Life as Surplus: Biotechnology and Capitalism in the Neoliberal Era

Introduction

INTRODUCTION TH E E A R L Y 1 9 8 0 S I N A U G U R A T E D A N E R A O F I N T E N S E C O N C E P T U A L , institutional, and technological creativity in the life sciences and its allied disciplines. Not only did discoveries in molecular biology, cell biology, and microbiology promise to deliver new technological possibilities, they also called into question many of the founding assumptions of the twentieth-century life sciences . This was also the era of the “neoliberal revolution,” where similarly dramatic transformations unfolded in the political, social, and economic spheres.1 Initiated in the United Kingdom and United States, the neoliberal experiment sought to undermine the existing foundations of economic growth, productivity , and value, while at the same time it forged an ever-tighter alliance between state-funded research, the market in new technologies, and financial capital. In the United States in particular these interventions had a resounding effect on the life sciences. When President Ronald Reagan implemented a series of reforms designed to mobilize a “revolution” in the life sciences, public health, and biomedicine, he triggered a momentum that has been pursued by every administration since then. The project of U.S. neoliberalism, I argue throughout this book, is crucially concerned with the emergent possibilities of the life sciences and related disciplines. As the realms of biological (re)production and capital accumulation move closer together, it is becoming difficult to think about the life sciences without invoking the traditional concepts of political economy—production, value, growth, crisis, resistance, and revolution. At the same time, however, the expansion of commercial processes into the sphere of “life itself” has a troubling effect on the self-evidence of traditional economic categories, compelling us to rethink their scope in dialogue with the life sciences themselves. The biotech era poses challenging questions about the interrelationship between economic and biological growth, resurrecting in often unexpected ways the questions that accompanied the birth of modern political economy. Where does 3 (re)production end and technical invention begin, when life is put to work at the microbiological or cellular level? What is at stake in the extension of property law to cover everything from the molecular elements of life (biological patents) to the biospheric accident (catastrophe bonds)? What is the relationship between new theories of biological growth, complexity, and evolution and recent neoliberal theories of accumulation? And how is it possible to counter these new dogmatisms without falling into the trap of a neofundamentalist politics of life (the right-to-life movement or ecological survivalism, for example)? Now, more than ever before, we need to be responsive to the intense traffic between the biological and the economic spheres, without reducing the one to the other or immobilizing one for the sake of the other. Working between the history and philosophy of science, science and technology studies, theoretical biology, and political economy, this book attempts to be as promiscuous in its investigations as the contemporary life sciences themselves. Taking the North American commercial life sciences as its point of departure , this book does not presume to cover the entire history of contemporary biotechnology or to account for the widely different ways in which new life science technologies have been deployed and regulated around the world. As recent studies in the field have made abundantly clear, even the differences between such economic competitors as the United States, Britain, and Germany are stark enough to warrant careful comparative analysis (Jasanoff 2005). And the politics of a country such as India, with its unique history of drug production and patent laws, brings an end to the idea that the emerging bioeconomies of the twenty-first century will be organized around rigid dividing lines between imperialist winners and postcolonialist losers (Sunder Rajan 2006). With the rise of East Asia as a significant hub of research and investment in the new life sciences, the global power dynamics of biocapital are far from determined in advance. However, I contend that there is a specificity to the development of life science production in North America that demands analysis in its own right. This specificity lies as much in the recent history of U.S. economic crisis as in its present position as a focal point of world economic and imperialist power. As I show in chapter 1, 1980 marked a turning point in U.S. research...