Life as Surplus

Biotechnology and Capitalism in the Neoliberal Era

Melinda E. Cooper

• Publisher: University of Washington Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780295990316
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Science General
• Index: Biological Sciences

Focusing on the period between the 1970s and the present, Life as Surplus is a pointed and important study of the relationship between politics, economics, science, and cultural values in the United States today. Melinda Cooper demonstrates that the history of biotechnology cannot be understood without taking into account the simultaneous rise of neoliberalism as a political force and an economic policy. From the development of recombinant DNA technology in the 1970s to the second Bush administration's policies on stem cell research, Cooper connects the utopian polemic of free-market capitalism with growing internal contradictions of the commercialized life sciences. The biotech revolution relocated economic production at the genetic, microbial, and cellular level. Taking as her point of departure the assumption that life has been drawn into the circuits of value creation, Cooper underscores the relations between scientific, economic, political, and social practices. In penetrating analyses of Reagan-era science policy, the militarization of the life sciences, HIV politics, pharmaceutical imperialism, tissue engineering, stem cell science, and the pro-life movement, the author examines the speculative impulses that have animated the growth of the bioeconomy. At the very core of the new post-industrial economy is the transformation of biological life into surplus value. Life as Surplus offers a clear assessment of both the transformative, therapeutic dimensions of the contemporary life sciences and the violence, obligation, and debt servitude crystallizing around the emerging bioeconomy.

1

LIFE BEYOND THE LIMITS

Inventing the Bioeconomy

Normal is passé, extreme is chic. While Aristotle cautioned “everything in moderation,” the Romans, known for their excesses, coined the word “extremus,” the superlative of exter (being on the outside). By the fifteenth century “extreme” had arrived, via Middle French, to English. At the dawning of the twenty-first century we know that the Solar System, and even Earth, contain environmental extremes unimaginable to the “ancients” of the nineteenth century. Equally marvellous is the detection of organisms that thrive in extreme environments. [Biology has] named these lovers of extreme environments “extremophiles.”

—Lynn J. Rothschild and Rocco L. Mancinelli, “Life in Extreme Environments”

THE CONTEMPORARY BIOTECH INDUSTRY WAS BORN IN A CONTEXT of intense speculation about the future of U.S. science and technology. After acting as the motor of international economic growth in the decades following World War II, the United States was traversing a period of decline, whose effects on world economic relations had yet to become clear. This period—which can be situated roughly between the late 1960s and mid-1970s—saw an extraordinary outpouring of futurological literature attempting to divine the economic and political futures open to the United States and its competitors. It also gave rise to the genre of global forecasting, in which the future of the earth itself was put to the test of computer-based systems analysis.¹

Undoubtedly, one of the most powerful documents of crisis produced in this period was the Club of Rome's world futures report of 1972 (Meadows et al. 1972). Under the direction of a team of systems analysts based at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (the so-called Meadows team), the report gave voice to the prevailing consensus that Fordist manufacture had entered a period of irreversible decline. But it also brought something palpably new to the analysis. If there was a crisis in the offing, it was not one that could be measured in conventional economic terms—a crisis in productivity or economic growth rates—but rather a wholesale crisis in the realm of reproduction. For the Club of Rome what was at stake was no less than the continuing reproduction of the earth's biosphere and hence the future of life on earth. The most visible signs of the impending crisis were therefore to be found in the existence of all kind of ecological disequilibria, exhaustion, and breakdown, from rising levels of pollution to famine and the increase in extinction rates. Using the latest developments in systems theory, the Meadows team sought to simulate the earth's possible futures by looking at trends and interactions between five principle areas—population growth, industrialization, food production, the depletion of nonrenewable resources, and pollution.

From the beginning, the report stressed the impossibility of arriving at any precise predictions, and yet in spite of variations, repeated runs of the simulation program pointed to one constant: the exponential growth of population and industry could not continue indefinitely without running up against the limits inherent in the other variables under study—namely, agricultural production, energy supplies, and pollution. Pointing out that 97 percent of industrial production, including agriculture, was dependent on such fossil fuels as natural gas, oil, and coal, the report anticipated that continued economic growth would soon come up against insurmountable limits. These limits were of two kinds, consisting not only in the depletion of nonrenewable resources but also in the steady environmental buildup of toxic, nonbiodegradable wastes. In other words, for the Club of Rome economic growth was synonymous with industrial production and would therefore end up faltering before the earth's geochemical limits. Already in the early 1970s there were signs that increasing levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere—“thermal pollution” as it was then called—could seriously disrupt the earth's climate and ecosystems (Meadows et al. 1972, 73). Such portents were all witness to a “simple fact,” according to the Meadows team—“the earth is finite”—and even though we can't calculate the upper limits to growth with any precision, there are definite limits nevertheless (ibid., 86).

