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popular education for a free society

Biotechnology and Society  |   Vol. 2, No. 1

Radicalizing the Debate

By Brian Tokar

The biotechnology industry is also at the forefront of patenting living things, having mobilized the power of the World Trade Organization to impose regimes of life patenting on all the world’s legal systems.  At the same time, corporate "bioprospectors" (many call them "biopirates") are surveying the entire biosphere, from the arctic to the tropics, in search of plants, animals and DNA sequences — including millions of fragments of human DNA — to study, manipulate and patent.  The ownership of life is proceeding on a macroscopic scale as well:  For-profit fertility clinics purchase human eggs and sperm from willing "volunteers" and offer them for sale.  Recent breakthroughs in animal cloning have suggested the very real possibility that an above-ground market in human cells, tissues and even laboratory-created organs may soon complement the shadowy but lucrative international trade in human organs for transplantation.

This unprecedented commodification of life has very real and immediate consequences.  In economic terms, the biotechnology industry represents an unprecedented concentration of corporate power over our food and our health. The late 1990s saw a heretofore unimaginable wave of corporate mergers and acquisitions in virtually every economic sector, and now the three pivotal areas of seeds, pharmaceuticals and agricultural chemicals are increasingly dominated by a small handful of transnational giants, all centrally committed to the advancement of biotechnology. By 1999, five companies — Monsanto, AstraZeneca, DuPont (owner of Pioneer Hi-Bred, the world's largest seed company), Novartis and Aventis — controlled 60 percent of the global pesticide market, 23 percent of the commercial seed market and nearly all of the world's genetically modified seeds. Farmers face an increasingly monopolized seed market, along with increasing integration of the entire food industry; one recent Wall Street Journal opinion piece suggested that farmers will soon become "more like Detroit's auto parts makers," mere subcontractors to a tiny handful of global corporations.

When the food biotech sector began running into problems with investors in 1999, many of the "gene giants" began divesting their agricultural divisions into separate companies.  The once seemingly-invincible Monsanto, for example, is now a much smaller, agriculturally-focused company 85% owned by the pharmaceutical giant Pharmacia.  The financial links between these sectors, however, remain largely intact, and the project of creating a comprehensive, worldwide "life science" industry controlled by many of the world’s largest chemical companies continues, albeit in an institutionally weakened form.  Commercial seed production worldwide is still increasingly dominated by companies that specialize in chemical production and biotechnology.

The leading institutions of global capitalism, particularly the WTO and the World Bank, along with the new Free Trade Agreement of the Americas, also play a central role in the proliferation of biotechnology, and are heavily supported by the biotech industry.  Biotech companies played a key role in formulating the WTO’s "TRIPs" (Trade-Related Intellectual Property Rights) provisions, and TRIPs has become the main leverage for imposing life-patenting regimes on those countries where the opposition is the strongest. The WTO’s "dispute settlement" mechanisms have been used by the U.S. government to try to compel European governments to accept imports of hormone-treated beef, Central American bananas and other unwanted products. Only the fear of political isolation in the face of massive public opposition has kept the biotech industry from utilizing the same direct pressure tactics.  World Bank development loans are often tied to "capacity building" aimed at shifting recipient countries toward biotech agriculture, and U.S. food "aid" shipments to impoverished regions are often tainted with genetically engineered products, including the "Starlink" corn that is deemed unfit for human consumption in the United States.

A radical critique of biotechnology also needs to encompass the various new human genetic technologies that are most often described — often misleadingly — as breakthroughs in medical research.  While some research using modern biotech methods has proved fruitful, and the sequencing of the human genome has in some ways broadened critical discourse on the genetic aspects of human identity, we are still in the midst of a massive diversion of scientific resources toward a narrow focus on genetics.  Capitalist medicine prefers to remain largely ignorant of the underlying causes of disease, preferring to identify genetic correlates that can be tested for, and used to weed out those who may be most susceptible.  The rhetoric of alleviating suffering is appropriated in the interest of isolating potential sufferers, so that the engines of capitalism can roll on unimpeded.  Commentators on the right have been ahead of much of the left in labeling human cloning and steps toward "designer children" as harbingers of a new form of slavery, even as they wax enthusiastic about steps toward a new, largely market — rather than state-driven form of eugenics.

