T

1NC
Our interpretation is that the affirmative must be responsible for defending the
desirability of topical action
“USFG should” means the debate is only about a policy established by
governmental means
Jon M. ERICSON, Dean Emeritus of the College of Liberal Arts – California Polytechnic U., et al.,
3 [The Debater’s Guide, Third Edition, p. 4]
The Proposition of Policy: Urging Future Action

In policy propositions, each topic contains certain key elements, although they have slightly different functions from
comparable elements of value-oriented propositions. 1. An agent doing the acting ---“The United States” in “The United
States should adopt a policy of free trade.” Like the object of evaluation in a proposition of value, the agent is the subject of the
sentence. 2. The verb should—the first part of a verb phrase that urges action. 3. An action verb to follow
should in the should-verb combination. For example, should adopt here means to put a program or policy into action
though governmental means. 4. A specification of directions or a limitation of the action desired. The phrase free trade,
for example, gives direction and limits to the topic, which would, for example, eliminate consideration of increasing tariffs,
discussing diplomatic recognition, or discussing interstate commerce. Propositions of policy deal with future action. Nothing has yet
occurred. The
entire debate is about whether something ought to occur . What you agree to do,
then, when you accept the affirmative side in such a debate is to offer sufficient and compelling
reasons for an audience to perform the future action that you propose .

Its is possessive and refers to the party preceding its use – the USFG
US District Court 7 (United States District Court for the District of the Virgin Islands, Division of St. Thomas and St. John,
“AGF Marine Aviation & Transp. v. Cassin, 2007 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 90808,”)

the word "its." The possessive pronoun was

The Court inadvertently used the word "his" when the Court intended to use

intended to refer to the party preceding its use--AGF. Indeed, that reference is consistent with the undisputed facts
in this case, which indicate that Cassin completed an application for the insurance policy and submitted it to his agent, Theodore Tunick & Company
("Tunick"). Tunick, in turn, submitted the application to AGF's underwriting agent, TL Dallas. (See Pl.'s Mem. of Law in Supp. of Mot. for Summ. J. 5.)

“Limit the condition under which” means restrict a defense pact to specific
adversaries, locations, or preconditions
Chiba et al. 15 Daina Chiba, University of Essex Jesse C. Johnson, University of Kentucky Brett
Ashley Leeds, Rice University “Careful Commitments: Democratic States and Alliance Design”
The Journal of Politics , Vol. 77, No. 4 https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/10.1086/682074.pdf?
refreqid=excelsior%3A4143156bd2c52cf3cac09e95835e5de7

Our second dependent variable measures whether or not a defense pact specifies limits to the
conditions under which defensive obligations are invoked . This variable is defined only for the subset of alliance agreements that have
defensive obligations. Alliances might specify that the defensive obligations are only invoked if a member is

attacked by a specific adversary, or in a specific location, or without provocation by the ally (see
Leeds and Mattes 2007, 192). The variable takes on a value of 1 for any alliance including defensive obligations that specifies any limits to the conditions under which defensive obligations are invoked, and a value
of 0 for any alliance including defensive obligations that does not specify such limits. There are 260 alliance treaties that have defensive obligations, and this variable is coded 1 for 116 cases (45%).
The “ceiling” of an alliance commitment would basically mean you can limit
anything the alliance does as long as you also limit the conditions under which
we will defend it.
Yarhi-Milo et al. 16 Keren Yarhi-Milo is an assistant professor of politics and international
affairs in Princeton University’s Politics Department and the Woodrow Wilson School for Public
and International Affairs. Alexander Lanoszka is Lecturer in the Department of International
Politics at City, University of London. Zack Cooper is a fellow at the Center for Strategic and
International Studies. “To Arm or to Ally?” International Security, Vol. 41, No. 2 (Fall 2016), pp.
90–139, https://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/kyarhi/files/to_arm_or_to_ally.pdf

alliance commitments

Alliances are written pledges between two or more states that are intended to formalize some form of security cooperation.7 In this
article, we set aside offensive alliances and nonaggression pacts to focus on defensive alliances (or defense pacts), in which members pledge to come to

each other’s aid in the event that one member experiences external aggression. Alliances deter adversaries by aggregating and, through

joint military exercises and operational planning, enhancing capabilities. Alliances are ex post
commitments that bolster the credibility of a state’s promise to intervene on behalf of an ally by putting the state’s reputation at stake.8 Reneging on commitments is costly because it affects a
state’s ability to negotiate future alliance treaties.9

States face a dilemma in deciding the strength of their alliance commitments. Too weak a commitment
could embolden an adversary and inspire abandonment fears in an ally because the patron might decline to assist it during a crisis.
Too strong a commitment, such as one that is explicit, broad, and binding, could embolden a client to pursue risky or aggressive
policies. This latter possibility fuels a patron’s fear of being militarily entrapped by a risktaking ally that could drag the
patron into an unwanted war.10 Of course, all alliance commitments imply some risk of entanglement, which Tongfi Kim
defines as “the process whereby a state is compelled to aid an ally in a costly and unprofitable

Framing issue: Debates are won and lost in the margins- the resolution is the
only constant to guide research and preparation over issues of content.
Allowing affirmatives to deviate away from the resolution creates a moral
hazard and incentivizes teams to race away from the resolution towards
truisms in order to exacerbate their monopoly on preparation.
We have 3 internal links to our offense:
1. Aff conditionality- Not reading a plan incentivizes teams to shift the
goalposts in the 2AC to skirt offense- causes late breaking debates while
destroying fairness
2. Predictable limits- Their model justifies infinite affirmatives that create
new strategies of international engagement- kills pre-round prep and
generates shallow debates void of education
3. Ground- The aff’s model skews ground to disproportionately favor the
affirmative- explodes negative research burden and undermines link
uniqeness- kills fair debate and makes in-depth research impossible
jeopardizing in and out of round education
Cap K
 1NC
Their cessation of revolutionary institution building abdicates the potential for
true communal power, reducing revolution to reactive bursts of energy.
Escalante 19. Alyson. Marxist-Leninist. Materialist Feminist and Anti-Imperialist activist.
"Communism and Climate Change: A Dual Power Approach." Failing That. Invent.
https://failingthatinvent.home.blog/2019/02/15/communism-and-climate-change-a-dual-
power-approach.

