Debate on Capitalism II

[MERIZoC]

Capitalism and socialism both have faults, but the former is much more detrimental to both humans and the earth. It's a system that has the explicit purpose of creating inequality, which in turn leads to exploitation, poverty, and strife. I cannot support a system so devoid of empathy as capitalism, nor one as destructive as it.

[Krumbia]

I tend to think that capitalism in a restrained manner is better than most other systems we have thought of to this date.

[Finland SSR]

When will people realize that systematic arguing over things like this here is a bad, bad idea?

[BK117B2]

1) Health insurance should be affordable for all.

Free. Not affordable.

No such thing. Somebody is paying.

4) Labor unions must be a crucial part of the economy.

Labor unions are very crucial. Agreed. However, I think I stress their necessity even more, as a vehicle for the abolition of a flawed system such as capitalism that is maintained through corruption and violence.

That's not really accurate. Capitalism exists. Corruption and violence would be necessary to end it.

[Massari (Ancient)]

It depends, if it's better than communism, its better for your economy but miss use it, your nation will be destroyed by its own lust for cash

[Massari (Ancient)]

It depends, if it's better than communism, its better for your economy but miss use it, your nation will be destroyed by its own lust for cash

[Chestaan]

My main gripe with capitalism (and I have many) is that it's purpose is to allocate the resources of the world but it does this in a very poor manner. This is the system that produces more than enough food to feed the world's population yet also fails to prevent starvation, the system that allows people to die because they have no access to life-saving medicine and the system that bafflingly can simultaneously have a surplus of houses and a homelessness problem. Capitalism simply doesn't allocate resources to where they are most needed, not even close. That's why I think humanity needs to find a new way to allocate resources, but what that is I can't say for sure.

[Duvniask]

Free. Not affordable.

No such thing. Somebody is paying.

I'm starting to get tired of hearing this whenever the topic of universal healthcare comes up.

When people talk about "free healthcare", they usually mean its free upfront. It's free like a bar handing out free drinks. Of course somebody worked/paid for it originally.

[Bogdanov Vishniac]

The point of genocide is to kill a lot of a group of people. The point of capitalism is to create wealth, and hunger isn't solved as a byproduct of the current system. That's a very important distinction, and calling the structural violence within capitalism genocide belittles and discounts that distinction.

It isn't genocide in the traditional sense of roving death squads or gas chambers - it's worse than any individual case of genocide since it's an impersonal, systemic process. That's why the author chose to use the term 'structural genocide'.

This distinction isn't meant to diminish the issues at play. We can recognize that "structural violence" (from hunger to bad healthcare) is the cause of millions of deaths with resorting to calling it genocide.

Why not? I mean, take the example of the tobacco industry; they make their money selling a product that they know for a fact kills people (and have for decades now), and which disproportionately kills lower class people and people in developing countries. They also spend billions in lobbying in the West and the rest of the world to prevent states from taking action to educate people about the health effects of smoking or to put in place things like government assistance programs to quit smoking or clean air laws. At what point does the drive to get a quick buck cross over into active malevolence towards their consumer base? They're an industry that sells a deadly product which they specifically design to be more addictive, and which fights tooth and nail to both keep so addictive and deadly and to prevent the public from knowing that. We're looking at an industry that kills 6 million people a year, and is growing to cause 8 million deaths a year by 2013, so it's certainly on the scale of historical genocides.

Compared to genocide, it's not remotely hard to prevent hunger. Food stamps are given to prevent hunger in countries, and additional foreign aid can be given to prevent hunger. It is possible (and significantly more likely than changing the system entirely) to make changes within the system of capitalism to address the concerns of hunger, medicine, and clothing.

'Possible' in only the broadest most theoretical sense, since nothing will ever be done to deal with world hunger or poverty. The great political debate in the West over the last 20 years about welfare has been not about expanding it to end hunger and deprivation for good, but the degree to which it should be scaled back. That should tell you all you need to know about how far gone capitalism is.

Preventing true genocide from getting worse can cost significantly more and thousands of lives. Preventing hunger is simply an issue of redistribution, and can exist within a capitalist framework. Because we can solve for hunger within a capitalist framework, the issue is with the status quo rather than capitalism as a system, which is what this thread is about.

Again, it's utterly futile to try and reform a system like capitalism to be more humane. There's far too much money and influence invested in keeping the gravy train going for a minority class of elites to ever get any reforms of significance applied, let alone applied uniformly across the world.

[Diopolis]

Let's have a debate on capitalism!

The following is my case on why it is bad. At the bottom I summed up all the points I made in the case.

