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The intense polarisation of the AI arms race as a clash between civilisations is further amplified by the distinct racial character of the US–China conflict. The West – and the US, in particular – has long used technological prowess to assume superiority over other nations perceived as ‘static, primitive, passive, Communist, terrorist, or fundamentalist (depending on the era)’ (Dinerstein, 2006: 571). Nonetheless, the AI arms race specifically builds on and reinvents existing anti-Asian racial tropes, such as Orientalism and the ‘Yellow Peril’. While the ‘clash of civilizations’ could extend to a variety of different cultural forms and groupings across the globe, the contemporary US–China AI arms race gains its rhetorical and affective power through reference to the West's longstanding understanding of China – and the East, more broadly – as its constitutive racial ‘Other’. In 1978, the Palestinian academic Edward Said critiqued how Western academics construed the ‘East’ or the ‘Orient’ as backwards, passive and feminine in comparison to the modern, active, masculine West (Said, 1979). Crucially, Said argued that the West's Orientalism revealed far less about the nature of the so-called Orient itself, and much more about the West's own crises of identity and the contradictory conditions of modernity. The Orientalism of the West's interpretation of the East extends to the East's technological production. In 1995, following the ‘Japan bashing’ and ‘Japan panic’ that characterised the US political and economic landscape in the 1980s, Morley and Robins coined the term techno-Orientalism to describe the West's distinct anxieties and desires regarding the spectre of a technologically ascendant Japan (Roh, Huang and Niu, 2015; Morley and Robins, 1995). Central to these anxieties was the notion that ‘Japan is the future, and it is a future that seems to be transcending and displacing Western modernity’ (Morley and Robins, 1995: 168). While the locus of these anxieties has shifted since Japan's asset price bubble collapse in 1991, the affective structures of techno-Orientalism have remained in place. Rather than being solely confined to Japan and Western perceptions of Japaneseness, they have been transposed and translated across to various countries and nations in the ‘Far East’, in particular China. Furthermore, in the case of the US–China AI arms race, the queasy relations of fetishisation and fear that characterise techno-Orientalism become imbricated in a second, much more overtly hostile, racial trope: that of the ‘Yellow Peril’. The term Yellow Peril describes the West's racialised fears of invasion, domination and imperilment by forces from the so-called ‘East’ (Tchen and Yeats, 2014). Key to the Yellow Peril's racialising force is its conflation of a country's government, its ‘culture’, and its economy with its people, including its extensive diaspora. In 1971, Webster's New International Dictionary defined the Yellow Peril as ‘1. A danger to Western Civilization held to arise from expansion of the power and influence of Oriental people; 2: a threat to Western living standards developed through the incursion into Western countries of Oriental labourers willing to work for very low wages and under inferior working conditions’ (Frayling, 2014: 10). While fears of an Asian uprising had been present in Europe since Genghis Khan, it was amplified by the invention of the ‘yellow race’ in 18th and 19th century race science (Keevak, 2011), populist uprisings against Chinese immigrants (Lew-Williams, 2018), and the proliferation of Yellow Perilist characters and tropes in US popular culture. The tenets of Yellow Perilism were observable in the US political establishment and media's response to Japan's technological development in the 1980s, where Japan's ascendency was portrayed as an existential threat to the economic prosperity and geopolitical supremacy of the US state (Heale, 2009; Garvey, 2020). In the case of the AI arms race, the Yellow Perilism originally directed towards Japan's technological advancement, which at the time was both a democracy and a military ally of the US, is further amplified by the geopolitical and military animosity between the US and China (Garvey, 2020). By casting China's AI development as a fundamental concern for all Americans – as the NSCAI 2021 Final Report does, alongside other key US AI strategy documents – the rhetoric around the AI arms race reproduces previous histories of Yellow Perilism that cast the Chinese state as an inherent threat to the US. In the AI arms race, the techno-Orientalism previously directed toward Japan combines with the much longer Sinophobic history of the Yellow Peril to create a new racial configuration: the Yellow Techno-Peril. Moreover, the AI arms race re-animates forms of anti-Chinese racism that constitute Chinese people as an ontological extension of the Chinese state, whether or not they have any meaningful political connections to China. The Chinese state is established as the external existential threat to the US, while Chinese-American and Chinese people living within the US borders are constituted as dangerous ‘enemies within’. The rhetoric of the Yellow Techno-Peril does not only further the ideology of a clash of civilisations between