I have previously argued that a crucial advantage to dual

power strategy is that it gives the masses an
infrastructure of socialist institutions which can directly provide for material needs in times of
capitalist crisis. Socialist agricultural and food distribution programs can take ground that the
capitalist state cedes by simultaneously meeting the needs of the masses while proving that
socialist self-management and political institutions can function independently of capitalism.
This approach is not only capable of literally saving lives in the case of crisis, but of demonstrating the
possibility of a revolutionary project which seeks to destroy rather than reform capitalism. One
of the most pressing of the various crises which humanity faces today is climate change. Capitalist production has
devastated the planet, and everyday we discover that the small window of time for avoiding its most disastrous effects is shorter
than previously understood. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicts that we have 12
years to limit (not even prevent) the more catastrophic effects of climate change. The simple, and horrific,
fact that we all must face is that climate change has reached a point where many of its effects are
inevitable, and we are now in a post-brink world, where damage control is the primary concern.
The question is not whether we can escape a future of climate change, but whether we can
survive it. Socialist strategy must adapt accordingly . In the face of this crisis, the democratic socialists and
social democrats in the United States have largely settled on market based reforms. The Green New Deal,
championed by Alexandria Ocasio Cortez and the left wing of the Democratic Party, remains a thoroughly capitalist solution to a
capitalist problem. The proposal does nothing to challenge capitalism itself, but rather seeks to subsidize
market solutions to reorient the US energy infrastructure towards renewable energy production, to
develop less energy consuming transportation, and the development of public investment towards these ends.
The plan does nothing to call into question the profit incentives and endless resource
consumption of capitalism which led us to this point. Rather, it seeks to reorient the relentless
market forces of capitalism towards slightly less destructive technological developments. While
the plan would lead to a massive investment in the manufacturing and deployment of solar
energy infrastructure, National Geographic reports that, “Fabricating [solar] panels requires caustic
chemicals such as sodium hydroxide and hydrofluoric acid, and the process uses water as well
as electricity, the production of which emits greenhouse gases.” Technology alone cannot
sufficiently combat this crisis, as the production of such technology through capitalist manufacturing
infrastructure only perpetuates environmental harm. Furthermore, subsidizing and incentivizing
renewable energy stops far short of actually combating the fossil fuel industry driving the current
climate crisis. The technocratic market solutions offered in the Green New Deal fail to adequately combat the driving factors of
climate change. What is worse, they rely on a violent imperialist global system in order to produce their technological solutions. The
development of high-tech energy infrastructure and the development of low or zero emission
transportation requires the import of raw material and rare earth minerals which the United States
can only access because of the imperial division of the Global South. This imperial division of the world
requires constant militarism from the imperial core nations, and as Lenin demonstrates in Imperialism: The
Highest Stage of Capitalism, facilitates
constant warfare as imperial states compete for spheres of
influence in order to facilitate cheap resource extraction . The US military, one of many imperialist forces,
is the single largest user of petroleum, and one of its main functions is to ensure oil access for the
United States. Without challenging this imperialist division of the world and the role of the United States military in upholding
it, the Green New Deal fails even further to challenge the underlying causes of climate change. Even with the failed promises of the
Green New Deal itself, it is unlikely that this tepid market proposal will pass at all. Nancy Pelosi and other lead Democrats have
largely condemned it and consider it “impractical” and “unfeasible.” This dismissal is crucial because it reveals the total inability of
capitalism to resolve this crisis. If the center-left party in the heart of the imperial core sees even capitalist reforms as a step too far,
we ought to have very little hope that a reformist solution will present itself within the ever shrinking 12 year time frame. There are
times for delicacy and there are times for bluntness, and we are in the latter. To put things bluntly: the capitalists are not
going to save us, and if we don’t find a way to save ourselves, the collapse of human
civilization is a real possibility. The pressing question we now face is: how are we going to save ourselves?
Revolution and Dual Power If capitalism will not be able to resolve the current encroaching climate crisis, we must find a way
to organize outside the confines of capitalist institutions, towards the end of overthrowing
capitalism. If the Democratic Socialists of America backed candidates cannot offer real anti-capitalist solutions through the
capitalist state, we should be skeptical of the possibility for any socialist organization doing so. The DSA is far larger and far
more well funded than any of the other socialist organizations in the United States, and they have failed to
produce anything more revolutionary than the Green New Deal . We have to abandon the idea
that electoral strategy will be sufficient to resolve the underlying causes of this crisis within 12
years. While many radicals call for revolution instead of reform, the reformists often raise the same response:
revolution is well and good, but what are you going to do in the mean time? In many ways this question is fair. The
socialist left in the United States today is not ready for revolutionary action, and a mass base does not exist to back the various
organizations which might undertake such a struggle. Revolutionaries must concede that we
have much work to be done
before a revolutionary strategy can be enacted. This is a hard truth, but it is true. Much of the left has
sought to ignore this truth by embracing adventurism and violent protest theatrics, in the vain
hope of sparking revolutionary momentum which does not currently exist. If this is the core strategy of the
socialist left, we will accomplish nothing in the next 12 years. Such approaches are as useless as the
opportunist reforms pushed by the social democrats. Our task in these 12 years is not simply to arm ourselves and hope that
magically the masses will wake up prepared for revolution and willing to put their trust in our small ideological cadres. We
must
instead, build a movement, and with it we must build infrastructure which can survive revolution and
provide a framework for socialist development . Dual power is tooled towards this project best.
The Marxist Center network has done an impressive amount of work developing socialist
institutions across the US, largely through tenants organizing and serve the people programs. The
left wing factions within the DSA itself have also begun to develop mutual aid programs that could be
useful for dual power strategy. At the same time, mutual aid is not enough. We cannot simply
build these institutions as a reform to make capitalism more survivable. Rather, we must make
these institutions part of a broader revolutionary movement and they ought to function as a
material prefiguration to a socialist society and economy . The institutions we build as dual power
outside the capitalist state today ought to be structured towards revolutionary ends, such that
they will someday function as the early institutions of a revolutionary socialist society. To
accomplish this goal, we cannot simply declare these institutions to be revolutionary. Rather they have
to be linked together through an actual revolutionary movement working towards
revolutionary ends. This means that dual power institutions cannot exist as ends in and of
themselves, nor can abstract notions of mutual aid cannot be conceptualized as an end in itself .
The explicit purpose of these institutions has to be to radicalize the masses through meeting
their needs, and providing an infrastructure for a socialist movement to meet the needs of its
members and the communities in which it operates. Revolutionary institutions that can
provide food, housing, and other needs for a revolutionary movement will be crucial for
building a base among the masses and for constructing the beginnings of a socialist infrastructure for
when we eventually engage in revolutionary struggle.

Rejection of the specific details of political engagement is not radical – it

continues the prevailing mode of leftist cynicism that eviscerates alternatives to
existing state power
Burgum 15 (Samuel, PhD candidate in Sociology at the University of Warwick and has been
conducting research with Occupy London since 2012, “The branding of the left: between
spectacle and passivity in an era of cynicism,” Journal for Cultural Research, Volume 19, Issue 3)

Rather than the Situationist spectacle , then, I argue that the reason those on the left are rendered post-
politically impotent to bring about change is not because we are deceived, but because we
enact apathy despite ourselves. In other words, the relationship between the resistive subject and ideology is not one
of false consciousness, but one of cynicism: we are not misdirected by shallow spectacles, but instead
somehow distracted by our cynical belief that we are being “distracted”. In this section, I begin by
outlining the concept of cynicism as it has been theorised by Peter Sloterdijk and Slavoj Žižek. This then leads us to an analysis of the
cynical position adopted by Brand’s critics, which I argue actually demonstrates more political problems on the part of the left than
those suggested by Brand himself.¶ For Sloterdijk, cynicism is an attitude that emerges right at the centre of the enlightenment
project, where, in contrast to a modernist illumination of truth, “a twilight arises, a deep ambivalence” (1987, p. 22). Rather than the
promised heightened consciousness of science that would allow us to see the hidden essential truths behind appearances, the very
conception of truth as unconcealedness (aletheia)3 instead creates a widespread mistrust and suspicion of every appearance.
Subsequently, “a
new form of realism bursts forth, a form that is driven by the fear of becoming
deceived or overpowered … everything that appears to us could be a deceptive manoeuvre of an
overpowering evil enemy” (Sloterdijk, 1987, p. 330). The surface becomes suspect and the subject therefore retreats from
all appearances: judging them to be spectacles that are seeking to oppress through falsity. The result is cynicism. ¶ Subsequently,
this leads Sloterdijk to his well-known paradoxical definition of cynicism as “enlightened false consciousness”
which he describes as a “modernized, unhappy consciousness on which enlightenment has laboured
both successfully and in vain … it has learned its lessons in enlightenment, but it has not,
probably was not able to, put them into practice” (1987, p. 5). In other words, in the search for a higher
consciousness behind appearances, the subject is paradoxically “duped” by their very
suspicion of being duped. Furthermore, because the subject thinks they “know” that appearances
are just a mask, they disbelieve the truth when it does appear. Like the story of the Emperor’s New
Clothes, they fancy themselves to know what is right in front of their eyes (that the emperor is
nude and vulnerable) yet they choose “not to know” and don’t act upon it (they still act as if the emperor
is all-powerful). As such,¶ cynical reason is no longer naïve, but is a paradox of enlightened false consciousness: one knows the
falsehood very well, oneis well aware of a particular hidden interest hidden behind the ideological
universality, but still one does not renounce it. (Žižek, 1989, p. 23)¶ The audience to the parade of
power can see that the emperor is not divine – just a fragile human body like the rest of us – yet they cynically
choose not to know and objectively retain his aura. They congratulate themselves on “knowing” that Brand is
a trivial spectacle, yet they choose to remain apathetic towards his calls for action. ¶ As such, the
dismissive reaction to Brand reveals a regressive interpassive tendency of the left to
subjectively treat ourselves as “enlightened” to authentic politics and yet objectively render
ourselves passive. In a kind of defence mechanism, the left believes that it ¶ can avoid becoming
the dupe of the latest fashion or advertising trend by treating everything as a matter of fashion and
advertising, reassuring ourselves as we flip through television channels or browse through the shopping
mall that at least we know what’s really going on. (Stanley, 2007, p. 399)¶ The critics disbelieve Brand,
distrusting his motives and seeing him as inauthentic, yet they continue to “believe” objectively
in their own marginalisation. As such, the cynical left believe they are dismissing shallow
spectacle in the direction of a stronger authentic radicalism, yet what their “doing believes” is
the maintenance of their apathetic position. More precisely, it maintains the attitudes of left
melancholy and anti-populism.¶ The problem of “left melancholy” points towards the forever-
delayed search for authenticity on the part of a cynical left that is in mourning. Coined by Walter Benjamin (1998), the
concept points towards “the revolutionary who is , finally, attached more to a particular political
analysis or ideal – even to the failure of that ideal – than to seizing possibilities for radical change in the
present” (Brown, 1999, p. 19). Suffering from a history of defeat and embarrassment, the left persist in a
narcissistic identification with failure, fetishising the “good old days” and remaining faithful to lost causes. As
Benjamin himself points out, the cynical kernel of this attitude is clear, as “melancholy betrays the world for the sake of knowledge
… but in its tenacious self-absorption it embraces dead objects in its consumption in order to redeem them” (1998, p. 157). In other
words, the sentiment is a deliberate self-sabotage that takes place even before politics proper has
a chance to begin or “the paradox of an intention to mourn that precedes and anticipates the loss of the object” (Žižek, 2001,
p. 146).¶ This then leads us to the second problem of leftist cynicism: anti-populism. As a result of melancholia,
the left has developed the bad habit of prejudging all instances of popular radical expression (such
as Brand’s) as necessarily flawed. However, to return to Dean again, she points out that this aversion to being
popular and successful is a defining feature of a contemporary left, who prefer to adopt an
“authentic” underdog position in advance than take risks towards political power. As she argues,
“we” on the left see “ourselves” as “always morally correct but never politically responsible”
(Dean, 2009, p. 6) prepositioned as righteous victims and proud political losers from the outset. What
this cynicism towards instances of popular radicalism ultimately means, therefore, is that any concern for authenticity is ultimately a
regressive one, a defence mechanism for a left that “as long as it sees itself as defeated victims, can refrain from having to admit is
short on ideas” (Dean, 2009, p. 5). Such
an attitude means never risking potential failure and residing in
the safety of marginal righteousness.¶ It is the contention here, therefore, that both melancholia and anti-populism
can be seen in the cynical reaction to Brand’s radicalism. Somewhat ironically, Brand (2013) even recognised these problems himself
when he wrote in his New Statesman piece that¶ the right seeks converts while the left seeks traitors … this moral superiority that is
peculiar to the left is a great impediment towards momentum … for an ideology that is defined by inclusiveness, socialism has
become in practice quite exclusive.¶ Automatically, then, the left denounce Brand and self-proclaimed “radical left-wing thinkers and
organisers” bitterly complain how he is getting so much attention for the arguments they have been making for years (for example,
Park & Nastasia, 2013). The left maintain distance and label Brand trivial, yet such a distance only renders these critiques even more
marginal and prevents them from becoming popular, effective or counter-hegemonic.¶ As Žižek has pointed out, the
political
issue of cynicism is “not that people ‘do not know what they want’ but rather that cynical
resignation prevents them from acting upon it , with the result that a weird gap opens up between what people
think and how they act”, adding that “today’s post-political silent majority is not stupid, but it is cynical and resigned” (2011, p. 390).
In terms of Brand, this
blanket cynical melancholy is typical of the left’s distrust of anything popular,
rendering them “like the last men” whose “immediate reaction to idealism is mocking
cynicism” (Winlow & Hall, 2012, p. 13). Proponents of a radical alternative immediately adopt caution
with the effect of forever delaying change, holding out for that real and authentic (unbranded)
struggle and therefore denying it indefinitely.
Their suspicion of mutual aid is an autochthonous discourse makes a strategy of
decolonization impossible and ignores cites of anti-capitalist resistance and de-
politicizes national resistance strategies – they rely on a romanticized notion of
the “pure” which cedes power to tribal elites – instead we need to FOREFRONT
anti-capitalist politics
Sharma 9 (Nandita Sharma, Department of Sociology and Anthropology @ Univ of Windsor.,
and Cynthia Wright. “Decolonizing Resistance, Challenging Colonial States” Social Justice Volume
35.3 ProQuest [KevC])

