ILLUSTRATIVE OPPOSITION
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particular meaning of life-patenting, tracing the emergence of anti-imperial
movements which contested injustices such as slavery and land enclosure.
II. TIhe Reconstructive Moment
In the reconstructive moment, we begin to consider the liberator^ possibilities
presented by addressing the particular form of injustice at hand. In the
reconstructive moment we treat the three spheres of society differently: while
we look to transform the social and political spheres, we examine avenues for
transcending the sphere of the State.
Beginning again by looking at the implications of biological patenting for
the social sphere, we may explore the reconstructive possibilities of revaluing
the private dimension of the body. In the reconstructive moment, we begin to
highlight the continuities between particular and general forms of injustice. For
example, while life-patenting introduces particular novel legal, cultural, and
corporate practices related to private 'embodied’ dimensions of life, it also
builds upon a more general history of privatizing human and other life forms.
It is consistent with a capitalist 'tradition’ which enslaved African Americans in
the American South, bound women legally to their husbands, and continues
this tradition by trafficking women and babies in sex industries
and
black-market adoptions, in addition to commodifying land, plants, animals, and
other organisms.
Here we understand that-the sufficient condition for reclaiming the body
and ‘life’ itself, is to abolish the practice of patenting in all spheres of society. A
truly free society entails that no body, person, or organism can be reduced to
private property, no human can be rendered subject, either in part or in
entirety, to another person or institution.
As we continue to think through the social sphere, we may consider
what it would take to create social and political conditions which render all
forms of private property (bodily or otherwise) unacceptable. Exploring the
role that medical, pharmaceutical, agribusiness, and chemical companies play
in determining research and regulation of genetically modified organisms, we
would look to remake the social sphere along post-capitalist lines.
What is most crucial in the reconstructive moment, then, is to draw out
the most utopian and sufficient conditions of freedom which surround a
particular issue. For instance, while it is necessary to eliminate patents of
biological life, we must illustrate how merely abolishing such patents
represents an insufficient condition to engender a truly free society in general.
We would point to the widest conditions of freedom that can be drawn out
from the idea of a patent-free social sphere. We would begin to articulate the
need for a sphere of education, technology, and economics that is based not
on commodification, but upon social cooperation.