two hostile techno-superpowers: it also dehumanises Chinese Americans living within US borders, entrenching the deeply held racial belief that Chinese people are ‘permanent sojourners’ or eternal aliens in the eyes of the US state (Lew-Williams, 2018). There are strong parallels between the current wave of Sinophobic and anti-Chinese rhetoric in the AI arms race and the Yellow Peril politics of the 1980s, which had negative ramifications on Japanese Americans and Asian American communities in the US (Heale, 2009; Garvey, 2020). Take, for example, the 1982 murder of Vincent Chin, which is now recognised as a landmark event in the formation of an Asian American political identity in the US. As Neda Atanasoski and Kalindi Vora write, ‘layoffs in the US auto industry, perceived by the public as a response to the dominance of Japanese automobile manufacturing, led to a series of attacks on Asian Americans. This includes the infamous 1982 beating of Vincent Chin in Detroit by two laid-off Chrysler workers, which resulted in Chin's death…killers justified their attack by saying, “It's because of you we’re out of work”, linking the Asian American Chin to Japanese autoworkers’ (Atanasoski and Vora, 2019: 45). Vincent Chin was not even Japanese, let alone an automobile worker; instead, he was a Chinese American draftsman. Chin's murder demonstrates how easily Yellow Perilist fearmongering moves and slips between different Asian peoples and countries, from the technologically ascendant Japan of the 1980s through to the contemporary AI arms race between the US and China today. Moreover, it also demonstrates how the Yellow Techno-Perilist rhetoric of the time – in particular, the fearmongering that, in the words of US Senator John Dingell, ‘little yellow men’ were taking white US automobile workers’ jobs – became attached to the bodies of Asian Americans, with violent and disastrous results. The scapegoating of Asian American people as internal threats and permanent aliens who embody white fears of the Yellow Peril extends into the age of the AI arms race, most notably through the US government's China Initiative. In 2018, the Trump administration founded the China Initiative to counter Chinese economic espionage and protect the US national security interests (Guo, Aloe and Hao, 2021). The Trump administration's emphasis on Chinese economic espionage reproduced earlier forms of fiscal orientalism (Yang, 2016) and monetary orientalism (Bui, 2019) that cast China as a ‘barbarian economic aggressor’ (Zhang, 2021) and a ‘global cheater’ (Bui, 2019; Garvey, 2020). Even more troublingly, it gave further credence to forms of racial internal policing that have historically been used to profile and punish Asian Americans as perceived spies. As Frank H. Wu (2023) notes, ‘with conflict between the United States and China increasingly a dominant theme of public discourse, Asian Americans, visible as such, have ended up overrepresented in the prosecution of espionage and associated crimes’ (pp. 191–192). In 2018, the FBI director Christopher Wray argued that the ‘China threat’ should not be seen only as a ‘whole-of-government’ threat, but as a ‘whole-of-society’ threat requiring a ‘whole-of-society’ response (Wu, 2023: 192). Through this lens, all Chinese people are seen as an extension of the Chinese government and its aims, regardless of their own personal political beliefs (Wu, 2023: 192). Donald Trump reinforced this view when he insisted that ‘almost every student’ that comes to the US from China ‘is a spy’ (Wu, 2023: 192). Consequently, an investigation by the MIT Technology Review found that the China Initiative evolved from a narrow initiative focusing on economic espionage to an ‘umbrella term for cases with any connection to China’, and that 88% of the defendants charged were of Chinese heritage (Guo, Aloe and Hao, 2021). The racial profiling of Chinese researchers through the China Initiative reflects how ‘three decades after the fall of the Soviet Union, as China emerges as a new superpower and contests US hegemony, the face of foreign espionage in the West has become Chinese’ (Cheng, 2023). The ‘whole-of-society’ approach to the threat supposedly posed by the Chinese state and, by extension, Chinese people within the US, has even led to calls for the US government to restrict or entirely ban Chinese students. In April 2021, the Republican Senators Tom Cotton, Marsha Blackburn, and Tommy Tuberville introduced the Secure Campus Act, which aimed to ‘prohibit Chinese nationals from receiving visas to the United States for graduate or post-graduate studies in STEM fields and would ban participants in China's foreign talent recruitment programs and Chinese nationals from taking part in federally-funded STEM research’ (‘Cotton, Colleagues Introduce Bill to Restrict Chinese STEM Graduate Student Visas’ 2021). Tom Cotton justified the Bill on the basis that ‘allowing China unfettered access to American research institutions is akin to granting Soviet scientists access to our critical laboratories during the Cold War. We shouldn’t allow the Chinese Communist Party to exploit the openness of American research institutions any longer. The SECURE CAMPUS Act will help stop Chinese nationals from stealing U.S. technology, which the CCP uses against our own troops and businesses’ (Cotton, Colleagues 2021). Cotton, Blackburn and Tuberville are not alone in their desire to ban or restrict the entry of Chinese STEM students: a Pew Research poll found that 55% of Americans want to instate restrictions on Chinese students entering the country (Zwetsloot and Arnold, 2021). The racial logics underlying the Secure Campus Act mimic those that drove the Chinese Exclusion Acts (1882, 1892, 1902), preventing Chinese nationals from entering the US. Central to the China Initiative and the Secure Campus Act is the assumption that Chinese people are ‘permanently loyal to China’ and ‘racially incapable of becoming American’ (Lew-Williams, 2018: 6). Hence, despite arguments that Chinese students enrich the US economy and STEM research cultures, Chinese students and researchers remain marked by the assumption that they are an extension of the Chinese state. Despite the shutdown of the China Initiative in 2023 and the failure of the Secure Campus Act, the racial profiling of Chinese Americans and people of Chinese heritage as inherent threats to the US technological supremacy continues to haunt Chinese American researchers and technologists. Writing in Nature, Natasha Gilbert argues that the ‘climate of fear and anxiety’ generated by the China Initiative has not dissipated, and that scrutiny of Chinese scientists has only intensified (Gilbert, 2023). While acknowledging the initiative's failures, Assistant Attorney General Matthew Olsen argued, ‘if you were looking for general deterrence, it has been achieved in spades – we have terrified the entire research community…Deterrence is about fear’ (Barry and Benner, 2022). Olsen's insistence that a nebulous and widespread fear is a good thing obscures how the racial fear of surveillance and violence has long conditioned Asian Americans’ experiences in the US (Lew-Williams, 2018; Wu, 2023), and how this fear is born unequally by scientists of Chinese descent. Consequently, Chinese scientists and researchers have argued that ‘tensions between the United States and China are likely to increase, but Chinese Americans should not be treated as collateral damage’ (Liu et al., 2023: 804), and ‘urge the federal government to shift away from deterrence and fear and instead focus on the philosophies that have made the United States a global leader in science and technology: openness, diversity, and international collaboration’ (Liu et al., 2023: 804). However, without significant efforts to combat and transform the US portrayal of China as the Yellow Techno-Peril, the fear and anxiety experienced by researchers of Chinese descent is unlikely to dissipate.

Interpreting U.S.-China AI development as an “arms race” or a winner-takes-all competition fundamentally misunderstands the transnational nature of AI development and technological interdependence. Policy prescriptions drawn from this “race” concept will thus be ill-fit to the goals they attempt to serve. This bad fit could result in, among other undesirable outcomes, damage to AI development, missed opportunities for AI development, and mishandling of real AI risks.

Yoshua Bengio, an early pioneer of modern AI techniques, has publicly disapproved of framing AI development as a race. “We could collectively participate in a race,” he told MIT Technology Review, “but as a scientist and somebody who wants to think about the common good, I think we’re better off thinking about how to build smarter machines and make sure AI is used for the well-being of as many people as possible.”7 Possible idealism aside, his point strikes at a fundamental flaw with this arms race analogy: AI is developed by a vast community of scientists, developers, and researchers who are not isolated within their respective countries. As such, the development of AI is not siloed within Chinese or American borders, and the benefits of artificial intelligence are not exclusive to either of those nations. Public and private entities in both countries can benefit from developments of artificial intelligence in areas that have wide reach between nations and positive impacts on economic growth and public well-being (e.g., skin cancer detection). In other words, the development of artificial intelligence is not winner-takes-all. And contrary to what some commentators seem to believe (or at least constantly and singularly discuss), not every significant application of AI will be a weapon.

How does international competition come into play when discussing the technical issue of alignment? Put simply, the faster AI advances, the less time we will have to learn how to align it. The alignment problem is not yet solved, nor is it likely to be solved in time without slower and more safety-conscious development.

The fear of losing a technological arms race may encourage corporations and governments to accelerate development and cut corners, deploying advanced systems before they are safe. Many top AI scientists and organizations — among them the team at safety lab Anthropic, Open Philanthropy’s Ajeya Cotra, DeepMind founder Demis Hassabis, and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman — believe that gradual development is preferable to rapid development because it offers researchers more time to build safety features into new models; it is easier to align a less powerful model than a more powerful one.