Twenty years later, and armed with more sophisticated modelling tools, the same team came up with a slightly more nuanced prognosis for the future. Limits to growth, they now argued, were time-like rather than space-like. This meant that we might have already gone beyond the threshold at which an essential resource such as oil could be sustainably consumed, long before we would notice its actual depletion. In fact, it was highly probable, according to the report's authors, that we were already living beyond the limit, in a state of suspended crisis, innocently waiting for the future to boomerang back in our faces: “Time is in fact the ultimate limit in the World3 model—and, we believe, in the ‘real world.’ The reason that growth, and especially exponential growth, is so insidious is that it shortens the time for effective action. It loads stress on a system faster and faster, until coping mechanisms that have been able to deal with slower rates of change finally begin to fail” (Meadows et al. 1992, 180). The conclusions of the 1992 report, however, remained substantially the same: in order to sustain life on earth, economic growth would need to respect ecological and biological equilibria. The current tendency toward exponential growth would need to be replaced by a steady-state economy.

The political consequences of the Club of Rome report were so resounding that President Jimmy Carter commissioned a follow-up document, The Global 2000 Report, drawing on the precise statistical data produced by various government departments and agencies in order to continue the work of prediction up until the year 2000—when life, it anticipated, would be even more precarious (Council of Environmental Quality and U.S. State Department 1980). The report was produced in a context of unprecedented government legislation around environmental issues—from the banning of pesticides to the passage of antipollution laws and the establishment of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

But already in the 1970s the Club of Rome had set off a virulent counter-reaction on the part of the new right. For Daniel Bell, one of the leading prophets of the postindustrial economy, the problem with the Club of Rome report was that it assumed what it set out to prove. Its very model of growth, based on a “simplified quantitative metric” and a “closed system,” was bound to run up against limits sooner or later. It was incapable of thinking through the kind of systemic “qualitative change” that, according to Bell (1974, 464), characterized the successive phases in the evolution of capital. And for Bell, precisely such a change was required in the move from an industrial to a postindustrial economy. Throughout the 1970s theorists of the new right called for a radical restructuring of the U.S. economy. In order to reassert its world dominance, it was claimed, the United States would need to move from heavy industry to an innovation-based economy, one in which the creativity of the human mind (a resource without limits) would replace the mass-production of tangible commodities.

The postindustrial literature, however, was never concerned solely with the immaterial, innovation-based aspects of economic growth; one aspect of this literature that has been consistently overlooked is its claim to have found a solution not only to economic decline but also to environmental crisis. According to right-wing futurologists employed especially for the purpose by President Reagan, the postindustrial economy would not only take economic growth beyond the limit, it would also respond point by point to the ecological and biospheric limits painstakingly detailed by the Club of Rome (Simon and Kahn 1984). In particular, these theorists pointed to the promises of biotechnology as a way of internalizing, and thus overcoming, all limits to growth—from the waste products of industrialism to the very finitude of the earth: “Each epoch has seen a shift in the bounds of the relevant resource system. Each time, the old ideas about ‘limits,’ and the calculation of ‘finite resources’ within the bounds, were thereby falsified. Now we have begun to explore the sea, which contains amounts of metallic and perhaps energy resources that dwarf the deposits we know about on land. And we have begun to explore the moon. Why shouldn't the boundaries of the system from which we derive resources continue to expand in such directions, just as they have expanded in the past?” (Simon 1996, 66). In response to the Club of Rome's quasi-cosmological warnings that the future was nearing exhaustion, the postindustrialists cited the work of physicist Freeman Dyson to affirm that time was without limit (ibid., 65). And if cosmological time was without limit, then time, become immanent to matter, would regenerate the earth.