Neoliberals try to hide capitalism’s exploitation through naturalization and gentrification. Zizek and Daly 04
Zizek, Slavoj, and Glyn Daly. "Slavoj Zizek-Bibliography/Glyn Daly/Lacan Dot Com." Slavoj Zizek-Bibliography/Glyn Daly/Lacan Dot Com. 2004. Accessed July 15, 2015. http://www.lacan.com/zizek-daly.htm.
For Zizek it is imperative that we cut through this Gordian knot of postmodern protocol and recognize that our ethico-political responsibility is to confront the constitutive violence of today's global capitalism and its obscene naturalization/anonymization of the millions who are subjugated by it throughout the world. Against the standardized positions of postmodern culture - with all its pieties concerning "multiculturalist" 6 etiquette - Zizek is arguing for a politics that might be called "radically incorrect" in the sense that it breaks with these types of positions 7 and focuses instead on the very organizing principles of today's social reality: the principles of global liberal capitalism. This requires some care and subtlety. For far too long, Marxism has been bedeviled by an almost fetishistic economism that has tended towards political morbidity With the likes of Hilferding and Gramsci, and move recently Laclau and Mouffe, crucial theoretical advances have been made that enable the transcendence of all forms of economism. In this new context, however, Zizek argues that the problem that now presents itself is almost that of the opposite fetish. That is to say, the prohibitive anxieties surrounding the taboo of economism can function as a way of not engaging with economic reality and as a way of implicitly accepting the latter as a basic horizon of existence. In an ironic Freudian- Lacanian twist, the few of economism can end up reinforcing a de facto economic necessity in respect of contemporary capitalism (i.e. the initial prohibition conjures up the very thing it fears). This is not to endorse any kind of retrograde return to economism. Zizek's point is rather that in rejecting economism we should not lose sight of the systemic power of capital in shaping the fives and destinies of humanity and our very sense of the possible. In particular we should not overlook Marx's central insight that in order to create a universal global system the forces of capitalism seek to conceal the politico-discursive violence of its construction through a kind of gentrification of that system. What is persistently denied by neo-liberals; such as Rorty (1989) and Fukuyama (1992) is that the gentrification of global liberal capitalism is one whose "universalism" fundamentally reproduces and depends upon a disavowed violence that excludes vast sectors of the world's population. In this way, neo-liberal ideology attempts to naturalize capitalism by presenting its outcomes of winning and losing as if they were simply a matter of chance and sound judgement in a neutral marketplace.

Capitalism results in violence on a genocidal scale. Angus explains Leech in 2012
Angus, Ian, and Garry Leech. "Capitalism: A Structural Genocide." Climate Capitalism. June 17, 2013. Accessed July 15, 2015. http://climateandcapitalism.com/2013/06 ... -genocide/.
Garry Leech disagrees. In Capitalism: A Structural Genocide, he argues that “structural violence [is] inherent in the capitalist system” and that “it results in death on a genocidal scale, thereby constituting a class-based genocide that targets the poor, particularly in the global south.” By structural violence, Leech means damage to humans caused by “the deprivation of people’s basic needs as a result of the existing social structures.” Obvious examples include hunger or disease caused by food and medicine being too expensive or kept off the market for business reasons. When such violence leads to large numbers of deaths, he argues, we must call it structural genocide. The core of Capitalism: A Structural Genocide is a series of case studies and analyses showing that capitalism by its very nature deprives hundreds of millions of people of the necessities of life. Just one example: every three seconds, a baby dies of preventable disease or hunger – and in the same three seconds, military organizations spend $120,000 on weapons. The choice to spend money on guns instead of food and medicine is irrational by any humanitarian standard, but it makes perfect sense if the prime directive is to preserve a system based on “an inequality in power and wealth that ensures the interests of capital are prioritized over those of the majority of human beings and nature.” Leech estimates that over 10 million people are killed every year by capitalism’s structural genocide. His accounts of structural violence in Mexico, India and sub-Saharan Africa are compelling and appalling. No reasonable person can read them without concluding that the system responsible must be ended.

Structural violence affects millions. Salvage et al 12
Salvage, J., M. Rowson, K. Melf, and I. Sandøy. Structural Violence and the Underlying Causes of Violent Conflict. 2012.
We then introduce the concept of development and look at its relationship to structural violence and direct violence. This gets us to the heart of some of the most interesting and provocative debates about the state of the world today. Do poverty and inequality cause violent conflict? Can development promote peace? Or is the opposite true, that development has meant the Westernization and plundering of Third World nations, and is leading to increasing levels of marginalization, oppression and violence? Examples of structural violence might include: • the 2.5 billion people who live on less than US$ 2 per day • the 30-year difference in life expectancy between those living in Africa and those in rich nations • the 800 million people who have no access to essential health services. We normally associate the word violence with some kind of intentional (and visible) use of force, but the notion of structural violence does not require us to see the harm in operation or to say that someone intended its use. In fact, what causes the poverty or ill health, or denial of services – the violent processes in our examples above – is either hidden from our immediate view, or we choose to ignore it.

