This is a war of all worlds
Fuss about the human genome just hides the
brutality of global capitalism
The ethics of genetics: special report
George Monbiot
Thursday June 29, 2000
Nearly everyone debating the mapping of the
human genome now agrees on one thing: that
the identification of our genes invokes an
unprecedented danger, as it might assist a
handful of companies to seize something
which belongs to all of us. I wish this
were true.
Terrifying as the impending capture of the
essence of humanity is, it is far from
unprecedented. The attempt to grab the
genome is just one of many symptoms of a
far graver disease. We are entering an age
of totalitarian capitalism, a political and
economic system which, by seizing absolute
control of fundamental resources,
destitutes everyone it excludes.
On Saturday I met a campaigner from Kerala,
in southern India, who told me that, to the
tribal people he works with, the ownership
of land is as inconceivable as the
ownership of air would be in the northern
hemisphere. I told him the bad news. In
several American cities, blocks of air,
which (once legally transferred to a
suitable site) allow their owners to build
skyscrapers, change hands for tens of
millions of dollars. There have been a
number of legal disputes over the ownership
of clouds, as firms battle for the right to
make them drop their rain where they want
it. Companies are now claiming they own
asteroids and landing spaces on the moon.
None of these presumptions is any more
absurd than the claim to possess exclusive
control over part of our own planet. But,
as property rights proliferate, almost
everything which once belonged to all of us
is being seized.
In Britain, for example, despite repeated
pledges by the government, playing-fields
and allotments are disappearing faster than
ever before. Public squares are being
turned into private shopping malls.
Traditional stopping sites for travellers,
some of which survived for five millennia,
have nearly all disappeared during the past
15 years.
Knowledge is rapidly becoming the exclusive
preserve of those who can afford to buy it.
Intellectual property companies are
monopolising image banks and picture
archives, while academic publishers,
concentrated in ever fewer hands, are able
to charge outrageous prices for access to
the work they publish. Companies are
asserting ownership in perpetuity of the
material in their electronic databases. A
firm called West Publishing has tried to
insist that it owned the entire archive of
US federal law.
The biotech companies have been empowered
to seize the human genome by the very
people - Tony Blair and Bill Clinton - who
are now begging them not to do so. Blair's
government helped drive through the
European directive on the legal protection
of biotechnological inventions, which
enables private companies to claim not only
human genes, but also plant and animal
varieties and even human body parts.
Every asset, once secured by the new
totalitarian regime, is surrounded by a
Berlin wall equipped with border guards.
There are ranches in the United States in
which you would be shot on sight if you
tried to take a walk. Disproportionate
responses to the feeblest threats are
assisted by the private prison and security
industries now seizing control of another
fundamental asset: human freedom. We cross
the economic frontiers at our peril.
The worst global inequality in history is a
direct result of this totalitarian
capitalism. Two hundred people now own as
much wealth as half the world's population,
for the simple reason that they have been
empowered to steal it from the rest of us.
This empowerment emerges from an
unwholesome union of neoliberal economics
and feudal law. Our legal framework, which
pre-dates democracy, protects property
above individuals and individuals above
society. We can't expect our governments to
address this inversion of democratic
priorities. The three men who could begin
to reform our legal system - the home
secretary, the lord chancellor and the
prime minister - are all lawyers, and all
wedded (literally in the prime minister's
case) to the profession which benefits from
its iniquities. Property-based law favours
the interests of the rich, which, in turn,
favours the interests of its practitioners.
The walls rising around us are beginning to
look impregnable. But before we can decide
how they might best be demolished, we must
first recognise that the enclosure of the
human genome is just a single cell in the
privatised global prison the new regime has
built.
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