The effects of these changes are legion – though we may note immediately a clear focus upon the life sciences where they are most controversial – and have been judged to be overwhelmingly negative by numerous commentators. A non-exhaustive list includes the following. First, by imposing patents on medicines necessary for treatment of diseases affecting large sections of the developing world, such as AIDS or tuberculosis, costs of these drugs are inflated beyond the financial means of most patients (Drahos and Mayne 2002). Second, by setting up IPR regimes in developing countries with rich resources of biodiversity, ‘bioprospecting’ (or ‘biopiracy’, depending upon your perspective) is encouraged, in which private enterprises from the Global North appropriate common resources of the Global South. This process is particularly facilitated by genetic engineering techniques, which allow even insignificant genetic modification of these plants to be patented (Drahos and Braithwaite 2002; Shiva 1998, 2001). Third, Northern businesses also exploit the traditional medicinal knowledge as pointers for further research, and can patent the resulting knowledge (Dutfield 2003; Shiva 1998). Fourth, through the substitution of traditional crops and farming methods by patented, genetically modified crops, issues of social displacement and food security for billions of the world’s peasantry arise (Shiva 1998, 2001). Last, but by no means least, the economic case for TRIPs is strikingly absent. First, as regards its effects on economic growth, there is almost unanimity in the economic literature that TRIPs shifts the balance of economic gains significantly in favour of developed economies, particularly the United States, and away from developing countries (at least in the ‘short term’), thus exacerbating global inequalities in economic development.3 Indeed, one widely respected, and generally proTRIPs, analysis concludes that ‘blind faith’ is the only basis for the rest of the world outside the United States to accept TRIPs (Maskus 2000: 190). Even within the developed economies, including the US, the case for TRIPs was both spectacularly weak and dependent upon forging from scratch a conceptual connection between IPRs and free global trade. As regards the latter issue, this involved a wholesale redefinition of the nature and purpose of patents. Patents are (temporary) monopoly rights regarding the exploitation of various ‘intellectual’ resources. As such, they have traditionally been treated as directly opposed to free and open markets. Portraying patents as a central issue for the global opening of trade was thus an extraordinary conceptual sleight of hand. Furthermore, patents have generally been legitimated as necessary incentives for individuals to engage in the risky and uncertain process of technological invention. Conversely, the argument for TRIPs was that scientific research would not be developed into profitable commodities without patents – a concern with innovation rather than invention. This opens the economic case for TRIPs to the objection that IPRs are a relatively unimportant mechanism for the translation of scientific research into innovation in the vast majority of industries (Mansfield 1986). Furthermore, literature on this empirical claim – which was still ‘emergent’ in 2003, some 10–15 years after the TRIPs negotiations (Cohen and Merrill 2003: 3) – shows that there are few ‘robust conclusions’ for patent policy regarding its connection to innovation (Jaffe 2000: 531, 554) and that, if anything, strengthening patents has had distinctly negative effects on innovation in the US (Jaffe and Lerner 2006). TRIPs thus effects momentous and contested changes to global trade rules in the absence of any credible economic case. Yet amazingly ‘probably less (sic) than 50 people were responsible for TRIPs’ (Drahos and Braithwaite 2002: 10, quoting a senior US trade negotiator). Furthermore, these people were representatives of private businesses, mostly based in the US, with significant interests in IPRs, not politicians or national trade diplomats who actually signed the agreement. Thus ‘in effect, twelve corporations made public law for the world’ (Sell 1999: 171). These companies together formed the Intellectual Property Committee (IPC) in March 1986 to coordinate their political lobbying for TRIPs. Regarding patents, the American pharmaceutical TNCs (henceforth ‘Big Pharma’) dominated, particularly Pfizer, while for copyright it was the IT and recording industries, particularly IBM. These companies stood to profit enormously from TRIPs; and, indeed, the economic rationale for TRIPs (though not its justification) is only apparent for these agents. The IPC’s control of the US Trade Representative (USTR) was almost total. For instance, the IPC drafted memos that were then circulated as government policy. Furthermore, while those behind TRIPs managed to get ‘95 per cent’ of what they were after (Drahos and Braithwaite 2002, quoting the Chairman of the IPC), this was also in the face of striking opposition, particularly from the large developing countries, India and Brazil, that stood to lose out significantly. Yet eventually this opposition was neutralized, not least through the deployment of threats from the USTR that these countries would be subject to American penalties and tariffs for their ‘restrictive’ trade practices. In these circumstances, the only alternative was a multilateral agreement that could at least provide a forum for some arbitration of these disputes. It is clear, therefore, that TRIPs represents the deployment of exceptional political power. Yet this cannot be explained purely in terms of strong corporate interests getting their will, as comparison with parallel neoliberal measures of global regulation reveals. The negotiations for global rules on financial investment (the TradeRelated Investment Measures agreement, TRIMs) and on trade in services (General Agreement on Trade in Service, GATS) were both much less successful for their corporate protagonists, despite having significant backing from powerful industrial and financial sectors (Sell 2003).

