Capitalists Attempt to Commodify the Products of Nature: Freedom, Privacy, Women’s Rights and Human Misery
There are two important concepts in leftist social theory, perhaps the most important, namely productive forces and social relations. Terry Eagleton states that this double is the core of Marxist thought and is fundamental to the theory of socialism (Why Marx Was Right). Marx posited a one-to-one mapping between an instance of productive forces and an instance of social relations.
This historical determinism is one of the weakest points of Marx’s theory, because it does not appear to be the case that the possibilities of social relations are so constrained by historical epochs marked by a particular configuration of forces of production called a mode. However, it is still interesting to apply these theoretical categories to analyze social facts with the realization that the mapping between social relations and forces of production is far more complex than Marx may have envisioned.
In a dialogue with Horkheimer, Adorno explains that work, the employment of productive forces, is for the purpose of reproducing what we might call the material conditions or circumstances of human life (Towards a New Manifesto). We can extend this to the productive forces themselves. Social relations are the relationships of social classes to one another in light of their relationships to the prevailing mode of production. These classes engage in class conflict which is a kind of civil war over the distribution of the realizable surplus value of production.
Capitalism is one mode of production. It is the mode which now prevails. Capitalists start their circuit with money, use this money to get laborers to produce commodities with added exchange value, and offer the commodities on the market in order to obtain even more money, or expressed symbolically: M-C-M+, where M stands for money or capital, C stands for commodity, and M+ stands for some amount of money that satisfies M+ > M (Das Kapital, Vol. I). Money in this sense is capital. We can see from this circuit that capital must be perpetually reproduced ad infinitum or the circuit breaks down. When the flow of capital breaks down the productive forces are no longer employed efficiently in bringing about material reproduction, and in this way the breakdown bring about human suffering.
These breakdowns in capital flow lead to disruptions that we can call crises of capitalism (The Enigma of Capital and the Crises of Capitalism; David Harvey). To the extent that the satisfaction of human wants is dependent upon the capitalist mode of production the circuit of capital flows must continue or the productive forces will not be effectively and efficiently employed. Capitalism is not just a mode of production it is a mode of reproduction.
We can use this basic logic of capitalist reproduction to understand and even predict the behavior of capitalists. We can expect that capitalists will try to get their hands on more money in order to expand the circuit of capital reproduction. We can also expect that capitalists will try to expand the set of commodities in order to keep the cycle of production going.
This brings us to the present situation. I first read about Myriad Genetic’s attempts to patent two genes linked to cancers of the female reproductive organs in Reuters (http://www.reuters.com/...). The same story quoted bioethicist Josephine Johnson of The Hastings Center as saying, "From an ethics perspective, one could argue that genes are owned by everybody, and that patenting them amounts to a commodification of an element of the human body". The story also quoted Dr. James Watson, one of the discoverers of DNA, as saying, "DNA's importance flows from its ability to encode and transmit the instructions for creating humans. Life's instructions ought not be controlled by legal monopolies created at the whim of Congress or the courts."
That SCOTUS is willing to entertain the question of whether or not human genes are patentable is troubling. There exist legal enabling conditions for every type of productive force which is borne out of the capitalist mode. In the Citizens United decision, SCOTUS created the legal framework for corporations and unions to act as rights-bearing entities in the usual course of representative government on parity with individual human beings. This is a sympathetic position to the present needs of the capital class, and SCOTUS may extend similar sympathy to a corporation which seeks a monopoly position on the use of genes BRCA1 and BRCA2 for the analysis and prevention of potentially terminal hereditary disease, thus potentially raising the cost of preventing breast cancers and limiting access to the life-saving or -extending testing and timely treatments to some women who are unable to pay the monopoly price.
The human body is a force of production. Our bodies contain biopower, a force capable of generating output which reproduces our material conditions, and from an ecological perspective these conditions are inextricably linked to the bodies, structures, and dynamics of the biological properties of our existence. But now we have a new force of production: machines capable of replicating components of our biological makeup. Many social relations could conceivably emerge from this force of production and the reactions of the legal superstructure which is over-determined by it. But a more interesting question than speculating on the possibilities is: on what trajectory are we currently heading?
Let us start considering this trajectory from where we have been. Lawrence M. Friedman has a very good primary on American law (Law in America). According to Friedman the Supreme Court “discovered” that a right to privacy was contemplated by the Fourteenth Amendment. In Roe v. Wade, this right was instantiated in the right to privacy in making reproductive choices. Surely this right to personal choice and privacy which covers the same applies likewise to the right to the free and voluntary use of the coding and transmission mechanism with the instructions for creating human life and the prevention of legal monopolies from restricting the use of DNA to specific, controlled uses consistent with parochial commercial interests.
We have to make sure not to commit the fallacy of equivocation when will talk about privacy as recognized in American jurisprudence. This is not a right to be secured from say, surveillance and misuse of personal information with permission. Friedman makes clear that this is a right to privacy in the sense of a “right to make life choices… without government interference or disapproval”. Myriad appears to be asserting before the court that it can hold a property interest in a gene which is contained with the genome of independent human beings and passed from one generation to another by natural reproduction, and it can restrict the uses of that gene for medically beneficial treatments for a period of time. It can thus prevent private use of that gene for the life choices of any individual that does not contract with the company as a party to a transaction at a price specified by the company. There is extensive analysis of Myriad’s efforts to have clinical data from genetic testing recognized as a commercial trade secret from a scientific perspective here: http://www.nature.com/.... The researchers express concern that “incomplete access to those databases threatens to impede the clinical interpretation of genomic medicine”.
But such is the impulse of capitalism. The impulse to reduce a natural product protected by natural rights to a commodity in which moneyed interests can dictate the terms of its use with terms of trade. The forces of production which are part of the capitalist mode of production once carried emancipatory potential to liberate mankind from feudalism and a relative level of resource scarcity. Now, human freedom and dignity run contrary to the aspirations of the bourgeoisie and the antagonisms between capitalist institutions and citizens in their role as workers as agents pursuing their own personal lives on a self-determined course are emerging. Capitalism now threatens to contribute even more to extant human misery. We are not constrained as Marx believed to an inevitable revolution from this class struggle which is the product of the internal contradictions of the current class relations and mode of productive forces. But there are openings for emancipation all around us and they are only limited by our collective will and imagination.