With its promise of future surplus on earth and beyond, the postindustrial literature set the scene for Reagan-era science policy—a policy that combined virulent antienvironmentalism and cutbacks in redistributive public health with massive federal investment in the new life science technologies and their commercialization. But what began as a utopian polemic designed to justify the specific machinations of the Reagan administration has since become the mainstay of neoliberal orthodoxy and as such has travelled far beyond the ranks of committed Reaganites and new right think tanks. Under President Clinton in particular, and during the stock market boom years of the late 1990s, the neoliberal promise came to be associated with a kind of libertarian, free-market vitalism. It was during this period that the concept of the “bioeconomy” began to take shape, culminating in the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development's decision to launch a major policy project in the area (OECD 2004).

The aim of this chapter is to provide a genealogy of the ideas and institutions that have brought the promise of the bioeconomy into being. My premise, as I have explained in the introduction, is that the emergence of the biotech industry is inseparable from the rise of neoliberalism as the dominant political philosophy of our time. The history of neoliberal theories of economic growth and biotechnological visions of growth therefore needs to be pursued simultaneously. I am interested in the specific conjuncture of domestic economic crisis that afflicted the United States in the early 1970s and the role of the life science industries in promoting a certain response to that crisis. The biotech revolution, I argue, is the result of a whole series of legislative and regulatory measures designed to relocate economic production at the genetic, microbial, and cellular level, so that life becomes, literally, annexed within capitalist processes of accumulation. Part of my work here is to detail the specific forms of property right, regulatory strategies, and investment models that have made this possible.

These questions lead me later in the chapter to a consideration of the important shifts in world imperialist relations that have occurred since the late 1970s (and in particular since the monetarist counterrevolution of 1979 through 1982). This period, according to political economists such as Giovanni Arrighi and Michael Hudson, has been one in which nation-state imperialism and the role of the United States within it have undergone a series of dramatic transformations (Arrighi 2003; Hudson 2003 and 2005). Here, I go further and interrogate the links between this shift in world imperialist relations and the growing importance of biological life within capitalist accumulation strategies. My argument here, and throughout the book, is that the geopolitics of world imperialism, as established in the post–World War II era, is today being displaced by a new and relatively mutable set of biopolitical relations, whose dynamics have yet to be theorized in detail.

In this context a number of methodological and conceptual questions become imperative. When capital mobilizes the biological, how do we theorize the relationship between the creation of money (surplus from debt; futures from promise) and the technological re-creation of life? Has the one been co-opted into the other? When capitalism confronts the geochemical limits of the earth, where does it move? What is the space-time—the world—of late capitalism, and where are its boundaries? What finally becomes of the critique of political economy in an era in which biological, economic, and ecological futures are so intimately entwined? And when the future itself is subject to all kinds of speculation?

This aspect of my work returns to Karl Marx's still fertile reflections on crisis, limits, and growth, in order to discern what is peculiar to the neoliberal moment in capital accumulation. My starting point is, in one sense, classically Marxian: I take for granted that the periodic re-creation of the capitalist world is always and necessarily accompanied by the reimposition of capitalist limits; that capitalist promise is counterbalanced by willful deprivation, its plenitude of possible futures counteractualized as an impoverished, devastated present, always poised on the verge of depletion. Yet my analysis extends into a sphere to which Marx paid relatively little attention: that of the life sciences conceived in the broadest sense of the term. For this reason I am also concerned with contemporary theoretical and technical developments in biology, the environmental sciences, and evolutionary theory. Recent biology, I argue, is as much interested in the limits and possible futures of life on earth as contemporary capitalism. Any critique of the bioeconomy therefore needs to address itself to the intense traffic of ideas between recent theoretical biology and neoliberal rhetorics of economic growth.

What this critique requires, I suggest, is not so much an analysis of market fetishism, simulacra or phantasm, as of capitalist delirium. Freud tells us that the psychotic delirium, as opposed to the neurotic fantasy, is crucially concerned with the breakdown and recreation of whole worlds. Delirium is systemic, not representative. It seeks to refashion the world rather than interpret it. In this respect the concept of delirium has obvious affinities with Marx's reflections on the self-transformative, world-expansive tendencies of capital.² But delirium is no less evident in the rhetoric of the biorevolution, where speculative meditations on the future of life on earth are never far from the agenda. This rhetoric isn't merely peripheral to the real business of the life science industries. Rather, the delirium of contemporary capitalism, I argue, is intimately and essentially concerned with the limits of life on earth and the regeneration of living futures—beyond the limits.