Neoliberalism emerged as the dominant political force in the Global North around 1980, in the context of the crisis of the Keynesian welfare/warfare state model of capitalism (see Birch and Mykhnenko; Jessop, this volume). Two points must be noted in order to understand the central role of IPRs in the neoliberal project, relating to the two aspects of neoliberalism as both a political project to restructure the global economy and a political ideology providing a unifying vision for disparate political interests. First, regarding the global economic restructuring, we must first consider the nature of the political economic crisis from which neoliberalism emerged triumphant. A capitalist economy must expand continually if it is not to collapse, a consequence of the dynamics of self-interested investment upon which it depends. The dynamics of a capitalist economy and the production of profit must both be understood as being dependent upon the spread and intensity of capital in any given society. Only in this way can we explain how the apparent exchange of equivalents can produce a profit – a surplus of monetary value at the level of the economy as a whole (Fine and Saad-Filho 2004). ‘Capital’ here refers to a social relation, namely that of waged labour employed in the production of commodities to be sold for a profit. The ever-increasing penetration of the capital relation into a society is only possible given political economic settlements (established through political struggle) that create a social possibility space for capital’s expansion by excluding and displacing its costs to other spaces (such as the Global South) and times (that is, the future) (Jessop 2000). Periods of ‘normal’ growth are merely those in which political acceptance for a given round of capital penetration into society has already been broadly established through prior struggle. Yet, conversely, the inexorable growth of a capitalist economy entails that it must, in time, come to push at these very political boundaries that have protected it, with a crisis of profitability that elicits capitalist political efforts to expand these boundaries yet deeper into social life. This includes the private appropriation of resources previously held in common so that these can be exploited for profit, a process called ‘primitive accumulation’ (Marx 1999; Arrighi 1994; Harvey 2003) that Lohmann illustrates in relation to carbon trading in the next chapter. Finance plays a crucial role in this process (see Shaoul, this volume). For example, since the 1970s crisis of industrial profitability, investment has been redirected increasingly to the financial sector, which promised higher profits. The resultant ‘financialization’ of the economy concentrates both economic and political power in the hands of finance, allowing it both to enforce the radical restructuring of the economy in order to return industries to profitability (in the face of labour unrest) and to change economic regulation in order to incubate new industries and opportunities for profit. Which social spheres are targeted for the further expansion of capital is clearly a contingent matter of what seems most promising at the time, particularly to this newly dominant financial sector (see Lohmann, this volume). It is also a matter of political power as regards what sectors of the society could be forced to accept marketization, conditioned by the existing penetration of capital. In the case of the neoliberal project, the opportunities for expansion of capital were two-fold (cf. Jessop, this volume, on time-space distantiation and compression). First, and most obviously, capitalist relations of production could spread extensively to societies as yet not fully integrated into the global capitalist market, as per globalization. Second, however, the intensity of the capital relation in societies whose economic relations were already dominated by capital could also increase through subsuming further social practices. It is this latter process in particular that may be summarized under the heading of the KBE regarding the marketization of knowledge production. This can be seen in two different ways. First, with the maturity of existing technologically advanced industries, capital tends to search out new investment possibilities, as revealed by the contemporaneous progress of both science and technology. These new technologies afford manipulation of material reality in novel ways in order to create profitable commodities and thus open up an entirely new sphere of social reality into which capital can expand (Arrighi 2005: 35–7). The two novel technologies of greatest significance in the neoliberal age have clearly been information and communication technologies (ICTs) and biotechnology. ICTs are obviously related to a knowledge economy, allowing for the significant growth of labour that is dependent on information manipulation and technical knowledge, as well as facilitating global production networks and ‘flexible’ production processes. Biotech has yet to penetrate the economy to the same extent, but it is also implicated because it is exceptional in the level of scientific sophistication it presupposes as a factor directly involved in the innovation of new products. Second, the Keynesian period had already also seen the expansion of capital relations not only into industry but also into the ‘culture industries’ (Adorno 2000), with oligopolies controlling all major cultural outputs. The intensification of capital in these societies thus had to extend into spheres of social life, held in common to date, even more removed from the daily material reproduction of society. Expansion into the relations of production of knowledge has obvious complementarities with other tendencies of the growth of the economy. The connection between neoliberalism and the KBE, however, goes beyond this. For, third, neoliberalism as an ideology also has particular conceptual resonance with the drive to privatize and marketize the creation of scientific knowledge (Mirowski 2008). Neoliberal ideology, following Hayek, is based on the analysis of the market not merely as the most efficient coordination mechanism for economic activity. Rather it is this because it is also the best mechanism for the optimal societal aggregation of the limited information of individual market participants, while maximizing human (negative) liberty. The market is thus not merely an economic phenomenon but also, and primarily, an epistemic one, necessarily trumping the decisionmaking capabilities of government, that is, decisions based on the (similarly) limited information available to the individuals in positions of authority. A central concept of neoliberal political ideology is thus the ‘marketplace of ideas’ as Miller and Birch and Tickell demonstrate in the preceding chapters. The phrase has two interrelated connotations. On the one hand, it signifies that the primary virtues of the market are epistemic and that the knowledgeable governance of society should be left to the market. On the other, it also privileges a conception of science, and indeed society, in which ideas should compete with each other in a proper market. In these two respects, then, neoliberalism has been centrally concerned with the marketization of the production of knowledge on a global (or ‘universal’) scale. For functioning capitalist commodity markets to be possible, however, private property rights must first be instituted in that resource – that is, IPRs for markets of knowledge. In the present case, all these various trends converged in the ‘globalized construction of knowledge scarcity’ (May 2006: 53) that is the TRIPs agreement.

