Cooper - Life as Surplus; Biotechnology and Capitalism in the Neoliberal Era (2008)
"WORLD ECONOMIES: ON DEBT CREATION, LIMITS, AND THE EARTH
TL;DR = The U.S. plays an active part in profiting from and causing the scarcity of all life to perpetuate a system of debt and promised futures that never come. All in a naive, misguided and delusional attempt to break the "limits of life" for capitalist gains and controls.
Page 29
"In his account of the shifting basis of world imperialism over the past three
decades, the economist Michael Hudson (2003 and 2005) has explained how
the United States, since abandoning the gold standard, has transformed the
U.S. Treasury bill, a government-issued debt, into an international monetary
standard, a promissory note to U.S. power in which all other national banks
are more or less obliged to invest. Prior to 1971, the oil-dollar-gold standard
had functioned as a check to the U.S. government's ability to run balance-of payments deficits without limit, since foreign central banks could always hold
the world's banker to account by exchanging their surplus dollars for gold. When
gold was demonetized, however, all institutional standards of measurement went
with it. With foreign banks unable to exchange their dollars for gold, no other
option was available to them than that of buying up U.S. Treasury bonds. In
other words countries that held a surplus of dollars could do only one thing
with them—purchase U.S. Treasury debt, placing them in the unenviable position
of extending a continuous loan to the U.S. government. As it stands, writes
Hudson (2003, xv), this loan has become so structural to world economic relations that it demands to be "rolled over indefinitely" and "will not have to be repaid."
These tendencies, Giovanni Arrighi has argued (2003, 62-66), were consolidated
by the monetarist counterrevolution of 1979-82, when the United
States introduced interest rate policies that had the overall effect of refunneling global financial flows back into the dollar and the U.S. markets. It is this move that accounts for the American economic revival of the 1990s—and its enormous R & D investments in the life sciences. "
Page 30
"Henceforth, North American imperial power would be reestablished on a new and paradoxical basis: having acted as the world's principle creditor nation in the years following World War II, the United States would now assert itself as the world's largest debtor,inflating its capital markets and fueling its spiraling budget deficits with a continuous inflow of foreign capital investment.
In the process the United States has plummeted to a level of indebtedness that "has no precedent in world history"(ibid., 70). In this way the early 1970s set off a process by which the United States transformed itself into the focal point of an effective debt imperialism—a world empire that is curiously devoid of tangible reserves or collateral, an empire that sustains itself rather as the evanescent focal point of a perpetually renewed debt and whose interests lie in the continuous reproduction of the promise.20
What becomes of money when the debt form goes global? Indeed, what becomes of imperialism when the world's greatest power derives its funds from an influx of perpetually renewed debt? For Marx the creation of money from debt represents the most insane form of the capitalist delirium. It is here, he writes, that capital begins to imagine itself as self-valorizing value: a life force
possessed of its own powers of self-regeneration.21 Hudson has argued that contemporary U.S. debt imperialism takes this delirium to its logical extreme. The establishment of U.S. Treasury bills as an international monetary standard, he claims, represents "the culmination of money's evolution from an asset form
to a debit form," and thus an unprecedented expression of capitalist megalomania
(Hudson 2005, 17).
For Marx this evolution is not so much a chronological development as a
tendency intrinsic to the capitalist mode of production from the beginning. In
this sense, and although there have been all kinds of institutional limits to the historical reproduction of debt, capital represents that mode of production in which the debt form strives to liberate itself from all mediation, in space and in time. "[A]s representative of the general form of wealth—money—capital
is the endless and limitless drive to go beyond its limiting barrier. Every boundary [Grenze] is and has to be a barrier [Schranke] for it" (Marx [1857] 1993, 3 34).22 Nevertheless, if there is something that distinguishes the contemporary debt form, it is not simply its paradoxical relationship to U.S. imperial power, but also the level of production at which it operates. What is at stake in the accumulation of capital today is the regeneration of the biosphere—that is, the limits of the earth itself."
Page 31
"This is not merely an economic phenomenon then; it is also ecological. Paraphrasing the political economists, one might thus go further and argue that we live in a world in which the debt form is no longer referenced to any known
terrestrial reserves, at least as far as the current state of science is concerned.
