Tournament: Lakeland | Round: 2 | Opponent: Someone | Judge: No one
the postmodern economy
Today the question of economic engagement is post-modernized. This means that it is no longer a matter of discovering and developing new markets. All of the markets have been discovered and exploited. The final frontier of economic engagement is on information and intellectual production.
Hardt and Negri 2000 (Michael and Antonio, Empire pgs. 271-272)
A third hypothesis, which may be seen as complementary to the second, is that today capital continues to accumulate through subsumption in a cycle of expanded reproduction, but that increasingly it subsumes not the noncapitalist environment but its own capitalist terrain—that is, that the subsumption is no longer formal but real. Capital no longer looks outside but rather inside its domain, and its expansion is thus intensive rather than extensive.
Economic engagement must be reevaluated under a conception of immaterial goods as the primary form of production today. This framing means that you value the quality of discussions that we have in this debate sphere over the illusion of passing a plan.
Hardt and Negri 2009 (Michael and Antonio, Commonswealth Page 132 – 133)
Three major trends emphasized by scholars of political economy give us a good first approximation of the current transformations that labor is undergoing in many parts of the world. First is the trend toward the hegemony or prevalence of immaterial production in the processes of capitalist valorization.1 “The immaterial dimension of the products,” André Gorz asserts, their symbolic, aesthetic, and social value, “predominates over their material reality.”2
The resolution is a question that has already been answered. Hardt and Negri indicate that there is no longer a separate political sphere in which decisions are made, but rather that the economic sphere determines questions of social policy and activism. This means that a true switch-side debate is an impossibility in status conceptions of the resolution.
Hardt and Negri 2000 (Michael and Antonio, Empire pgs. 307-308)
The contemporary phase is in fact not adequately characterized by the victory of capitalist corporations over the state. Although transnational corporations and global networks of production and circulation have undermined the powers of nation-states, state functions and constitutional elements have effectively been displaced to other levels and domains
mechanisms of control
As a means of controlling production and generating wealth from information networks, Empire must maintain and compartmentalize instances of identities and producers. This means that Empire is in a constant decline as our capability as producers always outpaces our ability to be contained. However, the desire to maintain control over network production is what fractures universal resistance to this capitalist process.
Hardt and Negri 2000 (Michael and Antonio, Empire pgs. 391-392)
Such examples of corruption could be multiplied ad infinitum, but at the base of all these forms of corruption there is an operation of ontological nullification that is defined and exercised as the destruction of the singular essence of the multitude
The impact is exploitation of our relationships with each other in communicative networks. This is what prevents a true political and ethical connection with each other.
Hardt and Negri 2004 (Michael and Antonio, Multitude p. 149-151)
We do not mean to suggest that the paradigm of immaterial production is some paradise in which we produce freely in common and share equally the common social wealth. Immaterial labor is still exploited under the rule of capital as material labor is. In other words, the labor of women, men, and children is still controlled by capitalists who appropriate the wealth their labor produces.
commonwealth
Our advocacy is that the judge activates her/his communicative agency as part of the Multitude.
This means that we do not seek to use our labor power to answer questions that have already been answered. Instead you should endorse abandoning the productive system of post-modern capitalism. An affirmative reason for decision should be an instance of communication with a goal of true democracy. This is the only way to solve for the harms of capitalism that exist today.
Hardt and Negri 2004 (Michael and Antonio, Multitude page 217-219)
To grasp fully the novelty of the multitude's network form of organization it helps to contrast it with the dominant organizational forms of our recent past. In the latter part of the twentieth century, protest movements and revolts followed two primary models. The first and more traditional form of organization is based on the identity of the struggle, and its unity is organized under central leadership, such as the party. There might be other axes of conflict important to those in the movement on the basis, for example, of minority status, but these must be subordinated in the name of unity to the primary struggle. The history of working class politics is full of such models. The second dominant model, which stands in direct opposition to the first, is based on the right of each group to express its difference and conduct its own struggle autonomously. This difference model developed primarily through struggles based on race, gender, and sexuality. The two dominant models posed a clear choice: either united struggle under the central identity or separate struggles that affirm our differences. The new network model of the multitude displaces both of these options-or, rather, it does not so much negate the old models as give them new life in a different form. At the 1999 Seattle protests, for example, which we will discuss in more detail later, what most surprised and puzzled observers was that groups previously thought to be in opposition to each other-trade unionists and environmentalists, church groups and anarchists, and so forth-acted together without any central, unifying structure that subordinates or sets aside their differences
The affirmative solves because it is an affirmation of the capability of intellectual labor to provide a means of social relations outside of the exploitative structures of Empire.
Ansaldi 2001, (Saverio, “The Multitude in Empire: Biopolitical Alternatives” in Rethinking Marxism vol. 13 no. 3-4 page 137)
The imperial political model thus does not only imply a redefinition of sovereignty and its modalities of application; it also brings up to date profound and irreversible changes in the modes of production. And it is there where we locate the question of biopolitics. In effect, we have seen that imperial sovereignty crosses, in an immanent manner, all the subjectivities onto which it exercises its action. It is thus an eminently bioproductive sovereignty. In the third part of the work, Hardt and Negri describe the passages of production that define the transition from modernity to postmodernity. The history of capital and its postmodern transformations is contemporary with the decline of the modern state and with the birth of Empire. The concept at the center of this part is naturally that of work, and of its exploitation. In effect, the biopolitics that ground imperial sovereignty determine new forms of exploitation, perfectly compatible with new modes of production expressed by the biopower of the multitude. In this regard Hardt and Negri insist on the "ontological" centrality of immaterial work in the productive sphere of imperial biopolitics. In the optic adopted here, this Marxian concept of Grundisse becomes the sign of a veritable "anthropological mutation" (289). Informatization, production via networks, the abstract and symbolic character of value, and the affective investment in tasks designate many changes that reveal the emergence of a "new human condition" (291). The cognitive economy-interactive and cybernetic-reveals to us a human nature increasingly "machinic"-organs of bodies and brains controlled with tools, languages, and codes.
Framing issue – The affirmative must maintain the ability to create institutions that remain committed to liberatory and revolutionary politics. This means that it is about how we can recreate communicative institutions like debate in ways that resist Empire.
Hardt and Negri 2009 (Michael and Antonio, Commonwealth page 355)
Insurrection, in order to open a path for revolution, must be sustained and consolidated in an institutional process. Such an institutional conception of insurrection should not be confused, of course, with the coup d’état, which merely replaces the existing state institutions with comparable, homologous ones.
And you don’t evaluate framework in a vacuum – you evaluate framework as a response to the 1AC. This means that shaping the affirmative’s communication is a means of biopolitical domination. This means that our impact is triggered in this round when the negative team decides to run framework.
Hardt and Negri 2009 (Michael and Antonio, Commonwealth page 144-146)
For a first approximation of the current biopolitical crisis we can return to the three general trends in the transformation of labor we spoke of earlier. Each trend indicates strategies of the capitalist control of labor- power, but in each case we find that the mechanisms of control contradict the productivity of biopolitical labor and obstruct the creation of value, thereby exacerbating the crisis. With regard to the first trend, the development of cognitive, affective, and biopolitical forms of labor, strategies of capitalist command develop intensively and extensively.