Ranking failed during Covid-19. Autumn 2019 saw the release of the first World Health Preparedness Report, accompanied predictably with a Global Health Security Index (Global Health Security Index 2019). Compiled by the Johns Hopkins University’s Bloomberg School of Public Policy, the Nuclear Threat Initiative, and the Economist Intelligence Unit, the Global Health Security Index offers a classic example of a ranking produced by “rationalised third-parties” (Werron 2015), which collect information and collate it into a plausible index. Like most indices, it created numerical values for multiple parameters and combined them to rank nation-states on their preparedness to address an epidemic. The report ran over 300 pages and contained more than 50 pages detailing its methodology. The Global Health Security Index has now become infamous for having no predictive power whatsoever. The index had ranked the United States and the United Kingdom as the first and second most prepared countries for a pandemic. When one economist compared the index with fatalities per capita in January 2021 (Milanovic 2021), he found that there was no correlation between a country’s rank on the index and its performance during Covid-19. As of January 2021, the United States’ fatality rate was 145th out of 153 countries, while the UK was in 149th place. One of the most striking aspects of this crisis is how ranking discourse so poorly anticipated nations’ performance during the crisis. The Index had done what rankings are supposed to do: “To aggregate a variety of dimensions into one ranking position, rankings translate qualities into quantities” (Brankovic et al. 2018: 274f.). And yet those quantifications bore no resemblance to the reality that unfolded mere months later. While commentators have lambasted the Index for its poor choice of measurements, the report’s subtitle highlights the paradoxical nature of such indices: “Building Collective Action and Accountability.” An index that created national competition through ranking was supposed to generate collabora-tion. And yet, during this crisis, national comparison and competition have dominated, much to the detriment of most of the world’s population. This volume asks when competition becomes “a globally relevant political category” (Russ/Stafford this volume). The Covid-19 pandemic offers a telling and tragic example of how competition can exacerbate systemic risks and ultimately undermine recovery. Competition has remained all too relevant, whether through statistics around cases and deaths or, more recently, vaccines. Even more strikingly, Covid-19 follows an older pattern where the nation-state is used as the default unit of “competitive comparisons” (Steinmetz 2019). The chapters in this volume highlight other crucial questions—what is the political power behind units of comparison? What do comparisons of deaths or cases of Covid omit? What is the development against which countries are measured and how does that translate into political or economic power? Finally, what historical developments have fostered a world where national competition comes before collective action, even for obviously global problems like pandemics? Even supposedly non-violent competition may have violent consequences. The Covid crisis has been full of competition. Many countries report their health statistics on a more granular, sub-national level: provinces in Canada, individual states or even counties in the US and Germany. Yet, national statistics have dominated in the global discourse. Perhaps to many readers of the Financial Times, it seemed natural to play around with graphs and compare Sweden to Switzerland to Senegal. This edited volume, though, highlights the complex competition that lies behind such purportedly “natural” units of comparison. Ramy Youssef reminds us that status competition is “a historically contingent social form.” It is not a natural phenomenon that millions of people should pore obsessively over data dashboards and graphs showing the success of one country over another. The power of the frame of competition requires explanation. Indeed, the richest analysis of such phenomena arises from interdisciplinary engagement. So too, we can best understand how Covid-19 statistics have spurred national competition and, at times, obscured much more important effects by turning to history, epidemiology, sociology, and international relations. There is a long history of why statistical representations of disease became the main mode of measuring disease and of making disease comparable across borders. Many scholars (Porter 1995; Speich Chassé 2013; Speich Chassé 2016; Jerven 2018) have examined the growing importance of numbers and statistics in modern economics and international institutions, while Wernimont (2019) has explored the feminist media history of quantification, including mortality statistics. While health statistics had been gathered for centuries, the movement to standardize epidemiology accelerated in the interwar period under aegis of the League of Nations Health Office (LNHO). The epidemiologists and medical officials at the LNHO believed in collating, collecting, and communicating standardized statistics as the most effective method to prevent another pandemic like the Spanish flu. They thought that swiftly-delivered statistics of infectious diseases could enable public health officials to act more quickly to enact quarantines or other measures to prevent an epidemic. Although the LNHO also created medical exchanges and national health systems, its main focus lay on generating comparable statistical information. The LNHO formed the first international epidemiological intelligence system by pushing nations, empires, and territories to submit their data in standardized numerical formats that enabled comparison. By the late 1920s, the League’s system encompassed two-thirds of the world’s population. The LNHO disseminated weekly bulletins of smallpox, cholera, and plague cases around the world. Such diseases were not necessarily the deadliest during that period. But they were the highest priority for empires that wished to smooth imperial trade and avoid the spread of disease