In this sense the concerns voiced by the Club of Rome and its critics express, in their different ways, the conflicting tendencies that animate this delirium. Most strikingly perhaps, the delirium finds expression in the NASA space biology program—a program whose conceptual and economic influence on the biotech revolution has been curiously neglected. In the words of its director, the not so humble aim of the NASA space biology program is “'to improve life here . . . to extend life there . . . to find life beyond'” (cited in Dick and Strick 2004, 230). The program's influence, I suggest, is increasingly present in the more practical applications of life science research, including, most recently, those proposed by the OECD's 2005 report on the bioeconomy and the U.S. Energy Act of 2005. By moving to and fro between the cosmic futures opened up by space biology and the mundane world of industrial and commercial biotech policy, I hope to show how the delirium of late capitalism gets translated, in very pragmatic fashion, into the day-to-day infrastructures of government and science. The interest of this method is to develop a critique that is at once sensitive to the global, systematizing momentum of capitalist dynamics and the micropolitical decisions that bring it into being. This method also suggests ways in which the delirium of capital can be challenged on a practical level.

RESPONDING TO CRISIS: REGENERATING WASTE

The details of the American economic crisis of the late 1960s have been rehearsed elsewhere. Throughout the 1970s the United States went from stagflation to recession as two successive oil shocks drastically raised the production costs of the manufacturing industry. U.S. industries began to face declining profitability as Japanese and European exports became increasingly competitive in international and domestic markets. By the late 1970s the ailing fortunes of industry had been compounded by a looming financial crisis, as American multinationals increasingly chose to invest their surplus dollars in offshore money markets rather than repatriate them in the United States.³ However, the decisive impact of this moment of crisis in shaping the future life science industries has been less closely explored.

The crisis had a particular impact on the whole arena of chemical production, which extended from plastics, fabrics, and such agricultural commodities as fertilizers and herbicides—the very stuff of Fordist mass manufacture and monoculture—to the pharmaceutical industry. It was largely at the initiative of these industries that molecular biotech would be born as a commercial venture. The U.S. petrochemical industry had flourished as a mass producer of tangible commodities during the 1950s and 1960s, but by the 1970s was faced with steeply declining profits, which were only exacerbated by the oil price shocks of 1973 and 1979.⁴ Moreover, the profits that had come from exporting Green Revolution mass monoculture to the developing world were beginning to fall, at least partially as a result of its devastating environmental consequences.⁵ Within the United States itself, mounting pressure from the green movement, combined with increasing governmental regulation, meant that chemical industries were being forced to internalize the costs of their own waste production.

For the pharmaceutical industry the period of decline came slightly later but was just as decisive in forcing it to reorient its commercial strategies.⁶ Unlike petrochemicals, the fortunes of the pharma industry had long been based on patent protection and innovation monopolies. Microbiology and organic chemistry, protected by chemical patents, had fueled the post–World War II boom in drug innovation. By the late 1970s, however, generics were beginning to flood the market while the rate of drug innovation had declined dramatically. Again, this downturn can be ascribed at least in part to the effects of growing public concern surrounding the nonregulation of clinical trials (many of them conducted in prisons) and the toxicity of certain wonder drugs. In the wake of thalidomide and other prescription drug disasters, government regulation had become much tighter and the lengths of clinical trials significantly prolonged. It was thus in response to the commercial limits posed by regulation (rather than ecological limits) that the petrochemical and pharmaceutical sectors began to reorganize. As prescribed by Daniel Bell, their response was not to falter in the face of undeniable limits but rather to relocate beyond the limits of industrial production—in the new spaces opened up by molecular biology.

The 1980s was a period in which the U.S. petrochemical and pharmaceutical industries embarked on a dramatic self-imposed makeover, reinventing themselves—at least prospectively—as purveyors of the new, clean life science technologies. Thus by the early 1980s all of the major chemical and pharmaceutical companies had invested in the new genetic technologies, either through licensing agreements with biotech start-ups or by developing their own in-house research units.⁷ Even for a notorious toxic-waste offender such as Monsanto, it now seemed clear that the extractive, petrochemical industries that had fueled the boom years of the Fordist economy were destined to be subsumed within the new paradigm of post-Fordist bioproduction. Taking the lead from recent successes in recombinant DNA and availing themselves of new patent laws, companies such as Monsanto began experimenting with all kinds of novel ways for reincorporating their former investments in petrochemical processes into the ambit of biomolecular science.

The commercial calculus was straightforward—instead of profits from mass-produced chemical fertilizers and herbicides, the agricultural business would displace its claims to invention onto the actual generation of the plant, transforming...