GUARDIAN (LONDON) Thursday June 29, 2000
This is a war of all worlds
BY George Monbiot
Fuss about the human genome just hides the brutality of global capitalism
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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