from colonies back to Europe. The most powerful members within the League of Nations shaped how diseases should be understood—as individual cases counted by statistics—and they also decided which diseases would matter. The statistical mode took the focus away from examining how political, economic, and social conditions could exacerbate disease. This focus continued into the World Health Organization (Tworek 2019). While much has changed in global public health since the 1920s, the focus on statistics has become even more pronounced. During Covid, it has been accompanied by an increasing reliance on comparative and competitive models. A ranking mania has pervaded much of the discourse around Covid. The US magazine Foreign Policy had created an index of Covid-19 performance by autumn 2020. In the Canadian province of British Columbia, public health officials created their original models around Covid-19 in March and April 2020 based upon comparison with a worst-case scenario (Italy) and best-case scenario (South Korea). It was seen as a moment of triumph when models no longer had to compare to any scenarios elsewhere, because the case count in British Columbia was so low. Declaring the end of competitive comparisons in modelling implied that British Columbia had outperformed any compar-isons, possibly creating a complacency that contributed to an autumn surge of cases (though this was a very small surge compared to the rest of Europe and North America). The case of British Columbia leads into broader questions about the competitive nature of comparisons. Such implicit and explicit comparison often made little sense on an empirical level. First, countries have classified cases in different ways. China does not count asymptomatic cases in its case count, even though these account for up to forty percent of all cases. Second, the United Kingdom only counts as Covid deaths those that occur within 28 days of a Covid-19 diagnosis. Such a decision would make little sense for many other diseases, such as cancer. It makes even less sense as some studies start to show that some Covid patients are re-admitted into hospital and may pass away after being readmitted. Third, some countries have later revised their statistics, which many speculated were manipulated from the start for political reasons. Russia was the most obvious example, adding hundreds of thousands of cases in late 2020. This indeed seemed a classic case of the suppressive impulse of statistical comparison: Russian officials wanted to highlight the swift development of their vaccine, Sputnik V, and to downplay the terrible conditions in Russian hospitals, rather than appear high in ‘league tables’ of Covid cases. In other cases, a denial of international comparison offered a route to hold off the spotlight on poor policies. The rejection of comparisons also became a way of rejecting criticism. Many European governments dismissed New Zealand as an example of the successful suppression of Covid because it is an island nation. But Great Britain is an island too. Governance matters more than geography. In May 2020, as the UK’s Covid deaths per capita seemed to be rising above other European countries, the UK government claimed that the country’s statistics were not comparable with any other nation. To justify this assertion, politicians pointed to a Guardian article by statistician David Spiegelhalter. Yet Spiegelhalter had actually traced the complexities behind comparing international death statistics for technical reasons, including some that I have mentioned above. Spiegelhalter had to plead for the UK government to stop misinterpreting his article and weaponizing his explanations to cover for political errors (Taylor 2020). Another obvious question of competitive comparison was to whom a nation compared itself. New Zealand has garnered enormous English-language media attention, as has Australia. So too has Taiwan, though sometimes less for its actual policies and preparedness than as a geopolitical anti-China stance. Alex Azar, Health and Human Services Secretary under former President Donald Trump, sought to increase cooperation with Taiwan over health but appeared not to promote any of the Taiwanese policies that had led to such impressive results, whether masks or significant public health institutional capacity. One group has used comparison with Taiwan, New Zealand, and Australia to advocate for a Zero Covid strategy in Canada (Global Canada 2020). Meanwhile, other effective responses have garnered significantly less media and scholarly attention, including Senegal and Uruguay. Suppression strategies that did not involve significantly increasing funding for public health or introducing paid sick leave have garnered far more attention than community-led or equity-driven strategies. Few in Europe or North America looked to Vietnam or Cuba for lessons, perhaps because these were not countries that they expected to manage the crisis effectively. Even noncomparison is politicized in the age of competitive ranking. A further problem emerged from a focus on national-level statistics that obscured the differential and increasingly inequitable impact of Covid-19. In the United States, for example, policies exacerbated inequalities by failing to improve workplace safety for those who could not work from home such as people in meatpacking plants or Amazon warehouses (Okonkwo et al. 2020). Countries like Germany and provinces like Ontario did not make any effort to collect race-based data. In Toronto, civil society groups filled the gap. Racialized people comprised 79 percent of all Covid-19 cases up to November 30, 2020, although they only make up 52 percent of the city’s population. The differences were even starker for some groups. South Asian or Indo-Caribbean residents of Toronto made up 27 percent of all Covid-19 cases, though they comprise just 13 percent of the population. Such data have emerged mainly because doctors and civil society have pushed for collecting more granular data. Only once such patterns emerge can public health act to prevent infection where it is actually spreading. Broad statistics and national comparisons could lead astray from the