The promise of capital in its present form—which after all is still irresistibly
tied to oil—now so far outweighs the earth's geological reserves that we are
already living on borrowed time, beyond the limits. U.S. debt imperialism is
currently reproducing itself with an utter obliviousness to the imminent depletion of oil reserves. Fueling this apparently precarious situation is the delirium of the debt form, which in effect enables capital to reproduce itself in a realm of pure promise, in excess of the earth's actual limits, at least for a while. This is a delirium that operates between the poles of utter exhaustion and manic overproduction, premature obsolescence and the promise of surplus. In the sense that the debt can never be redeemed once and for all and must be perpetually renewed, it reduces the inhabitable present to a bare minimum, a point of bifurcation, strung out between a future that is about to be and a past that will have been. It thus confronts the present as the ultimate limit, to be deflected at all costs.
The speculative moment is only one side of the debt form, however, since
the debt needs at some point to redeem its promised futures, to remember them
to the past as if they had already been realized. In this way the debt form is
not merely promissory or escapist but also deeply materialist; that is, it seeks
to materialize its promise in the production of matter, forces, and things. In
the long run what it wants to do is return to the earth, recapturing the reproduction of life itself within the promissory accumulation of the debt form, so that the renewal of debt coincides with the regeneration of life on earth—and beyond. It dreams of reproducing the self-valorization of debt in the form of biological autopoiesis."
ID:1948732
 Sep 25 2015, 12:26 am (Edited on Oct 1 2015, 12:03 pm)
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Chapter 3 - PREEMPTING EMERGENCE
...Pages 75-79
TL;DR = Attack life? Life attacks you.
Page 75-76
"GERMS AT WAR
One of the most eloquent legacies of twentieth-century public health can be found in the idea that some kind of final "truce" would at some point be reached between ourselves and infectious disease. "
Page 76
"Ever since the development of germ
theory in the late nineteenth century, modern biology had imagined humans
and microbes to be engaged in a merciless war: a struggle for survival from
which only one of us would emerge victorious. Only after World War II, however,
would public health institutions have the confidence to declare that the
war was almost over; that infectious disease would be conquered once and for
all, sequestered, quarantined, eliminated even, first in the "developed" world
and later in the "developing" world, through the classic public health strategies
of quarantine and immunization as well as the massive use of the new
generation of antibiotics and vaccines. As late as 1978, the United Nations issued
an accord predicting that even the poorest of nations would undergo an "epidemiological
transition" before the year 2000, transporting us into a new era
in which the chronic diseases of old age would prevail over infection.
Ironically, this was precisely the period in which infectious disease made a
dramatic comeback. At a time when public health expenditure was being heavily
cut back in the name of welfare reduction, and microbiology had long been
relegated to the margins of the life sciences, new infectious diseases were on
the rise again while old diseases were reemerging in new, more virulent forms.
This in any case was the view from the richest countries, which had long considered
themselves immune from the plagues still raging "over there." In the
year 2000 the World Health Organization officially announced in its Report on
Infectious Diseases that the truce was over: the return of infectious diseases worldwide
represented a deadlier threat than war; we had been caught off guard;
the microbes had been preparing an underground counterresistance just when
we thought we were finally safe.
The militaristic language of classical germ theory made a spectacular return
to public health discourse, but this was warfare of a different kind, one that
unsettled the reassuring dogmas of the quarantine state. Pathogenic microorganisms
were proliferating from within and without. Friends were turning
against us. The immunological self was misrecognizing itself (the autoimmune
disease). Our most promising cures (antibiotics) were provoking counterresistances
at an alarming rate. The apparent triumph of biomedicine was generating
its own blowback effects (due, for example, to the overuse of antibiotics
in the "developed" world and their underuse in the "developing" world). Diseases
that had long been considered chronic or genetic were suddenly revealing
an unsuspected link to latent infections (P. Ewald 2002). New pathogens
were crossing borders that were supposed to be impenetrable, including frontiers
between species (such as mad cow and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease).
Page 77
"Contagions were hitching a ride on the vectors of free trade (the deregulated blood
market that enabled the contaminated blood scandals to happen; the complex
cross-border movement of food implicated in mad cow disease), perhaps
even on the mobile vectors involved in the production of transgenic crops and
therapeutics.
The same era witnessed something of a conceptual revolution in microbiology.