In each instance, a particular definition of who constitutes the "Native" is put forward. Some, like the one articulated by
Lawrence and Dua in the Canadian context, are part of efforts at decolonization where many "Natives" are subordinated and
defined (by both the dominated and the dominating) metaphysically as being of the land colonized by various European
empires. Others, such as across Africa and in Asia, are advanced in postcolonial contexts where the polity is redefined over the
distribution of power and land and where "Natives" are usually defined ethnically as those living in any particular area (at
smaller and larger scales) at the point of colonization (Mamdani, 1998). Still others are formulated in an attempt to make
claims for the continuation of rank hierarchies for those "Natives" racialized as either European or white against former
colonial subjects who have made a home in various mé tropoles (Balibar, 1991b). Although each definition of the
Native shares qualities with the other (metaphysical claims of "rootedness" are often
racialized and ethnicized, for instance), in each case it is those constituted as "migrants"-the
quintessential non-Natives-who come to be the problem for those constituted as "Natives ."
Migrants are said to take resources properly belonging to Natives, to promote the
disintegration of the "nation," thwart decolonization, and so on. In this negative duality of
the "Native" and the "migrant," each is defined as existing within discrete,
oppositional categories that are wholly unrelated and, more importantly, should
remain so. The pervasiveness of such autochthonous discourses leads us to question how
they are related to political and social transformations shared across the spaces where they
are, or are rapidly becoming, prevalent. Global flows, after all, are certainly not new. Many
(most?) places across the world have long experienced the movement of people. As capitalist social relations have
truly become a global phenomenon, however, it seems that the presence of "foreigners" has
taken on even greater urgency and generated increasingly heated controversies. As we shall
argue below, the expansion of the category of "settler colonizer" to include all "non-
Natives" emerged within the context of the political consolidation of neoliberalism in
the late 1980s and the related rise of neo-racist ideologies of incommensurable
"differences" among "cultures" imagined as separate and distinct (Comaroffand Comaroff,
2005: 125; Balibar, 1991b; Mamdani, 1998; Geschiere and Nyamnjoh, 2000). Though we will clearly depart from Lawrence and
Dua on various key questions-including on who constitutes a settler colonist, on migration, and on nationalism-we do share certain of
their arguments. For example, it is important to attend to the specificities of the oppression of people constituted as indigenous in any
struggle against racism; a civil rights approach clearly does not pose a fundamental challenge to colonialism; and a forceful critique of
We
liberal discourses of "democracy" and multiculturalism is needed since they do not challenge colonial relationships.
therefore conclude with a consideration of ways to undo the divide between
"indigenous" people and "migrants" by working toward practices of decolonization
that are fundamentally antiracist and toward an antiracist politics fully cognizant of
the necessity of anti-capitalist decolonization. From this standpoint we reject the de-linking of antiracism
and anti-colonialism that is fundamental to Lawrence and Dua's argument, and seek rather to renew the historical linkage with
colonialism made in the best of antiracist thought and practice. We are especially
interested in liberatory
strategies of critique and practice that do not reproduce the ruling strategies of
colonial modernity, the colonial state, and nationalisms, and that open up spaces for
radical critique and resistance. What Does the Discourse of "All Migrants Are
Colonizers" Do Politically? A number of political and intellectual projects are evident in Lawrence and Dua's
article. In this essay, however, we address what we perceive to be two of the most problematic
aspects of the argument that nonwhites in Canada are settler colonists. The first is the
conflation of migration and colonization; the second is the attempt to depoliticize
nationalist politics by taking it out of the realm of contestation . In claiming that
attempts to critique notions of "nationhood," or of the ways in which nationalisms organize social relations,
are tantamount to colonizing practices, Lawrence and Dua neglect to consider how various
nationalisms, including relatively recent ones centered on indigeneity, have relied
upon and reproduced the colonial state and colonial social relationships.1 In this section,
we try to unpack these two political projects by showing their link to neoliberal
practices that have further globalized capitalist social relations and to the related
neo-racist practices of "each to their own." Both of these, we argue, rely on
nationalisms and the existing, or hoped-for, national states they legitimate .
Refusing a telos-driven politics in favor of proliferating refusal is a disaster they
assume a transformative potential from everyday moments of resistance that
simply does not exist
Reed 16 [Adolph, Jr., Prof. of Political Science @ Penn., “Splendors and Miseries of the
Antiracist “Left”” Nonsite, http://nonsite.org/editorial/splendors-and-miseries-of-the-antiracist-
left-2]

More than a
decade and a half ago I criticized similar formulations of a notion of “infrapolitics,” understood as the
domain of pre-political acts of everyday “resistance” undertaken by subordinated populations,
which was then all the rage in cultural studies programs. Proponents of the political importance of
this domain insisted that, because insurgent movements emerge within such cultures of
quotidian resistance, a) examining them could help in understanding the processes through
which insurgencies develop and/or b) they therefore ought to be considered as expressions of an
insurgent politics themselves. Several factors accounted for the popularity of that version of the
argument, which mainly had to do to with the political economy of academic life, including the
self-propulsion of academic trendiness and the atrophy of the left outside the academy, which
encouraged flights into fantasy for the sake of optimism. The infrapolitics idea also resonated with
the substantive but generally unadmitted group essentialism underlying claims that esoteric,
insider knowledge is necessary to decipher the “hidden transcripts” of the subordinate
populations; put more bluntly, elevating infrapolitics to the domain on which the oppressed express
their politics most authentically increased its interpreters’ academic capital.8 I discussed those factors
in my critique. However, the point in that argument most pertinent for evaluating Birch and Heideman’s confidence that the
contradictions they acknowledge in BLM should be seen only as growing pains of a “new movement” is the following: At best, those
who romanticize “everyday resistance” or “cultural politics” read the evolution of political movements
teleologically; they presume that those conditions necessarily, or even typically, lead to political
action. They don’t. Not any more than the presence of carbon and water necessarily leads to the
evolution of Homo sapiens. Think about it: infrapolitics is ubiquitous, developed political movements

are rare.9
Neoliberal capitalism will produce extinction – the system reproduces crises
that depoliticize the left, undermine futural thought, and postpone its demise –
the impacts are environmental collapse, endless war, and the rise of fascism
Shaviro 15 (Steven Shaviro is an American academic, philosopher and cultural critic whose areas of interest include film
theory, time, science fiction, panpsychism, capitalism, affect and subjectivity. He earned a PhD from Yale in 1981. “No Speed Limit:
Three Essays on Accelerationism” https://track5.mixtape.moe/qdkkdt.pdf cVs)

