CapitalismBiotechnologySecuritisation
Capitalism, Biotechnology, Securitisation and Other Scary Words!
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Life as Surplus
Cooper describes how the Club of Rome documented the crisis of
Fordism in the early 1970s and how a group of right-wing ‘post-industrial’
economists took up the challenge and offered solutions for the restructuring of
capitalism based on post-Fordist imperatives that would later be called
‘bioeconomy’ - a kind of libertarian, free market vitalism. In the 1980s this
trend led to a self-imposed reinvention of the petrochemical and pharmaceutical
industries ‘as purveyors of the new, clean life science technologies’ (p. 22).
Mass production has not been made obsolete, rather ‘it has been demoted as the
principle source of surplus value within a higher-order mode of production’ (p.
24). The federal government aggressively encouraged high-risk research and
development in the life sciences using a highly liquid stock market which
included pension funds and (indefinite) loans from foreign nations which
culminated in ‘an effective debt imperialism’ (p. 30).
The research fund thus generated from internal and external proletarian surplus
wealth began to pay dividends around 1973 with the advent of recombinant DNA
production or genetic engineering - a post-Fordist production technique which
allegedly did away with ecological limits to growth. Now pollution and
environmental crises were viewed not so much as wastage but as prerequisites
for innovation and regeneration. In parallel to this move, the boundaries of
what was considered ‘life’ were pushed further with the discovery of
‘extremophile microbes’ by bioscientists. These are microbes that flourish
under extreme geochemical and physical conditions (p. 34). Post-Fordist life
production, unlike Fordist industrial growth, is not subject to depletion or
diminished returns. As Cooper puts it, ‘Life creates its own limits to growth
only to expand them’ (p. 36). This new expanded life continuously reanimates
itself in ever more complex combinations (p. 38). Research in life biology was
cemented with exobiological investigations led by NASA into survival in extreme
environments. Cooper shows how all this vitalism in the life sciences is being
taken up by neoliberal economists who are going beyond Adam Smith's principle
of equilibrium and using crisis as a productive self-organising tool. In
Cooper's own words:
The new liberal economists ... remain true liberals, in the sense that they
believe in the essential autonomy of the market ... yet in place of Adam
Smith's principle of equilibrium ... they argue that economics evolve most
productively in far-from-equilibrium conditions (p. 43).
In other words what is neo about neoliberalism is the coupling of the principle
of self-organisation with the necessity of continual crisis.
[...]
Both authors attempt to chart the changes in warfare from a modernist (Cold
War) approach to newer forms of waging war - variously referred to as
‘postmodern’, ‘permanent’ or ‘distributive’ warfare. In this new phase,
pre-emption and full-spectrum dominance replace the doctrine of mutual
deterrence and the frontier between warfare and public health (as well as the
distinction between real and imaginary risks) disappears. New pathogens cross
supposedly impenetrable borders.
[...]
The mechanics and philosophy of (Fordist) organ technologies are surveyed
through the work of the French physiologists Étienne-Jules Mary (1830-1904) who
is credited with the advent of prosthetics and organ transplantation (p. 107).
Post-Fordist techniques of regeneration, Cooper argues, have added the new
element of the bioreactor whose purpose is ‘to provide the conditions under
which a tissue can be modulated, deformed, continuously remolded’ (p. 123).
One of the most original ideas is posited in relation to stem cell research.
Cooper suggests this technique is being integrated into an entirely new mode of
accumulation, ‘one that is irreducible to either (organic, human) production or
reproduction in the Marxian sense’ (p. 131). She believes what is being
constituted here ‘is something like a market in embryonic futures ... exchanges
[begin] to resemble high-stake casinos more than agricultural markets ...
gambling turns back on itself and investing becomes the postmodern game of
betting on bets’ (p. 141). So (and this is key to her argument) biological life
is not just becoming more commodified, rather it is transmuting into
speculative surplus value (p. 148). As she puts it,
When patent law apprehends the value of the stem cell line, it is not in
the first instance as an exchangeable equivalent (Marx's definition of a
commodity) but as a self-regenerative surplus value, a biological promise whose
future self-valorisation cannot be predetermined or calculated in advance
(ibid.).
An Empire of Indifference
Martin's central thesis is that American domestic and foreign policies have become dominated by a ‘finance-based logic of risk control’. His ‘Marxist’ analysis ditches the antagonism between bourgeois and proletarian in favour of a dualism based on the ability to take risk: ‘investors’ are those able to ‘avail themselves of wealth opportunities through risk taking’ and those who cannot are considered ‘at risk’. When this dualism is exported to foreign lands the US is basically urging risk taking on the occupied. The minority who make the grade become friendly-lackeys and the majority are classified as bad risk and rejected. Imperialism which was presumably once benign or at least concerned with the development of its colonies has become ‘indifferent’ to the plight of its subjects. [...] We feel there are two dimensions to Martin's analysis of warfare. The positive dimension is generated by a useful discourse analysis of the US bourgeoisie's talk about changing strategies. For example, Martin has studied seminal military texts produced by various think-tanks. He has observed a shift from (early) Fordist assembly line techniques of interchangeable troops inaugurated by the Prussian army (more than a century before Ford himself), to (advanced) Fordism of the post-WW2 era (characterised by command, control, and communication known by the acronym C3) and finally the present post-Fordist period (characterised by command, control, communication, computers, intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance and known as C4ISR). Some of this information is useful and throws light on intra-classist tensions between Rumsfeld, Cheney and their Pentagon detractors. It may even have practical implications for some sections of the world proletariat down the line. [...] The early Al-Qaeda are compared to a ‘venture capitalist firm ... sponsoring projects submitted by a variety of groups or individuals in the hopes they will be profitable’ (p. 103, Jason Burke quoted by Martin).
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