Resources: Biotech

This presentation at a recent conference at the University of Jena takes the view that contending with bioenergy development effectively will require social movements to respect – but also to update carefully – Marxian accounts of capital accumulation that tie together the labour theory of value, surplus accumulation, the “contradictory unity” of living and dead labour, mechanization, “vampirism,” class struggle, and the tendency toward falling profit rates.

This book chapter explores some of the parallels, connections and disjunctures between the promised genetic revolution in medicine and health, and the crash of financial capital in 2008, aiming to illuminate several known insights for pursuing public health futures and finances that are often kept in the dark or conveniently forgotten.

When TRIPS was signed in 1994, the United States, Europe and Japan dominated the world's software, pharmaceutical, chemical and entertainment industries. The rest of the world had little to gain by agreeing to these terms of trade for intellectual property. They did so because a failure of democratic processes nationally and internationally enabled a small group of men within the United States to capture the US trade-agenda-setting process, to draft intellectual property principles that became the blueprint for TRIPS and to crush resistance through US trade power.

Economics and financial gain, rather than improved health, is the underlying rationale for public and private support of human genetic research and technologies.

Many of the issues raised by developments in genetic technologies are the same in every country. Is it ethical to experiment on embryos or people who cannot give their consent? Will widespread gene testing of adults lead to discrimination? Does genetic research increase the likelihood of biological weapons being deployed and used? But some issues are not the same because of different cultures, legislation, histories and economies. Genetic developments will play out differently in different countries with consequences for the building of international alliances.

Vast plantations of genetically modified (GM) trees would undoubtedly have significant social and environmental impacts, including displacement of people from their lands, and pollen and gene drift to non-GM trees. GM trees are a technofix for problems created by industrial pulpwood plantations and the worldwide paper, timber and fruit industries. Tackling the challenge posed by GM trees entails alliance building with groups ranging from seed savers to communities battling encroachment of industrial tree farms on their land.

Most discussions about human embryo cloning focus on ethics and potential health benefits. In the process, the many social, economic and environmental aspects of health and disease are increasingly hidden, while issues such as how the potential benefits of biotech would be obtained and distributed are sidelined. It has therefore become hard to raise key questions about the increased geneticisation of our lives and societies.

The biotechnology industry claims that genetic engineering in agriculture is necessary to feed a growing world population. Yet, far from preventing world starvation, genetic engineering threatens to exacerbate the social and ecological causes of hunger by forcing farmers to pay for their right to fertile seeds, threatening crop yields, undermining biodiversity and reducing the access of poorer people to food.

Living organisms can now be patented as “inventions” if they are the result of genetic engineering techniques or of the transfer of genes between totally unrelated species of plants, animals and micro-organisms. Yet patents can hinder research, legalise biopiracy and restrict both competition and people’s access to health treatment.