The problem may be summarized as follows. Capitalism has indeed created the conditions for general
prosperity and therefore for its own supersession. But it has also blocked, and continues to
block, any hope of realizing this transformation.  We cannot wait for capitalism to transform on
its own, but we also cannot hope to progress by appealing to some radical Outside  or by
fashioning ourselves as militants faithful to some “event” that  (as Badiou has it) would mark a radical
and complete break with the given “situation” of capitalism.  Accelerationism rather demands a movement
against and outside capitalism—but on the basis of tendencies and technologies that are intrinsic to capitalism. Audre Lord
famously argued that “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” But  what if
the master’s tools are the only ones available?  Accelerationism grapples with this dilemma. What is the appeal
of accelerationism today? It can be understood as a response to the particular social and political
situation in which we currently seem to be trapped: that of a long-term, slow-motion
catastrophe. Global warming, and environmental pollution and degradation, threaten to
undermine our whole mode of life. And this mode of life is itself increasingly stressful
and precarious, due to the depredations of neoliberal capitalism . As Fredric Jameson puts it, the world
today is characterized by “heightened polarization, increasing unemployment, [and] the ever
more desperate search for new investments and new markets.” These are all general features of capitalism
identified by Marx, but in neoliberal society we encounter them in a particularly pure and virulent form. I want to be as specific as
possible in my use of the term “neoliberalism” in order to describe this situation. I define neoliberalism as a specific mode of
capitalist production (Marx), and form of governmentality (Foucault), that is characterized by the following specific factors: 1. The
dominating influence of financial institutions, which facilitate transfers of wealth from everybody else to the already extremely
wealthy (the “One Percent” or even the top one hundredth of one percent). 2. The privatization and commodification of what used
to be common or public goods (resources like water and green space, as well as public services like education, communication,
sewage and garbage disposal, and transportation). 3. The extraction, by banks and other large corporations, of a surplus from all
social activities: not only from production (as in the classical Marxist model of capitalism) but from circulation and consumption as
well. Capitalaccumulation proceeds not only by direct exploitation but also by rent-seeking, by
debt collection, and by outright expropriation (“primitive accumulation”). 4. The subjection of all aspects
of life to the so-called discipline of the market. This is equivalent, in more traditional Marxist terms, to the
“real subsumption” by capital of all aspects of life: leisure as well as labor. Even our sleep is now
organized in accordance with the imperatives of production and capital accumulation. 5. The redefinition of human beings as private
owners of their own “human capital.” Each
person is thereby, as Michel Foucault puts it, forced to become “an
entrepreneur of himself.” In such circumstances, we are continually obliged to market ourselves, to “brand” ourselves, to
maximize the return on our “investment” in ourselves. There is never enough: like the Red Queen, we always need to keep running,
just to stay in the same place. Precarity
is the fundamental condition of our lives. All of  these processes
work on a global scale; they extend far beyond the level of immediate individual experience. My
life is precarious, at every moment, but I cannot apprehend the forces that make it so. I know
how little money is left from my last paycheck, but I cannot grasp, in concrete terms, how “the
economy” works. I directly experience the daily weather, but I do not directly experience the
climate. Global warming and worldwide financial networks are examples of  what the ecological theorist
Timothy Morton calls hyperobjects. They are phenomena that actually exist but that “stretch our ideas of time and space, since
they far outlast most human time scales, or they’re massively distributed in terrestrial space and so are unavailable to immediate
experience.” Hyperobjects affect everything that we do, but we cannot point to them in specific instances. The
chains of
causality are far too complicated and intermeshed for us to follow.  In order to make sense of our condition,
we are forced to deal with difficult abstractions. We have to rely upon data that are gathered in massive quantities by scientific
instruments and then collated through mathematical and statistical formulas but that are not directly accessible to our senses. We
find ourselves, as Mark Hansen puts it, entangled “within networks of media technologies that operate predominantly, if not almost
entirely, outside the scope of human modes of awareness (consciousness, attention, sense perception, etc.).” We cannot imagine
such circumstances in any direct or naturalistic way, but only through the extrapolating lens of science fiction. Subject
to these
conditions, we live under relentless environmental and financial assault . We continually find ourselves in
what might well be called a state of crisis. However, this involves a paradox. A crisis—whether economic, ecological,
or political—is a turning point, a sudden rupture, a sharp and immediate moment of
reckoning. But for us today, crisis has become a chronic and seemingly permanent condition. We live,
oxymoronically, in a state of perpetual, but never resolved, convulsion and contradiction.
Crises never come to a culmination; instead, they  are endlessly and indefinitely deferred. For
instance, after the economic collapse of  2008, the big banks were bailed out  by the United States
government. This allowed them to resume the very practices—the creation of arcane financial instruments, in
order to enable relentless rent-seeking—that led to the breakdown of the economic system in the first
place. The functioning of the system is restored, but only in such a way  as to guarantee the
renewal of the same crisis, on a greater scale, further down the road.  Marx rightly noted that crises are
endemic to capitalism. But far from threatening the system as Marx hoped, today these crises actually help it to
renew itself. As David Harvey puts it, it is precisely “through the destruction of the achievements of
preceding eras by way of war, the devaluation of assets, the degradation of productive
capacity, abandonment and other forms of ‘creative destruction’” that capitalism creates “a new
basis for profit-making and surplus absorption.” What lurks behind this analysis is the frustrating sense of an
impasse. Among its other accomplishments, neoliberal capitalism has also robbed us of the future. For it
turns everything into an eternal present.  The highest values of our society—as preached in the business schools—are
novelty, innovation, and creativity. And yet these always only result in more of the same. How often have we been told that a minor
software update “changes everything”? Our
society seems to function, as Ernst Bloch once put it, in a state of
“sheer aimless infinity and incessant changeability; where everything ought to be constantly
new, everything remains just as it was.” This is because, in our current state of affairs,  the future
exists only in order to be colonized and made into an investment opportunity.  John Maynard Keynes
sought to distinguish between risk and genuine uncertainty. Risk is calculable in terms of probability, but genuine uncertainty is not.
Uncertain events are irreducible to probabilistic analysis, because “there is no scientific basis on which to form any calculable
probability whatever.” Keynes’s discussion of uncertainty has strong affinities with Quentin Meillassoux’s account of hyperchaos. For
Meillassoux, there is no “totality of cases,” no closed set of all possible states of the universe. Therefore, there is no way to assign
fixed probabilities to these states. This is not just an empirical matter of insufficient information; uncertainty exists in principle. For
Meillassoux and Keynes alike, there comes a point where “we simply do not know.” But today, Keynes’s distinction is entirely
ignored. The Black-Scholes Formula and the Efficient Market Hypothesis both conceive the future
entirely in probabilistic terms. In these theories, as in the actual financial trading that is guided by them (or at least
rationalized by them), the genuine unknowability of the future is transformed into a matter of
calculable, manageable risk. True novelty is excluded, because all possible outcomes have already been calculated and
paid for in terms of the present. While this belief in the calculability of the future is delusional, it nonetheless determines the way
that financial markets actually work. We might therefore say that speculative finance is the inverse—and the complement—of the
“affirmative speculation” that takes place in science fiction. Financial speculation seeks to capture, and shut down, the very same
extreme potentialities that science fiction explores. Science fiction is the narration of open, unaccountable futures; derivatives
trading claims to have accounted for, and discounted, all these futures already. The
“market”—nearly deified in neoliberal
doctrine—thus works preemptively, as a global practice of what Richard Grusin calls premediation. It seeks
to deplete the
future in advance. Its relentless functioning makes it nearly impossible for us to conceive of
any alternative to the global capitalist world order. Such is the condition that Mark Fisher calls
capitalist realism. As Fisher puts it, channeling both Jameson and Žižek, “it’s easier to imagine the end of the
world than the end of capitalism.”
The alternative is to affirm the model of the Communist Party – only the Party
can provide effective accountability mechanisms to correct violent tendencies
within organizing, educate and mobilize marginalized communities, and
connect local struggles to a movement for international liberation.
Escalante 18. Alyson Escalante is a Marxist-Leninist. Materialist Feminist and Anti-Imperialist
activist. “Party Organizing in the 21st Century. September 2018.
https://theforgenews.org/2018/09/21/party-organizing-in-the-21st-century.
I would argue that within the base building movement, there is a move towards party organizing, but this trend has not always been
explicitly theorized or forwarded within the movement. My goal in this essay is to argue that base
building and dual
power strategy can be best forwarded through party organizing , and that party organizing can
allow this emerging movement to solidify into a powerful revolutionary socialist tendency in the
United States. One of the crucial insights of the base building movement is that the current state of the left in the
United States is one in which revolution is not currently possible. There exists very little popular support for
socialist politics. A century of anticommunist propaganda has been extremely effective in convincing even the most oppressed and
marginalized that communism has nothing to offer them. The
base building emphasis on dual power responds
directly to this insight. By building institutions which can meet people’s needs, we are able to
concretely demonstrate that communists can offer the oppressed relief from the horrific
conditions of capitalism. Base building strategy recognizes that actually doing the work to serve the people does infinitely
more to create a socialist base of popular support than electing democratic socialist candidates or holding endless political education
classes can ever hope to do. Dual power is about proving that we have something to offer the oppressed. The question, of course,
remains: once we have built a base of popular support, what do we do next? If
it turns out that establishing socialist
institutions to meet people’s needs does in fact create sympathy towards the cause of
communism, how can we mobilize that base? Put simply: in order to mobilize the base which base
builders hope to create, we need to have already done the work of building a communist
party. It is not enough to simply meet peoples needs. Rather, we must build the institutions of
dual power in the name of communism. We must refuse covert front organizing and instead
have a public face as a communist party. When we build tenants unions, serve the people programs, and other dual
power projects, we must make it clear that we are organizing as communists, unified around a party, and are not content simply
with establishing endless dual power organizations. We
must be clear that our strategy is revolutionary and in
order to make this clear we must adopt party organizing. By “party organizing” I mean an
organizational strategy which adopts the party model. Such organizing focuses on building a
party whose membership is formally unified around a party line determined by democratic
centralist decision making. The party model creates internal methods for holding party
members accountable, unifying party member action around democratically determined goals,
and for educating party members in communist theory and praxis. A communist organization utilizing the
party model works to build dual power institutions while simultaneously educating the communities they hope to serve.
Organizations which adopt the party model focus on propagandizing around the need for
revolutionary socialism. They function as the forefront of political organizing, empowering local
communities to theorize their liberation through communist theory while organizing
communities to literally fight for their liberation. A party is not simply a group of individuals doing work together,
but is a formal organization unified in its fight against capitalism. Party organizing has much to offer the base building movement. By
working in a unified party, base builders can ensure that local struggles are tied to and informed by a unified national and
international strategy. While the most horrific manifestations of capitalism take on particular and unique form at the local level, we
need to remember that our
struggle is against a material base which functions not only at the national
but at the international level. The formal structures provided by a democratic centralist party
model allow individual locals to have a voice in open debate, but also allow for a unified strategy
to emerge from democratic consensus. Furthermore, party organizing allows for local
organizations and individual organizers to be held accountable for their actions. It allows
criticism to function not as one independent group criticizing another independent group, but
rather as comrades with a formal organizational unity working together to sharpen each others
strategies and to help correct chauvinist ideas and actions. In the context of the socialist movement within the
United States, such accountability is crucial. As a movement which operates within a settler colonial
society, imperialist and colonial ideal frequently infect leftist organizing . Creating formal unity
and party procedure for dealing with and correcting these ideas allows us to address these
consistent problems within American socialist organizing. Having a formal party which unifies the various dual
power projects being undertaken at the local level also allows for base builders to not simply meet peoples needs, but to pull them
into the membership of the party as organizers themselves. The party model creates a means for sustained growth to occur by
unifying organizers in a manner that allows for skills, strategies, and ideas to be shared with newer organizers. It also allows
community members who have been served by dual power projects to take an active role in organizing by becoming party members
and participating in the continued growth of base building strategy. It ensures that there are formal processes for educating
communities in communist theory and praxis, and also enables them to act and organize in accordance with their own local
conditions. We also must recognize that the current state of the base building movement precludes the possibility of such a national
unified party in the present moment. Since base building strategy is being undertaken in a number of already established
organizations, it is not likely that base builders would abandon these organizations in favor of founding a unified party. Additionally,
it would not be strategic to immediately undertake such complete unification because it would mean abandoning the organizational
contexts in which concrete gains are already being made and in which growth is currently occurring. What is important for base
builders to focus on in the current moment is building dual power on a local level alongside building a national movement. This
means aspiring towards the possibility of a unified party, while pursuing continued local growth. The movement within the Marxist
Center network towards some form of unification is positive step in the right direction. The independent party emphasis within the
Refoundation caucus should also be recognized as a positive approach. It is important for base builders to continue to explore the
possibility of unification, and to maintain unification through a party model as a long term goal. In the meantime, individual
base building organizations ought to adopt party models for their local organizing. Local
organizations ought to be building dual power alongside recruitment into their organizations,
education of community members in communist theory and praxis, and the establishment of
armed and militant party cadres capable of defending dual power institutions from state terror.
Dual power institutions must be unified openly and transparently around these organizations in order for them to operate as more
than “red charities.” Serving the people means meeting their material needs while also educating and propagandizing. It means
radicalizing, recruiting, and organizing. The party model remains the most useful method for achieving
these ends. The use of the party model by local organizations allows base builders to gain popular support, and most
importantly, to mobilize their base of popular support towards revolutionary ends, not simply towards the construction of a parallel
economy which exists as an end in and of itself. It is my hope that we will see future unification of the various
local base building organizations into a national party, but in the meantime we must push for party organizing at
the local level. If local organizations adopt party organizing, it ought to become clear that a unified national
party will have to be the long term goal of the base building movement. Many of the already existing
organizations within the base building movement already operate according to these principles. I do not mean to suggest otherwise.
Rather, my hope is to suggest that we ought to be explicit about the need for party organizing and emphasize the relationship
between dual power and the party model. Doing so will make it clear that the base building movement is not pursuing a cooperative
economy alongside capitalism, but is pursuing a revolutionary socialist strategy capable of fighting capitalism. The long term details
of base building and dual power organizing will arise organically in response to the conditions the movement finds itself operating
within. I
hope that I have put forward a useful contribution to the discussion about base building
organizing, and have demonstrated the need for party organizing in order to ensure that the
base building tendency maintains a revolutionary orientation. The finer details of revolutionary strategy will
be worked out over time and are not a good subject for public discussion. I strongly believe party organizing offers the best path for
ensuring that such strategy will succeed. My goal here is not to dictate the only possible path forward but to open a conversation
about how the base building movement will organize as it transitions from a loose network of individual organizations into a unified
socialist tendency. These discussions and debates will be crucial to ensuring that this rapidly growing movement can succeed.
 2NC
Communicative Capitalism DA – the form of the perm is communicative
capitalism, adding in revolutionary institutional building but defusing it of its
transformative political potential
Khan 16 (Abraham Iqbal, Assistant Professor of Communication @ University of South Florida,
“A rant good for business: Communicative capitalism and the capture of anti-racist
resistance,” Popular Communication: The International Journal of Media and Culture, Volume
14.1)
The problem with  neoliberalism is not that it asks us to be anti-racist as such, but that it demonizes collective action, occludes
class consciousness, and forestalls the formation of plausible solidarities.  The critical move that connects anti-racism
to anti-capitalism is to account for the mechanisms that help anti-racism depoliticize the marketplace. Opposing neoliberalism requires