Finally, it is important to understand the ways biotechnology has become a centerpiece of today’s information-centered capitalism.  As the profitability of conventional industrial capitalism began to decline in the late twentieth century, investors sought out new forms of information-centered production as the basis for renewed economic expansion.  In her chapter in the new collection Redesigning Life?, Chaia Heller describes the central role of biotechnology in the consolidation of a new, postmodern form of service-oriented, flexible, "organic" capitalism, in which dispersed, interchangeable and culturally-mediated forms of economic activity are largely supplanting conventional modes of industrial production and profit extraction.  In this respect, biotechnology is essentially "the systematic conversion of biological nature into informational capital," according to Heller, and all the gene sequencers and gene hunters (i.e., "biopirates") are merely "attempt[ing] to map out future colonial territories within the cells of human beings [as well as] within the biological nature of plants, animals and other organisms."⁵

If we believe that a free, ecological society is possible, then our activism against biotechnology needs to fully reflect that understanding.  Many well-known and widely-supported organizations are focused entirely on getting genetically engineered foods labeled, or petitioning government agencies to require independent testing, and perhaps more comprehensive regulation, in place of today’s thoroughly dubious "consultations" between the US Food and Drug Administration and the biotech and agribusiness industries.  Today’s non-regulations are founded on a myth of "substantial equivalence" — the transparently false notion that there is nothing qualitatively different about a genetically engineered variety of a given crop, no discernable health and environmental problems that are unique consequences of this technology.  But exposing and overturning this myth, and even eliminating GE foods entirely, are only first steps toward a democratic society that can feed everyone fresh, healthy food in an ecologically sound manner.

Demanding justice from an inherently unjust system can be a step toward creating a free society, or it can merely perpetuate self-defeating attempts to reform the system strictly on its own terms.  It depends on whether the movement is ready to view its immediate goals in the context of a broader reconstructive social and political vision.  Is our goal merely the labeling of GE food — or even its abolition — or is it a truly ecological food system that abolishes the stranglehold of agribusiness megacorporations on our food supply and our lives?  What kinds of strategies can serve to dismantle the unaccountable and life-denying power of these institutions and the system they serve?  How can our opposition to genetic engineering be grounded in a political strategy aiming at genuine community empowerment and a society freed from the confines of the capitalist war of all against all?  There have been important successes in the past few years; the hegemony of companies like Monsanto over our food, our health and our future has been seriously shaken, but we clearly have much further to go.  We need to ground our opposition to biotechnology in our dreams of community empowerment, of the triumph of citizenship and human liberation over consumption and the stranglehold of the capitalist market.

Will we have biotechnology in a free society?  This question has often arisen in our discussions of biotechnology at the ISE.  Perhaps we will, but as with all the other technologies social ecologists have discussed and critiqued over the years, an ecologically-informed biological technology will be a fundamentally different kind of undertaking than the biotechnology that dominates today’s discussions.  Today’s biotechnology industry has flourished largely at the expense of more benign, ecological technologies, from sophisticated refinements of organic food raising and permaculture methods to holistic approaches to medical care that are grounded in both traditional knowledge and a non-mechanistic outlook on the inner ecology of the human organism.  We have seen how research into alternative technologies has been systematically devalued and de-funded in recent years, even in our theoretically public land-grant universities; now we need to envision a society where these technologies can flourish.

Technologies are always a product of their social context, and powerful technologies serve to reinforce the social and political structures that produce them.  Today’s biotechnology is fundamentally about manipulation and control — that is what capitalism thrives upon.  Future biological technologies, on the other hand, can aim to work with the patterns of nature and enhance human participation and harmony with the rest of the natural world.  Genetics will likely play a role, as will a wealth of whole organism-centered approaches to scientific research that have been largely relegated to the margins of academia in recent decades.  And, perhaps most important, communities of people will reclaim decision-making power around what kinds of technologies are most amenable to the creation of an ecological future.  Communities can debate and decide how to allocate resources toward research and discovery in a free, open, and directly democratic forum, instead of corporate executives and government bureaucrats deciding largely in secret.  As we continue to explore the wider implications of today’s biotechnologies, social ecology will continue to look toward the development of a science — and a social and participatory political context for that science — that truly represents the full realization of human possibilities.

Notes

1. Karl Marx, Capital: Vol. 1 (New York: Vintage, 1977) , p. 125.
2. Ibid, p. 131.
3. Murray Bookchin, Re-enchanting Humanity (London: Cassell, 1995), p. 155.
4. Murray Bookchin, "Moral Economy or Market Economy," in The Modern Crisis (Philadelphia: New Society Publisher, 1986), p. 82.
5. Chaia Heller, "McDonalds, MTV and Monsanto: Resisting Biotechnology in the Age of Informational Capital," in Redesigning Life? The Worldwide Challenge to Genetic Engineering, Brian Tokar, ed. (London: Zed Books, 2001), p. 413.

 

Brian Tokar is on the faculty of the Institute for Social Ecology in Plainfield, Vermont.  His most recent book is Redesigning Life?  The Worldwide Challenge to Genetic Engineering (Zed Books).

Social Ecology n 1: a coherent radical critique of current social, political, and anti-ecological trends. 2: a reconstructive, ecological, communitarian, and ethical approach to society.

Published by the Institute for Social Ecology