2021 Sept/Oct LD Topic - Kritik Series
In this series, Anthony talks about the upcoming 2021 September/October Lincoln-Douglas Debate topic from a critical perspective. Resolved: The member nations of the World Trade Organization ought to reduce intellectual property protections for medicines.
In part 1, Anthony introduces some of the arguments that he will explore and interrogate on the LD topic such as vaccine apartheid. Anthony thinks that the a lot of the topic could deal with whether the capitalist supply chains secured by IP law are better or worse at dealing with COVID-19 than not having them at all. Thinking and understanding about the topic from a Global North/South perspective can also be very important. Is it right to deal with medicines at all? Should the WTO even exist in the first place? This series will also focus on how COVID-19 intersects with racial capitalism and the anti-China movement.
In part 2, Anthony starts by saying that talking about COVID-19 demands that we also talk about Racial Capitalism (watch last week's 3 part series on Racial Capitalism by Taylor if you're unfamiliar with racial cap). Racial Capitalism is a spatial process of organizing and the pandemic sheds light on the biopolitical technologies and space that are made possible by certain logics. Different responses to the virus show how different people are engaged in capital struggles. Issues like environmental racism and unequal access to medicines and health care are a prerequisite to understanding if any mechanism will be enough to help black people. Thinking about how public health has been a biopolitical tool that has existed for centuries is important in understand the topic. Disease itself has been isolated to create conditions of suffering. Linking that to how COVID-19 acts as a spatial arrangement for race and bodies to the right to health or life is a biopolitical tool of the nation state to govern particular bodies. Health has historically separated racialized bodies from non-racialized bodies.
In part 3, Anthony talks about biopolitics on the 2021 September October LD topic. When thinking about innovation and intellectual property protections, you want to be thinking about power - sovereign power, biopower, or any other type of disciplinary power that works to govern a population in general. Biopolitics is important on the LD topic because we can think of the pandemic as a shift in the ways bodies are made available for life and public health. Public Health itself exists as a right or protection against difference. We associate sickness with disease and that the opposition to disease is life and that creates and produces a trope where those who are diseased don't have the same value to life as those who aren't afflicted. Control over how bodies designate what is and isn't livable is what Anthony is talking about with public health and biopolitics. Framing disease through public health requires the exclusion of dirty, diseased orientations. The US uses intellectual property protections over medicine to monopolize rights to the vaccine because they want to control which bodies get the vaccine. Thinking about medicine as a public health or as a necessity depends on a structure that produces capitalism and commodity forms. The state uses these life-or-death situations to produce violent forms of regulation. If you want to learn more about biopolitics, check out the first few parts of Nae's series on Foucault.
In part 4, Anthony continues talking about biopolitics. Anthony starts by talking about how medicine exists as a biopolitical thing in its connection to the prison-industrial complex, disasters, and risk. Thinking about how medicine operates in connection to these categories is important. Risk in relation to intellection property is important because it is structured as a fail safe mechanism. A new amendment to a law could be exactly that. In terms of biopolitics, think about how new mechanisms on health that are produced (through "development") establishes trust in state regulations over other groups. The Global South is vulnerable because governments are capitalizing on threat and violence. When taking a critical approach to the topic, you should interrogate how the topic is unwilling to talk about how the WTO allows smooth governance that produces violence. The resolution privileges the interests in preserving the political structure and political economy of the WTO by justifying its protections over medicinal rights and that's what you want to kritik.
In part 5, Anthony continue to talk about biopolitics and it functions in terms of medicine and public health. Public health and protections over medicines exist because it is a strategy that organizations like the WTO take because the US can't accomplish this itself. Thinking about how the resolution produces technological solutions to structural problems shows how it privileges the ideologies of certain groups. Anthony gives a lot of examples of topical examples of this while also giving K teams advice for how to approach the topic.
In part 6, Anthony talks about the preservation of public health. Public health uses technologies to regulate certain bodies through supposed objective means. Technologies profile which bodies need medicine and use that to give certain people care or infrastructure based on the idea of preserving those bodies. This reproduces the stigma that those people aren't deserving of care in the first place because they are dependent and unable to provide care for themselves. The way the WTO works is it racializes populations and uses science and technology to produce ableist understandings over life. Even if the topic is trying to limit intellectual property protections, your argument is that all of these things are part of slavery, slavery's afterlife, surveillance, the prison, etc. All of these things are about the categorization, regulation, and designation of bodies through violent technology. Most aff teams will say you're talking about the status quo and that there's a chance the aff could produce new technologies that give people access to something they didn't have before. That is the very logic of the nation-state, domination, and colonialism - it strips bodies of certain things so that it can give it back little by little while still claiming it is radical. This fosters racializing processes.
In part 7, Anthony talks about racial capitalism on the 2021 September/October LD topic. Medicines, public health, and the protection law are caught up in a pre-existing fixation on racial capitalism. Thinking about why capitalism reacts to the lack of medicine with intense risk is how the logic of racial capitalism is preserved. The resolution will use protection law to make a monopoly on the technology that is used to regulate public health and medicines. You can never believe that the end result of the state attempting to mediate medicine or public health with amount to nothing less than more racial injustice against black and brown people. Neoliberalism's investment in public health exacerbates difference and sacrificial logic.