attention to what Jodi Dean calls communicative capitalism, an enticement to play politics without
doing it, to delight in political speech without the work involved in organizing and forming coalitions. As Dean (2009)
puts it, communicative capitalism is defined by “the materialization of ideals of inclusion and participation in information, entertainment, and communication technologies in
ways that capture resistance and intensify global capitalism” (p. 2). Marxist critics like Adolph Reed (2013) worry that the hunt for institutional racism works to “graft more
complex social dynamics onto a simplistic and frequently psychologically inflected racism/anti-racism political ontology” (p. 12). Reed’s concern is that anti-racism centers
oppositional politics around the wrong antagonism by promoting the racial diversification of capital. At the same time, anti-racist critics of neoliberalism notice the ways in which
those very same complex social dynamics are deeply racialized. The idea of communicative capitalism resolves this impasse in oppositional politics by  recognizing

legitimation and obfuscation are opposite sides of the same coin.  By promising universal
that 

access and unfettered mobility, communication technologies deliver participation

to previously excluded social groups and then register the fact of participation as politics
itself. Anti-racist grievances are easily heard, but also quickly evaporate. Participation validates market wisdom
and effaces the market’s racial effects. This point addresses the gap between racism as it was diagnosed and racism as it was practiced in the aftermath of Sherman’s postgame
rant. A handful of hateful tweets offered the sports media the opportunity to exhibit their anti-racist credentials in torrents of self-referential speech. The sheer amount of
media attention paid to Sherman after his postgame interview was itself the subject of media attention, a kind of meta-attention expressed in the suggestion that Sherman had
“broken the internet.”1 Dean (2009) observes that on the internet, “media circulate and extend information about an issue or event, amplifying its affect and seemingly its
significance. This amplification draws in more media, more commentary, and more opinion, more parody and comic relief, more attachment to communicative capitalism’s
information and entertainment networks such that the knot of feedback and enjoyment itself operates as (and in place of) the political issue or event” (p. 32). Sports media
illustrated this dynamic relative to the way audiences were invited to interpret Sherman’s rant. As Tommy Tomlinson (2014) admitted in Forbes, “raw emotion—whatever form
it takes—is exactly what I hope for.” ThinkProgress’s Travis Waldron (2014) agreed that “it might be a little unfair to expect anything else than raw, honest emotion right after