AND, structural violence is invisible. Ho 07
Ho, Kathleen. Structural Violence as a Human Rights Violation. 2007.
In order to understand the crucial distinction between these types of violence, Galtung constructs a typology of violence composed of three categories: personal, structural, and cultural.8 Here, the personal and structural aspects will be highlighted. For Galtung, the case of the Burmese military junta would be a case of personal or direct violence where the actor(s) and object(s) of violence are readily identifiable. Here, the actor is the military junta and the objects are the victims of torture, rape and forced labour. Galtung asserts that structural violence, as opposed to personal or direct violence, is indirect in that ‘there may not be any person who directly harms another person in the structure. The violence is built into the structure and shows up as unequal power and consequently as unequal life chances.’9 Therefore, in the case of racial inequality in America, social structures, particularly racism, systematically disadvantage African-American men and women who suffer from unequal life chances. There is no person that directly harms those HIV-infected African-American women, rather it is the structure of racial inequality, historically rooted in slavery, that perpetuates constraints in agency and unequal opportunities to receive an education, have access to medical care and justice and to secure a stable job.

The impact is equivalent to genocide. Ahmed 07
Ahmed, Nafeez M. Structural Violence as a Form of Genocide: The Impact of the International Economic Order. 2007.
Genocide is conventionally associated with direct physical violence targeted against national, ethnic, or religious groups, in whole or in part. However, although there is no doubt that this form of genocide is devastating, there is another form of violence that is comparatively invisible, to some extent acceptable, numerically far more prevalent than the former, and largely ignored in the literature on genocide. This form of violence is associated with indirect, structural violence targeted against vulnerable individuals and communities across ethnic and national boundaries, albeit largely situated in the South. This form of structural violence, through the international economic order’s systematic generation of human insecurity, has led to the deaths of countless hundreds of millions of people, and the deprivation of thousands of millions of others. Most of the literature on human security, development, and genocide fails to see this phenomenon of global mass death and marginalization —a consequence of structurally-induced deprivation— as a form of genocide. In this paper, I question this failure and attempt to explore whether this form of structural violence should indeed be seen as a form of genocide. The main premises for my argument are that there are a variety of inadequacies in existing conceptualizations of genocide and structural violence.


SUMMARY:
zizek and daly 04 say
Neoliberals try to hide capitalism's exploitation through making its ideologies seem natural.

angus explains leech in 2012 saying
capitalism results in genocide through structural violence, which is violence through the structure of society, but not necessarily from one person to another.

Salvage et al 2012 says
Structural violence affects millions of people around the world negatively

ho 07 says
structural violence is invisible.

ahmed 07 says
structural violence is just as bad as genocide

I apologize for the short post on this topic I originally made.

Did you just copy and paste policy debate cards into an NS post?

[The Serbian Empire]

The point of genocide is to kill a lot of a group of people. The point of capitalism is to create wealth, and hunger isn't solved as a byproduct of the current system. That's a very important distinction, and calling the structural violence within capitalism genocide belittles and discounts that distinction.

It isn't genocide in the traditional sense of roving death squads or gas chambers - it's worse than any individual case of genocide since it's an impersonal, systemic process. That's why the author chose to use the term 'structural genocide'.

A genocide that is more the product of infrastructure issues and most importantly, corrupt politicians and customs agents. How is one going to feed the hungry when some despot is hoarding all the food for himself?

[Bogdanov Vishniac]

It isn't genocide in the traditional sense of roving death squads or gas chambers - it's worse than any individual case of genocide since it's an impersonal, systemic process. That's why the author chose to use the term 'structural genocide'.

A genocide that is more the product of infrastructure issues and most importantly, corrupt politicians and customs agents. How is one going to feed the hungry when some despot is hoarding all the food for himself?

Well, in this case it's not as though there's any one individual Stalin or Nazi party or whoever that is acting as the directing force - the global economic system is a complex thing that's been operating longer than any living person today. But there are various degrees of complicity amongst individual actors in perpetuating the conditions to lead to this 'structural violence'.

