA) remains symbiotically tied to particular states and groups of states. Proclaiming the advent of a new world `beyond the nation-state', where the significance of state borders is in absolute decline, is less convincing when social science practice is so tied to the world view emanating from (the dominant Western) states. In privileging spatial analysis, that is, space over time, much contemporary border study lacks an adequate historical analysis of state and nation formation; they over- emphasise the novelty of contemporary forms of border change and globalisation and, in the process, fail to register the extent to which we continue to live in a `world of diverse states', shot through with the legacy of empires, past and present.

The starting point of the commons is quote a “refusal of work” – transition to a post-work society reinforces inequality and fascismKonczal 15 (Mike Konczal, Roosevelt Institute Fellow, “The Hard Work of Taking Apart Post-Work Fantasy,” June 29, 2015, http://www.nextnewdeal.net/rortybomb/hard-work-taking-apart-post-work-fantasy)

Going further, the idea that a post-work economy would involve simply choosing between a handful of quasi- utopias strikes me as completely naive . In Thompson’s piece, for instance, the problem seems to be whether post-work people would spend their time in intellectual pursuits or as independent artisans. But it’s just as likely people would spend their days as

refugees trying not to starve.¶ You can get the sense that something is missing because virtually all of these articles consider radical forms of leisure instead of ownership. (Indeed, in assuming that prosperity leads to redistribution leads to leisure and public goods, it’s really a forward projection of the Keynesian-Fordism of the past.) I rarely see any of these

mass media post-work scenarios tackle these issues head-on, much less talk about “post-ownership” instead of just “post-work.” (Friend of the blog Peter Frase is one of the few who does.)¶ It’s just as likely that the result will be a catastrophe for those who lose the value of their human capital . It seems unlikely that the political economy would become more conducive to redistribution , as these articles usually imply, because the value of capital assets would probably skyrocket . With that value high and ownership concentrated, it would potentially lead to a political economy more favorable to fascism than to robust egalitarianism. Who owns the robots, and what that even means in such a world, will be just as much a question as what we do to occupy ourselves; the first, really, will determine

the second.¶ As a result, discussions of the idyllic robot future give working people a desire that is an obstacle to the actual flourishing of their lived conditions, and it remains an ideology completely divorced from the lived experiences of everyday people . I hereby nominate this as Pure Ideology. Who seconds the motion?

Work is inevitable and the commons trades off with labor organization – turns their impactKonczal 15 (Mike Konczal, Roosevelt Institute Fellow, “The Hard Work of Taking Apart Post-Work Fantasy,” June 29, 2015, http://www.nextnewdeal.net/rortybomb/hard-work-taking-apart-post-work-fantasy)

At this point, the preponderance of stories about work ending is itself doing a certain kind of labor, one that distracts us and leads us

away from questions we need to answer. These stories, beyond being untethered to the current economy, distract from current problems in the workforce , push laborers to identify with capitalists while ignoring deeper transitional matters , and don’t even challenge what a serious, radical story of ownership this would bring into question.¶ Unlikely¶ Before we begin, I think it’s important to note how unlikely this scenario remains. We can imagine the Atlantic of the 1850s running a “The Post-Agriculture, Post-Work World” cover story, correctly predicting farming would go from 70 percent of the workforce to 20 percent over the next 100 years, yet incorrectly predicting this would end work. We don’t think of what happened afterward as “post-work.” The economy managed to continue on, finding new work and workers in the process.¶ There are other minor problems.

Globalization and tech nological advancement are treated as the same thing, when they are not . There’s also a slippage common in the critical discussion of these articles (you can see it from this tweet from Thompson here) of substituting in the argument that technology has weakened wages and excluded some workers in recent

decades for an argument about the long-run trajectory of technology itself. These are two different, distinct stories, with the first just as much about institutions as actual technology, and evidence for the first certainly doesn’t prove the second.¶ We’ll Still Be

Working¶ But what is the impact of these stories? In the short term, the most important is that they allow us to dream about a world where the current problems of labor don’t exist, because they’ve been magically solved. This is a problem, because the conditions and compensation of work are some of our biggest challenges. In these future scenarios, there’s no need to organize, seek full employment , or otherwise balance the relationship between labor and capital, because the former doesn’t exist anymore.¶ This is especially a problem when it leaves the “what if” fiction writings of op-eds, or provocative calls to reexamine the nature of work in our daily lives, and melds into organizational politics. I certainly see a “why does this matter, the robots are coming” mentality among the type of liberal infrastructure groups

that are meant to mobilize resources and planning to build a more just economy. The more this comforting fiction takes hold, the more problematic it becomes and easier it is for liberals to become resigned to low wages.¶ Because even if these scenarios pan out, work is around for a while. Let’s be aggressive with a scenario here: Let’s say the need for hours worked in the economy caps right now. This is it; this is the most we’ll ever work in the United States. (It won’t be.) In addition, the amount of hours worked decreases rapidly by 4 percent a year so that it is cut to around 25 percent of the current total in

34 years. (This won’t happen.)¶ Back of the envelope, during this time period people in the United States will work a total of around 2 billion work years. Or roughly 10,000 times as long as human beings have existed. What kinds of lives and experiences will those workers have?