Beyond simply circulating a burst of anti-racist indignation,

that game is finished.” 

this commentary distilled Sherman’s display into pure affect. Dean (2009) contends that communicative capitalism

“reformats” political energy “to speaking and saying and exposing and explaining, a reduction
key to a democracy conceived of in terms of discussion and deliberation”  (p. 32). This kind
of discourse produces the illusion that something political is going on, while “reinforcing the

hold of neoliberalism’s technological infrastructure” (Dean, 2009, p. 32).

Case
 1NC
1. Vote neg on presumption –
A. Refusal to end alliances does not end the forms of Westphalian sovereignty
and conquest they’ve highlighted as their impacts.
B. No internal link to explain how refusal in debate spills up to resolve conquest
on a global scale – their critique remains locked in their aff rounds.
C. Their method ends at skepticism – no explanation of how they result in
material change.
2. Their theory can’t explain decades of indigenous progress – politics is a long
game – strategic engagement with the state is key to extract concessions even
in a world of Trump
NoiseCat 17 (Julian Brave - enrolled member of the Canim Lake Band Tsq'escen in British
Columbia where he was nominated to run for Chief in 2014 AND a graduate of Columbia
University and the University of Oxford, “When the Indians Defeat the Cowboys,” 1/15/17,
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/01/standing-rock-indigenous-american-progress/)