The new microbiology tells us that our relation to microbial life is one
of inescapable coevolution. We are literally born of ancient alliances between
bacteria and our own cells; microbes are inside us, in our history, but are also
implicated in the continuing evolution of all forms of life on earth. Biologists
are discovering the biospheric dimensions of microbial life (the notion of a
common evolution linking plants, animals, and microbes with the geology of
the earth and the composition of the atmosphere) and claiming that emerging
infectious diseases are indissolubly linked with climate change. In the words
of biologists Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan (1997, 94) the environment "is
regulated by life for life," and the common vector linking all these life forms
and responsible for maintaining a breathable atmosphere is provided by bacterial
evolution.
At the same time recent research is throwing new light on the specific
processes of bacterial evolution, suggesting that bacteria evolve through highly
accelerated processes of horizontal communication rather than chance mutation
and selective pressures. It has been known, since the late 1950s, that bacteria
are able to exchange sequences of DNA, often between unrelated species,
through a general process of horizontal transfection.1 Only recently has the
full extent of this mobility become apparent: under certain conditions mobile
sequences of bacterial DNA jump across species, genuses, and kingdoms; once
integrated into a new genome, these sequences are able to mutate and recombine;
the bacterial genome itself is highly fluid, capable of mutating under stress
and accelerating its own mutation rate (Ho 1999, 168-200). While many leading
infectious disease specialists continue to see microbial resistance as a form
of (highly accelerated) Darwinian evolution (Lederberg, Shope, and Oaks
1992), a growing body of new research is suggesting that bacteria do not even
have to wait around for random mutation to confer resistance; they can share
it among themselves. The new microbiology is discovering that for bacteria resistance
is literally contagious (Levy and Novick 1986; Ho 1999, 178-79)."
Page 78
"These new insights into microbial resistance have important ramifications
for our understanding of genetic engineering technologies. What molecular biology
shared in common with the political philosophy of twentieth-century public
health was the belief that the future evolution of life could be predicted, controlled,
and (at worst) reverse-engineered on the basis of localized interventions.
This shared utopia is coming under increasing scrutiny, however, as recent
research points to the possible links between the reemergence of infectious disease
and the use of recombinant DNA technologies. The production of "transgenic"
life forms, after all, hitches a ride on the same vectors of communication
that are responsible for resistance—viruses, transposons (mobile genetic elements),
and plasmids (extrachromosomal genetic elements)—while these vectors
are routinely modified to render them even more prone to circulate and
recombine. As the full extent of horizontal transfer comes to light, biologists
are beginning to suggest that we cannot mobilize these vectors of communication
without provoking and even accelerating the emergence of all kinds of
counterresistance.2"
"EMERGENCE REEMERGING
The microbiologist René Dubos was the first to coin the term "emergence" as
a way of describing the temporality of biological evolution. By "emergence"
he understood not the gradual accumulation of local mutations, but the relentless,
sometimes catastrophic upheaval of entire coevolving ecologies; sudden
field transitions that could never be predicted in linear terms from a single mutation
(Dubos [1959] 1987, 33). Writing at a time when the "health transition"
was official public health doctrine, Dubos dismissed the idea that infectious disease
could ever be eliminated, let alone stabilized. There can be no final equilibrium
in the battle against germs, he argued, because there is no assignable
limit to the coevolution of resistance and counterproliferation, emergence, and
counteremergence. In Dubos's work the concept of microbial "resistance" is
divested of its association with the pathological: resistance is merely another
word for emergence, and there is no end to it; its future evolution is unforeseeable
from within the present.
Dubos is scathing in his criticism of the strategic vision of mid-twentiethcentury
public health, but what he offers in response is not so much a pacifist
manifesto, as an alternative vision of warfare and a counterphilosophy of disease."
Page 79
"If we are at war, Dubos contends, it is against an enemy that cannot be
sequestered—a threat that is not containable within the boundaries of species
life, is both inside and out, necessary for our survival yet prone to turn against
us, and capable of reinventing itself in response to our "cures." Dubos's theater
of war presupposes a coimplication of human, bacterial, and viral existence;
a mutual immersion in the conditions of each other's evolution. It is
inevitable—he argues—that our most violent efforts to secure ourselves against
contagion will be met with counterresistances of all kinds. Microbial life will
overcome our defenses, and yet we can never be sure when and how it will
happen: "At some unpredictable time and in some unforeseeable manner
nature will strike back" (ibid., 267)."