[Drury Lane]

Capitalism and socialism both have faults, but the former is much more detrimental to both humans and the earth. It's a system that has the explicit purpose of creating inequality, which in turn leads to exploitation, poverty, and strife. I cannot support a system so devoid of empathy as capitalism, nor one as destructive as it.

Capitalism doesnt create inequality, or any other subjectively negative aspect of the human condition that exist regardless of our environment. How these issues are addressed is left to the individual end user, which I appreciate the wisdom of. It is infinitely easier and less violent to redress individual human errors versus whole system failures.
Capitalism may seem cruel or unsympathetic, like the rivers and lakes one tries to fish from, but if conducted purely without undue political influence will typically yield a feast to anyone who puts forth honest effort with only a regard for their skill and initiative, and like said waters, will sometimes wholly frustrate your efforts. Nothing in this universe, including human social convention, is immune to chaos.
Id rather live and work from within a system that recognizes that, and allows me to pursue life as an adult, than suffer the injustice and indignity of stealing food from one mouth to put into anothers in a naive and juvenile attempt to prop up an unmerited standard of living without any regard to my determination or my neighbors.

[BK117B2]

No such thing. Somebody is paying.

I'm starting to get tired of hearing this whenever the topic of universal healthcare comes up.

When people talk about "free healthcare", they usually mean its free upfront. It's free like a bar handing out free drinks. Of course somebody worked/paid for it originally.

Then simply call it donated. I'm tired of people calling it free to imply that it doesn't cost anything...even though it costs the same in effort and resources as any other.

[BK117B2]

No such thing. Somebody is paying.

I'm starting to get tired of hearing this whenever the topic of universal healthcare comes up.

When people talk about "free healthcare", they usually mean its free upfront. It's free like a bar handing out free drinks. Of course somebody worked/paid for it originally.

Then simply call it donated. I'm tired of people calling it free to imply that it doesn't cost anything...even though it costs the same in effort and resources as any other.

[Trotskylvania]

Looks like the OP does C-X debate.

"Card" format? Check.

Quotes of dubious length? Check.

Focus on esoterica in logical chains for negative impacts? Check.

Tie what you're critiquing to genocide and/or nuclear war? Check.

Definitely c-x debate.

[Diopolis]

Looks like the OP does C-X debate.

"Card" format? Check.

Quotes of dubious length? Check.

Focus on esoterica in logical chains for negative impacts? Check.

Tie what you're critiquing to genocide and/or nuclear war? Check.

Definitely c-x debate.

Not to mention citing Zizek. Debaters love him for some reason.

[Utilitarian Garibaldi]

Looks like the OP does C-X debate.

"Card" format? Check.

Quotes of dubious length? Check.

Focus on esoterica in logical chains for negative impacts? Check.

Tie what you're critiquing to genocide and/or nuclear war? Check.

Definitely c-x debate.

Not to mention citing Zizek. Debaters love him for some reason.

Don't talk about Zizek like that, he is light in the darkness of the post industrial world.

[Duvniask]

I'm starting to get tired of hearing this whenever the topic of universal healthcare comes up.

When people talk about "free healthcare", they usually mean its free upfront. It's free like a bar handing out free drinks. Of course somebody worked/paid for it originally.

Then simply call it donated. I'm tired of people calling it free to imply that it doesn't cost anything...even though it costs the same in effort and resources as any other.

Because in any other context we'd call something like that "free". It won't cost anything in terms of money or resources to the people receiving treatment. The costs would be societal, whereas the benefits would be free for individual use when necessary.

[The New Sea Territory]

Free. Not affordable.

No such thing. Somebody is paying.

Cliché argument.

Furthermore, no, under various socialist models, healthcare would be distributed according to need.

Labor unions are very crucial. Agreed. However, I think I stress their necessity even more, as a vehicle for the abolition of a flawed system such as capitalism that is maintained through corruption and violence.

That's not really accurate. Capitalism exists. Corruption and violence would be necessary to end it.

On the contrary, the only reason capitalism still exists is because of the threat of violence.

[The New Sea Territory]

Capitalism doesnt create inequality,

Wow.

[Wildeboden]

Not to mention citing Zizek. Debaters love him for some reason.

Don't talk about Zizek like that, he is light in the darkness of the post industrial world.

Lincoln Douglass debate

[Outer Sparta]

Capitalism doesnt create inequality,

Wow.

Yeah. That's not how capitalism works, Dury Lane.

[Egemore]

The point of genocide is to kill a lot of a group of people. The point of capitalism is to create wealth, and hunger isn't solved as a byproduct of the current system. That's a very important distinction, and calling the structural violence within capitalism genocide belittles and discounts that distinction.