Consider, for example, the most cited work in the fields of settler colonial and indigenous studies:
“Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” a 2006 essay by the late radical Australian
anthropologist Patrick Wolfe. In a clever turn of phrase, repeated today like a Feuerbach Thesis for indigenous radicals and scholars,
Wolfe described the invasion of indigenous lands as “a structure not an event.” His argument
was that settler colonialism — a form of colonialism where colonists come to stay, as in the
United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Palestine, and some Pacific Islands
— requires the elimination of Native people and societies to access and occupy their land. As
Wolfe put it, “Settler colonialism destroys to replace.” Wolfe’s theory of settler colonialism emerged out of the ongoing “History
Wars” in Australia, a public, battle-hardened, and career-defining debate over whether Australia’s treatment of Aborigines should be
considered genocide. For decades, specialists have squabbled over the numbers massacred at places like Tasman and
Slaughterhouse Creek. These debates remain passionate and deeply controversial. They are tied to political battles over land rights,
reconciliation, constitutional recognition, mass incarceration, racism, and Aboriginal treaties. But while his contemporaries tried to
win the History Wars by appealing to documents, figures, and definitions, Wolfe sought to reframe the debate. He shifted the focus
from determining the point at which butcheries become genocide to the “logic” of eliminating indigenous people over centuries and
around the world. Settler colonialism, he argued, is a structural phenomenon that plays an ongoing and central role in shaping the
modern world. Wolfe’s was a brilliant intervention. In the jargon-riddled field of postcolonial studies, he homed in on the empires,
colonies, states, and territories of ongoing settlement and indigenous dispossession. His theory traveled well. For indigenous
scholars and activists from the United States to Palestine and Canada to New Zealand, “settler colonialism” became the dominant
framework for understanding ongoing Fourth World struggles. But Wolfe’s theory ran into a rather significant
problem — reality. If settler societies like Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United States
are structurally dependent upon the elimination of the Native, how do we explain the survival,
resilience, and resurgence of that same Native? How do we explain the global emergence of
policies of indigenous self-determination, recognition, and land rights in various forms? Are
these policies lipstick on the same colonial pig? Are indigenous people permanently cast in
cameo roles — their victories small exceptions that prove the rule? How do we explain Standing
Rock? Wolfe’s theory, however popular and illuminating, is in a sense, a gussied-up version of the inevitable victory of Cowboys
over Indians — a reworking of Victorian ideology as critical theory. The indigenous story unfolding before us
demands more. Explaining Standing Rock The Cowboy is supposed to be everything the Indian is not. While the Indian is
depicted as a tragic vanquished trope, the Cowboy is a handsome, swaggering, and triumphant trickster. While the Indian retreats
into the wild, the Cowboy hunts down his enemies to settle old scores. While the Indian is at best a noble savage and at worst a
villain, the Cowboy is a cultural icon and hero. And, while the Indian is a loser, the Cowboy is a winner. At
Standing Rock,
generations of myth and folk wisdom proved wrong. As Bill McKibben put it in the Guardian, the Standing
Rock movement “is a break in that long-running story, a new chapter.” In a moment when the Left is
struggling in the face of a globalizing free market and an ascendant right, indigenous victory stands as both a
surprising puzzle and an intriguing promise. It begs the rarely considered question: why have
indigenous people been able to secure a stunning victory while even the most successful
movements of late have faltered? And what can other movements learn from Indians? Various
voices have risen to offer answers. Writing in the Nation, Audrea Lim argues that Standing Rock shows a multiracial
coalition united against neoliberalism and white supremacy can win in the heartland. McKibben and
Naomi Klein tout the power of direct action and praise indigenous organizers for catalyzing nonviolent mass resistance. In the New
Yorker, novelist Louise Erdrich suggests that Standing Rock prevailed because it offered the world an emotionally, historically, and
environmentally compelling story rooted in faith. “Every time the water protectors showed the fortitude of staying on message and
advancing through prayer and ceremony, they gave the rest of the world a template for resistance ,” Erdrich
concludes. All of these analyses are accurate, but their individual and collective explanations for the Standing Rock victory are
insufficient. They fail to ask key questions about the when, where, how, and who. They do not explain what made this movement
and moment different. And perhaps most importantly, in their haste to explain a seemingly improbable and episodic victory, these
writers miss the remarkable big picture. Outflanking Corporate Globalization Since the 1970s, unions, public goods, social
welfare, and other essential building blocks of social democracy have been beaten back by the free market consensus. Yet over
these same decades, indigenous rights to land, jurisdiction, and sovereignty have gained ground. At
the same time workers lost their unions, the environment was winning a union of its own. That union takes the form of indigenous
rights. Credit
for these often-overlooked indigenous victories belongs to the indigenous
movements that unswervingly pushed for similar goals across decades and even centuries:
return of indigenous lands, restoration of indigenous sovereignties, and dignity for indigenous
peoples. From the time their lands were seized in the nineteenth century and even before,
indigenous people came together, forming tribal, intertribal, regional, and national coalitions
and organizations. They pressured states and empires built on lands taken from them to
recognize their demands. They stood strong against obstinate and repressive governments
determined to claim their remaining territories and assimilate their people into the laboring
class. They remained resolute. As the Chiefs of the Syilx, Nlaka’pamux, and Secwepemc nations wrote in a petition to
then–Canadian prime minister Wilfrid Laurier in 1910: So long as what we consider justice is withheld from us, so long will
dissatisfaction and unrest exist among us, and we will continue to struggle to better ourselves. For the accomplishment of this end
we and other Indian tribes of this country are now uniting and we ask the help of yourself and government in this fight for our rights.
In moments of global political and economic crisis like the 1880s, 1930s, 1940s, 1970s, and now 2010s, state policies toward
indigenous people worldwide often shifted. During the 1880s and 1940s, the United States applied assimilationist pressure on
indigenous communities, with disastrous consequences. In the 1880s allotment and privatization policies under the Dawes Act of
1887 splintered indigenous lands and communities and brought poverty and political, social, and cultural erosion. In the 1940s,
termination policies designed to eliminate tribes and assimilate Native laborers further devastated indigenous communities.
Children were taken from their families and placed in abusive residential schools. Workers were displaced from their homelands and
dropped into poverty and homelessness in urban ghettos. Indigenous people, particularly indigenous women, were subjected to
sexual violence, sterilization, and medical experimentation. Yet the
stubborn dream of indigenous resurgence
endured. And crises sometimes ushered in marginal progress. In the 1930s, Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s so-
called “Indian New Deal” afforded tribes greater control over their lands and resources and
restored a measure of sovereignty and self-determination. The 1960s and 70s saw the rise of the
Red Power movement, a momentous breakthrough that pushed the US and Canadian states to
adopt policies based on recognition instead of assimilation. The contemporaneous Maori
Renaissance in Aotearoa/New Zealand and Aboriginal land rights movement in Australia won
similar gains. These movements often found unlikely allies in neoconservatives , neoliberals, and their
predecessors who, beginning in the 1970s and especially from the 1980s onwards, saw indigenous self-determination and autonomy
as an opportunity to scale back social welfare spending and reduce indigenous dependence on the government. It was Richard
Nixon who inaugurated the current era of indigenous self-determination . He outlined his commitment to
the policy in a special message to Congress on July 8, 1970: This, then, must be the goal of any new national policy
toward the Indian people: to strengthen the Indian’s sense of autonomy without threatening his
sense of community. We must assure the Indian that he can assume control of his own life
without being separated involuntarily from the tribal group. And we must make it clear that
Indians can become independent of Federal control without being cut off from Federal concern
and Federal support. At times, support from capital-friendly politicians contained and defanged the revolutionary potential
inherent in the restoration of indigenous lands and sovereignties. In some instances, capital interests used self-determination as a
facade to restructure tribes as junior corporate partners in the global political economy. This occurred at times with Indian gaming,
Alaska Native Corporations, corporate iwi that manage Treaty of Waitangi settlement money in New Zealand, the Indigenous Land
Corporation in Australia, and First Nations natural resource corporations in Canada. More often, however, indigenous people
have coopted conservative forces as agents of an indigenous agenda. Across the world, while
other Left and progressive movements gained little and often lost ground, indigenous people
moved debate and policy in directions favorable to their interests. Self-determination is now the
established framework for indigenous policy in the United States, Canada, Australia, and
Aotearoa/New Zealand. It has been firmly endorsed and furthered through the United Nations
Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. In states built upon the dispossession,
marginalization, and attempted elimination of indigenous people, these are remarkable
victories. At Standing Rock and at proposed pipeline sites across the United States and Canada, neoliberals have
been forced to confront indigenous rights — a legal precedent and policy partially of their own creation — when in a
prior age they would have plowed through these communities without a moment’s hesitation. Politicians like Nixon did not
anticipate that indigenous people would, for instance, be able to parlay the minor restoration of self-governance over expanded
acreage in the hinterlands into a transformative political, economic, and cultural movement. Indigenous people, according to
common sense, could never win. The future that is now our present would never happen. This condescending assumption turned
out to be dead wrong. And it opened up pathways to victory for indigenous people precisely because they had been
underestimated. Viewed from a decades-long and global view, indigenous people emerge as cunning,
courageous, and even heroic political tricksters. They took their struggle out onto their lands
and waters and into the courts. They outsmarted and outflanked politicians by simultaneously
pressuring and cozying up to them. In so doing, they won important and lasting concessions
bit by bit. In the long run, these concessions and relationships have provided indigenous nations
with access to government as well as the political, economic, and legal leverage to deliver
devastating blows to the networks and infrastructure of carbon-dependent capitalism, which
threaten the future of indigenous communities, lands, and waters and all who share these with
them. This dynamic revealed itself most vividly under the administration of Barack Obama, who many Indians adopted and
embraced. Obama became one of the only sitting presidents to visit an Indian reservation when he journeyed to Standing Rock in
2014. In September 2016, at the Obama administration’s final Tribal Nations Conference, National Congress of American Indians
president Brian Cladoosby honored Obama with a song, blanket, and traditional cedar hat. At the same time, Standing Rock
marshaled a global indigenous-led coalition, pressuring Obama to halt the Dakota Access Pipeline. “Help us stop this pipeline. Stick
true to your words because you said you had our back,” Standing Rock youth Kendrick Eagle pleaded in a moving message to the
president in November. “I believed in you then, and I still believe in you now that you can make this happen.” A similar dynamic is
unfolding in Canada, where Liberal Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has promised to renew a “nation-to-nation” relationship with First
Nations, a position which contradicts his economic agenda and is forcing him to either backpedal or face a Standing Rock North in
the forces aligned against a proposed Kinder Morgan pipeline. But indigenous movements used more than cunning and moral
suasion. They also identified pressure points and exploited them. The Dakota Access Pipeline, by its very nature, was a vulnerable
target. Trenches cannot be dug where people stand. A pipeline cannot be rerouted without incurring immense expense. Bakken
shale oil costs more to refine and transport to market than other forms of crude oil. Investors, bankers, and business partners are
risk averse. They don’t like delays, and they don’t like bad headlines. OPEC, not American and Canadian oil barons and politicians,
controls the largest share of the global oil market. In short, if your objective is to shore up the Bakken as a viable domestic
alternative to OPEC, Dakota Access looks like a risky play. Now, indigenous operatives and their supporters are pushing investors to
divest. In recent weeks, they’ve posted a conspicuous billboard in Times Square and unfurled a massive banner at an NFL game, even
as they maintain their presence in North Dakota. While President-elect Trump has threatened to approve Dakota Access,
divestment, environmental review processes, and proposed rerouting could end up delivering more partial victories for Standing
Rock in the coming months. Had the Democrats won in November, the movement could have killed Dakota Access like Keystone XL,
delivering a crippling [devastating] blow to the Bakken oil barons. But to assume Trump’s election guarantees the pipeline will be
completed is to again underestimate the indigenous movement. Indians Make the Best Cowboys At Standing Rock, Indians settled
old scores. They danced inside and outside the lines as lawyers and outlaws. They took on pipelines and bulldozers where the tools
and trappings of the oil industry were most vulnerable. As capital and corporate globalization threatened to squelch progress and
conscience, the Indians rode to victory. The water protectors emerged as heroes. Their enemies became villains. For today, it’s
victory. For generations it will be remembered and honored. For the movements of the Left, it’s a lesson. Beyond well-worn analyses
of the power of action, solidarity, and narrative, Standing Rock points to the necessity to act when and where the networks and
infrastructures of capital are most vulnerable, at the level of individual projects as well as entire industries and global systems. It
shows that movements must remain resolute in their aims — even if their goals take decades to
achieve. Politics is a long game.

Standing Rock also reminds us that resistance is key, but that effective resistance is strategic. And
strategic resistance is even more impactful when paired with subtle and cunning forms of
persuasion. This is especially essential for Indians, who comprise less than 2 percent of the population and so must out-
strategize and outsmart the powers aligned against them to win. Lastly, it suggests that indigenous rights are potentially
revolutionary, and that indigenous sovereignty is an increasingly powerful instrument against the forces of capital. When the Justice
Department halted construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline in October, they committed to look into Free Prior Informed Consent
legislation. Such a move would greatly strengthen the rights and leverage of indigenous nations. The Left should see these and other
indigenous struggles as its own, incorporating an indigenous platform into the next generation of radical coalitions and writing and
thinking about indigenous issues alongside more commonly discussed forms of oppression. Dark times lie ahead for the
first people of this land and all who share it with us. President-elect Trump, a former Dakota Access investor,
has threatened to approve the pipeline and others like it. He is lining up resources to accelerate energy exploitation,
devastating the natural world and pushing the global thermometer higher and higher. Trump’s advisors have called for the
privatization of oil, gas, and coal-rich Indian reservations, mirroring policies like the Dawes Act of 1887 and the “Termination”
policies of the 1940s and 50s, both designed to destroy tribal communities. But the frontier is turning. In an unforeseen and
previously unimaginable twist, it
is the Indians who shepherd forward progress. In their right hand, they
clutch a long history of unrequited struggle for Native Sovereignty. Among its many chapters is
the story of Standing Rock and the rallying cry heard around the world, “Water is Life!” With
their left hand, they sow the seeds and point the way forward for the forces of conscience
against capital. In politics, it turns out that Indians make the best Cowboys.

