Putting life on the market, Book Review - Multitude

Perhaps the most celebrated and controversial new example of bioproperty is OncoMouse, the only animal type to date that has been patented. Du Pont laboratories together with Harvard University created OncoMouse by transplanting a human cancer-producing gene into a mouse. The mouse is predisposed to developing cancerous tumors and is thus useful for oncological research. Du Pont sells individual mice as research tools, but the novel aspect here is that Du Pont does not merely own individual mice but the type of mouse as a whole.

- Multitude, 181

In 1976 a patient at the University of California medical center began treatment for hairy-cell leukemia. The doctors recognized that his blood might have special properties for the treatment of leukemia and, in 1981, they were granted a patent in the name of the University of California on a T-cell line - that is, a sequence of genetic information - developed from the patent's blood; the potental value of the products derived for it was estimated at three billion dollars. The patient sued the university for ownership of the T cells and the genetic information, but the California Supreme Court ruled against him. The court reasoned that the Unversity of California was the rightful owner of the cell line because a naturally occuring organism (on which his claim rests) is not patentable, whereas the information scientists derive from it is patentable because it is the result of human ingenuity.

- Multitude, 183

These days a lot of graduates coming out of school, unlike their parents, aren't expecting to find a big company to be loyal to and work long-term, with all those pension and retirement benefits. Instead, they work at this company for a year, and then that one for a year. Our generation in our current economy is increasingly mobile.

So what does this have to do with the above quote about Oncomouse and patenting somebody's T-cell sequence? They're both part of a similar global trend towards the hegemony of immateriality: technology, informationalization, and globalization.

"Immaterial" production such as music, stories, services (such as retail or medical care), and knowledge, have always been a part of the societal commons. But because technology has made these things so easily reproducible and transferable (think mp3s or bit torrents, google books, financial networks, on-line higher ed., etc.) immaterial production has become hegemonic, displacing industrial production as the former hegemonic mode. Huge sums of money can disappear and reappear across the globe, the separation between work and private life is becoming blurred in postmodernizing societies, and information transfers in literally zero-time. Castells theorizing network society calls this timeless time.

In other words, the postmodern era is one of networks. Even US military ideology recognizes this, and instead of the old model of war where the objective was to destroy the enemy, now the objective of war is to "create" the enemy, in other words to maintain the global capitalist network and create the global geopolitical body that most privileges the US and the West.

So, back to my point about the labor market...
In the modern, Fordist era, businesses were built on the idea of economies of scale. In other words, armies of laborers for mass production. You keep your laborers long-term, attracting them with benefits like healthcare and pensions etc. But this Fordist mode of production couldn't compete with the Toyotaist mode of production. The problem with economies of scale was that all these products were produced, and sat on lots waiting to be sold. Not all of them got sold. Meanwhile the company had large workforces to pay. It was too inefficient to remain competitive, and so would get debunked by Toyotaism, which took advantage of computer technology and the ability to rapidly transfer knowledge and information across networks. Large work forces were no longer needed, nor the imprecision of blind mass production. Production is now done in timeless time as a rapid response to demand. How much of this car is demanded in the market? Okay, produce that much now and put it out there.

The type of workers in demand in this kind of economy are the highly educated, with general knowledge and skills in many areas, so they can fill different responsibilities when forming different teams to do different projects. So then, there's been a "shift from an economy characterized by the stable long-term employment typical of factory workers to one marked by flexible, mobile, and precarious labor relations: flexible because workers have to adapt to different tasks, mobile because workers have to move frequently between jobs, and precarious because no contracts guarantee stable, long-term employment" (Multitude, Hardt and Negri, 112).

The hegemony of immaterial forms of labor doesn't mean that industrial production is gone. It just means that immaterial production is hegemonic, just as industrial production used to dominate even though it was in the minority and greatly outnumbered by agricultural production. The hegemony of immaterial production simply means that it dominates the economy, and its characters spills over to other sectors of economy, like the agri-businesses that are patenting the genetics of crop-seeds. In order for capitalism to continue to exploit, it more and more focuses on exploiting "surplus value" (a Marxist term) not from the factory laborer, but from the creative, immaterial commons of the multitude. The global south, for example, is much wealthier in terms of the biodiversity of plant life. But it's companies of the global north that own the rights to the knowledge of the plants' genetics, which makes the north wealthier in the capitalist system. That primary issue is "that nature is ceasing to be common, that it is becoming private property and exclusively controlled by its new owners" (184).