It isn't genocide in the traditional sense of roving death squads or gas chambers - it's worse than any individual case of genocide since it's an impersonal, systemic process. That's why the author chose to use the term 'structural genocide'.

This distinction isn't meant to diminish the issues at play. We can recognize that "structural violence" (from hunger to bad healthcare) is the cause of millions of deaths with resorting to calling it genocide.

Why not? I mean, take the example of the tobacco industry; they make their money selling a product that they know for a fact kills people (and have for decades now), and which disproportionately kills lower class people and people in developing countries. They also spend billions in lobbying in the West and the rest of the world to prevent states from taking action to educate people about the health effects of smoking or to put in place things like government assistance programs to quit smoking or clean air laws. At what point does the drive to get a quick buck cross over into active malevolence towards their consumer base? They're an industry that sells a deadly product which they specifically design to be more addictive, and which fights tooth and nail to both keep so addictive and deadly and to prevent the public from knowing that. We're looking at an industry that kills 6 million people a year, and is growing to cause 8 million deaths a year by 2013, so it's certainly on the scale of historical genocides.

Why not call it genocide? Because it doesn't meet the definition of the word genocide.

The purpose of the global economic system isn't to make poor people starve or die. Genocide requires that the purpose of the action be the death of a certain group. While people dieing of smoking is terrible, the purpose of the cigarette companies is to make a profit. People die because of cigarettes, but that is not the purpose of cigarettes. I understand why they call it structural genocide and am fine with using that terminology in this debate. It doesn't change the fact that it doesn't meet the definition of genocide and that I think that it belittles the struggles of people that actually endured genocide.

Compared to genocide, it's not remotely hard to prevent hunger. Food stamps are given to prevent hunger in countries, and additional foreign aid can be given to prevent hunger. It is possible (and significantly more likely than changing the system entirely) to make changes within the system of capitalism to address the concerns of hunger, medicine, and clothing.

'Possible' in only the broadest most theoretical sense, since nothing will ever be done to deal with world hunger or poverty. The great political debate in the West over the last 20 years about welfare has been not about expanding it to end hunger and deprivation for good, but the degree to which it should be scaled back. That should tell you all you need to know about how far gone capitalism is.

Except that there is much that is being done to prevent global hunger, and your example of the "debate of the past 20 years" is by your own admission very western centric. We set the millennium development goals (note goal #1) within a global capitalist system, and over the past 20 years, the number of people living in extreme poverty has halved as a percentage of the global population (note the graph). While the West is may be cutting back on welfare (though this is debatable. Transfer payments have increased in real and as a percentage of GDP in the US- note the green line.) developing countries such as China are creating welfare states. The Nordic model is a capitalist one, and it is being praised as a model to decrease poverty. To say that "nothing will ever be done about [hunger and poverty in capitalist systems]" is both unsupported by the events of the past 30 years and absurd.

Preventing true genocide from getting worse can cost significantly more and thousands of lives. Preventing hunger is simply an issue of redistribution, and can exist within a capitalist framework. Because we can solve for hunger within a capitalist framework, the issue is with the status quo rather than capitalism as a system, which is what this thread is about.

Again, it's utterly futile to try and reform a system like capitalism to be more humane. There's far too much money and influence invested in keeping the gravy train going for a minority class of elites to ever get any reforms of significance applied, let alone applied uniformly across the world.

The elites want a functioning society as well, and that can't exist if there are food riots. It's certainly not a futile exercise to make capitalism more humane, it has happened around the world in improving the safety net- see Social Security in the United States, the NHS in the UK, the myriad of social programs in Scandinavia. We had a whole era called "the progressive era" in the United States where capitalism was reformed and made more humane by breaking up trusts, increasing regulations, and creating income taxes.

Furthermore, Extreme poverty and hunger have declined around the world in the past 30 years, in many cases with little in the way of social spending. So much for the idea that the minority of elites will prevent all social reforms. In no way, shape or form is it utterly futile to attempt to reform capitalism- it has happened in the past time and time again.

Reforming capitalism presents significantly less risk than complete system overhaul. Sure, a revolution could address poverty and hunger, but it could as easily go wrong. It seems silly to advocate to take that risk when the solution is right in front of us and significantly more plausible.

[The New Sea Territory]

Reforming capitalism presents significantly less risk than complete system overhaul. Sure, a revolution could address poverty and hunger, but it could as easily go wrong. It seems silly to advocate to take that risk when the solution is right in front of us and significantly more plausible.

...but the solution isn't right in front of us. Reformed capitalism does not fix its core problems.