ECOLOGY OF EVERYDAY LIFE
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The development of the new biotechnology is controlled primarily within
capitalist structures such as transnational enterprises, universities funded by
corporations, and small ‘start-up’ corporate firms. Already, biotechnology has
been applied in primary industries of agriculture, forestry, and mining; in
secondary industries of chemicals, drugs, and food; and finally in tertiary
industries of health care, education, research and advisory services.8
AddRESsiNq TIhe Question Of Biobqic/\l Patents
When a group sets out to address a problem such as intellectual property
rights, or biological patenting, the group faces a crisis so complex and
overwhelming that to merely address the particular problem at hand seems
insurmountable. For instance, indigenous communities in the Amazon engaged
in
fighting
the
patenting
of
local
medicinal
plants
by
transnational
biotechnology corporations, are already often so involved in other struggles for
survival that contestation often focuses on protecting indigenous communities
from the specific harm of biological enclosure.^1
Accordingly, questions of biotechnology are often cast within the terms of
the offending party itself, framed in social terms of economics and production
(as groups resist particular corporate practices), in terms of state power (as
groups address national and international patenting policies); and in the
social-statist terms of international trade (as groups deal with international trade
agreements facilitated by the World Trade Organization (WTO). Yet for
contestation to such practices as biological patenting to be rendered sufficient,
they must be understood not solely in the terms of freedom from specific
injustices within the realms of the social and the State, but in terms of freedom to
create a socially and politically free society in general.
Iiow can we reason from a particular crisis such as the patenting of living
organisms to reach a general analysis of social and political transformation? How
can we reason from the dystopic crisis of life patenting to a vision of a world
that is not only patent free, but is free of all forms of hierarchy in general? What
follows offers a brief outline, a set of illustrative and oppositional questions that
allow us to begin to reason from the particular to the general, from the social to
the political, and ultimately, from the ecological to the revolutionary.
I. TIhe CRiTicd Moment
In the critical moment, we begin explore the social and statist dimensions of
life patenting. We initially ask: How does the patenting of biological life inform
the social sphere, both public and private? Beginning by looking at the private
dimension of the social sphere.; we might ask: If the most basic and organic
unit of private life lies within the body itself, then we may explore how the
body’s autonomy and privacy are degraded by patents that impose new
capitalist relations within die very germ plasm of life. As we attempt to critique