3. Hope in contingent political gains can be energizing

Solnit 16. Rebecca Solnit has a Master's degree in journalism from the University of California,
Berkeley [“Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities,” 2016, Haymarket, p.137-
142]//vikas

*Edited for ableist language

This book was written for something—for the encouragement of activists who share some of my dreams
and values. We are all activists in some way or another, because our actions (and inactions) have
impact. And it was written against something—a defeatist, dismissive frame of mind that is far too widespread.
We talk about politics as though they were a purely rational exercise in the world of deeds and powers, but how we view that
world and act in it has its roots in identities and emotions. There is, in other words, an inner life to
politics, and I wanted to get at it, to plant and to weed there. I went on the road from 2003 onward, talking about hope, change,
civil society movements, and the power of stories. I met with joyous embrace of the ideas I was
talking about from people who’d already arrived at their own versions of these ideas independently, and from people who wanted
encouragement or alternative views. Often, I also encountered
bitterness, defeatism, and sometimes rage. It
was, at first, surprising that talking about hope made some people furious. Some had the sense that they
were protectors of knowledge that might otherwise be lost, about injustices and wrongs and injuries, and they saw those as the
stories that need to be told. I
had a different sense, that we need stories that don’t gloss over the ugly
damage out there but that don’t portray it as all there is either. The mainstream media don’t tell
much about the dank underside of our institutions and the damage they do, but they won’t tell you much about populist
insurrections, grassroots victories, or beautiful alternatives either. Both matter; because the former are so
well attended to, I’ve taken the latter as my beat. The despairing were deeply attached to their despair, so much so I came to refer
to my project as stealing the teddy bear of despair from the loving arms of the left. What did it give that particular sector of the left?
It got them off the hook, for one thing. If
the world is totally doomed no matter what , little or nothing is
demanded of you in response.

You can go be bitter and idle on your sofa if you’re already comfortable and safe. It was striking
that the people with the most at stake were often the most hopeful . And that those who were active were
often hopeful, though it may be the other way around: some of those who are hopeful are active . Yet the range of
the hopeful extends beyond that, and you can find hope in surprising corners. Early in my hope tours, I gave a talk to a
roomful of people of color in Washington State. Some had memories of the civil rights movement, some identified with their fellow
Mexicans who’d risen up as the Zapatistas, and a small, elegant Asian woman about my age said, in a voice of bell-like clarity, “I think
that is right. If
I had not hoped, I would not have struggled. And if I had not struggled, I would not
have survived Pol Pot.” It was a stunning statement, by a Cambodian immigrant whose hope must
have been small and narrow at the time—just to survive. I am often amazed at the lack of
bitterness on the part of many of those who have most right to it, though I’ve seen exhaustion,
physical, emotional, and moral, among frontline activists. For the desperate, the alternative to
hope—and the struggle to realize that hope—is death or privation or torture or a grim future or no future
for their children. They are motivated. From afar I’ve watched the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, the mostly
undocumented Haitian, Latino, and Mayan Indian immigrants who fought for farmworkers’ rights with panache, brilliance, and
creativity for the last decade. Realizing they couldn’t extract a living wage from farmers, they went after the buyers and brought
gigantic corporations—McDonald’s, Walmart, Burger King, Taco Bell, Whole Foods—into line with their fair-price terms for tomato
pickers. Along the way they were cheerful, spirited, and hopeful . It seemed in part to be a cultural style. There’s a
romantic idealism in Latin American politics, a sense of possibility for the world and heroic engagement for the self. It may come
from recent memories of death squads and beautiful insurrections and from turbulent national histories, from a sense that
everything can change suddenly, for the better or the worse. That
it’s not a problem of the English language is
evident in the beautiful spirit of many Black movements past and present, some of them faith-based, some of
them energized by hip-hop. And then there were my people, middle-class white people. It was as though many of us didn’t know
how to be this other kind of person, this person who could speak of big dreams, of high ideals, of deep emotions, as though
something more small-scale and sarcastic was the reduced version of self that remained to us. I’ve had great visionary companions
the past dozen years from many places and races, but I’ve met so
many of my kind who are attached for various
reasons to their limits and their misery. A friend born in the 1950s reminds me that his generation in their youth
really expected a revolution—the old kind where people march with weapons and overthrow the government and establish a utopia
—and were permanently disappointed that it hadn’t come to pass. When I was young, people still jestingly said, “ After the
revolution,” but the catchphrase came from the idea that regime change was how to change
everything, and that nothing short of regime change mattered. Though everything had changed—not
enough on many fronts, but tremendously. And everything matters. My friend’s different from many of his peers, and we
talked about the more profound revolutions that had unfolded in our lifetimes, around race, gender, sexuality, food, economics, and
so much more, the slow incremental victories that begin in the imagination and change the rules. But seeing those
revolutions requires looking for something very different than armed cadres. It also requires
being able to recognize the shades of gray between black and white or maybe to see the world in full
color. Much has changed; much needs to change; being able to celebrate or at least recognize milestones and victories and keep
working is what the times require of us. Instead, a lot of people seem to be looking for trouble, the trouble that reinforces their
dismal worldview. Everything that’s not perfect is failed, disappointing, a betrayal. There’s idealism in there, but also unrealistic
expectations, ones that cannot meet with anything but disappointment. Perfectionists often position themselves on the sidelines,
from which they point out that nothing is good enough. The idea that something is flawed, doomed, fatally
compromised, or just no good frequently arises from what I call naïve cynicism. It often comes out of less
information and less responsibility for results than deeply engaged activists have. I’ve often seen, say, a landmark piece of
climate legislation hailed as a victory and celebrated by people working hardest on the issue ,
but dismissed and disparaged by those who are doing little or nothing for the cause in question.
They don’t actually know what work went into producing the legislation , what it will achieve, and
what odds were overcome to get it. Criticizing it seems to be a way of reinforcing an identity, but that criticism is
often vague and ill informed when it comes to the facts. And the question arises about that identity too: is it
attached to losing? Nevertheless, such dismissive critiques are often presented as worldliness, as knowledge and experience, even
when they draw from neither. They
naively cynical measure a piece of legislation, a victory, a milestone
not against the past or the limits of the possible but against their ideas of perfection, and as this book reminds
you, perfection is a yardstick by which everything falls short. They may fear that celebrating anything means
undermining the dissatisfaction that drives us—if dissatisfaction drives us rather than parks us in the parking lot of the disconsolate.
The business of how we get from bad to good, from dying to surviving and maybe to thriving, isn’t their responsibility. The
deeply engaged well know that the particular bit of legislation under discussion isn’t everything
we hope for, doesn’t get us all the way there, and also know that it can be a step forward from
which further steps can and must be taken, and that change is often made incrementally, not
by a great leap from evil to pure goodness. Maybe an underlying problem is that despair isn’t even an
ideological position but a habit and a reflex. I have found, during my adventures in squandering time on social media, that a
lot of people respond to almost any achievement, positive development, or outright victory with “yes but.” Naysaying
becomes a habit. Yes, this completely glorious thing had just happened, but the entity that
achieved it had done something bad at another point in history. Yes, the anguish of this group was ended,
but somewhere some other perhaps unrelated group was suffering hideously. It boiled down to: we can’t talk about good things
until there are no more bad things. Which, given
that the supply of bad things is inexhaustible, and more
bad things are always arising, means that we can’t talk about good things at all. Ever. Sometimes it
seemed to come out of a concern that we would abandon the unfinished work if we celebrated, a sense that victories or even joy
and confidence are dangerous. That celebrating or just actively fomenting change is dangerous. The young activist Yotam
Marom, who came of age as an activist at Occupy Wall Street, contemplated this state of affairs in the essay “Undoing the Politics of
Powerlessness.” He wrote: Today, when I think about the politics of powerlessness, it feels clear as day to me that the source of all
of it is fear. Fear of leaders, of the enemy, of the possibility of having to govern, of the stakes of winning and losing, of each other, of
ourselves. And it’s all pretty understandable. We call each other out and push one another out of the movement, because we are
desperate to cling to the little slivers of belonging we’ve found in the movement, and are full of scarcity — convinced that there isn’t
enough of anything to go around (money, people, power, even love). We eat ourselves alive and attack our own leaders because
we’ve been hurt and misled all our lives and can’t bear for it to happen again on our watch … And perhaps most importantly: Our
tendency to make enemies of each other is driven by a deep fear of the real enemy , a paralyzing
hopelessness about our possibilities of winning. After all, whether we admit it or not, we spend quite a
lot of our time not believing we can really win. And if we’re not going to win, we might as well
just be awesome instead. If we’re not going to win, we’re better off creating spaces that suit our
cultural and political tastes, building relationships that validate our non-conformist aesthetic,
surrendering the struggle over the future in exchange for a small island over which we can reign. How
do we get back to
the struggle over the future? I think you have to hope, and hope in this sense is not a prize or a gift,
but something you earn through study, through resisting the ease of despair, and through
digging tunnels, cutting windows, opening doors, or finding the people who do these things.
They exist. “You gotta give them hope,” said Harvey Milk long ago, and then he did exactly that. I believe that you can talk about
both the terrible things we should engage with and the losses behind us, as well as the wins and achievements that give us the
confidence to endeavor to keep pursuing the possibilities. I write to give aid and comfort to people who feel overwhelmed by the
defeatist perspective, to encourage
people to stand up and participate, to look forward at what we
can do and back at what we have done. This book was always for them. And if you’ve read this far, for you.