real problems at hand, which require “equity-driven policy” (Dosani 2021). Statistical competition between nations has focused many Euro-American politicians on absolute numbers and pushed them towards more blanket measures, such as school closures or lockdowns. As one set of mathematicians and epidemiologists put it: “Focusing on high-level, broad policy decisions as singular causal determinants belies a complexity and heterogeneity of transmission dynamics to be considered if we are to move from ‘flattening the curve’ to turning it downward” (Baral et al. 2020). Without attention to smaller units of analysis, however, politicians cannot address the underlying structural conditions that facilitate the spread of Covid-19, such as homelessness, multi-generational households with no room for anyone to self-isolate, and precarious work conditions. Rather than one pandemic, as implied by national statistics, Covid-19 is actually “many microepidemics” with highly heterogenous effects that require much more specific interventions wherever possible (Mishra et al. 2020). Such problems were compounded by data disappearance and the noncollection of certain types of data. The United States government under the Trump administration so abdicated its responsibility to collect basic statistics that The Atlantic magazine led a group of citizens to track the number of Covid tests and cases in the Covid-19 Tracking Project (2021). As Samanth Subramanian, one of the writers of a major project on data disappearance in the United States, put it (Huffington Post 2020), “precise, transparent data is crucial in the fight against a pandemic—yet through a combination of ineptness and active manipulation, the government has depleted and corrupted the key statistics that public health officials rely on to protect us.” But problems with data collection are not unique to the United States. Many other countries, from Brazil to Tanzania, have seen politicians find ways to deny the state of the pandemic in their nation because they themselves had failed to create the testing infrastructure to understand the pandemic on the ground. Tanzania has not provided statistics on Covid-19 cases since April 2020. The politics behind such data collection long hid those really bearing the burden of the pandemic. More broadly, these fights over statistics amongst epidemiologists, biostatisticians, journalists, politicians, and much of the public have obscured the qualitative aspects of this crisis. It is striking how few stories we know of the over two million individuals who have died. Even the incoming Biden administration’s memorial service on January 19, 2021 featured forty illuminated columns in Washington, DC, each column representing 1,000 of the 400,000 Americans who had died at the time; the service did not mention any person by name nor tell their story. The lack of public mourning is a profound contrast to the many memorials to fallen soldiers, as well as the ritual of returning coffins in the United States. Civilian engagement with and understanding of deaths and violence during war has changed profoundly over time (Dudziak 2018). Perhaps the concealment of Covid-19 deaths dovetails with the now dehumanized drone warfare that has killed so many thousands. But the lack of stories remains a phenomenon to be explained. Some news organizations have filled that gap, including the Guardian, which has traced the deaths of over 1,300 healthcare workers in the United States. The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) too has sometimes featured stories of those who have passed, often because the family wanted others to know the person’s story. In the long run, though, the statistical mode inherited from the League of Nations has rendered other forms of suffering invisible. Statistics have desensitized, making the pandemic more about a competition over cases than about mourning those who have passed away and finding public health solutions to prevent further cases. As Caroline Chen (Jaffe 2021), a ProPublica reporter put it, Sometimes when I’m looking at the charts, I have to remind myself what the numbers mean. It’s become so easy after months and months of this to become numb. For example, even though the case count is finally starting to go down in Los Angeles County, and that is good news, it’s not just a trend line. […] Each person […] was somebody’s everything. I have to remember that, so I don’t ever treat the numbers like just numbers in my reporting. The absence of stories of suffering individuals further acts to obscure the disproportionate toll of the pandemic on racialized minorities in many European and American nations. Without stories to mobilize action, the statistics seem often to lead politicians away from the most effective solutions, including paid sick leave, rapid testing, and improved workplace safety for essential workers. Ignoring stories has also had detrimental consequences for those who have suffered from what is currently colloquially called “Long Covid.” Long Covid seems to compromise a wide range of symptoms from persistent fever to fatigue to skin issues to myocarditis. Yet, for many months, the individual stories of people who were suffering seemed to spread mainly on social media. The statistical focus on cases and deaths created a narrative binary of death and recovery. This binary elided the long-term effects of Covid-19. One UK doctor, Nisreen A. Alwan, suffered from fatigue and chest pain for months after Covid-19 symptoms (though she was never tested because there were so few tests in March 2020 when she developed symptoms). Like many others, her case was described as “mild,” yet she continued to struggle with the post-viral aftermath. Thousands of people took to social media and formed support groups to document confounding, incapacitating, and long-lasting effects. “We are the unrecorded,” lamented Alwan in July 2020. She pushed for more precise and nuanced definitions of Covid that do not simply divide between death, hospitalization, and mild cases before assuming a recovery within a few weeks. “Death is not the only thing to count in this pandemic, we must count lives changed,” she pleaded (Alwan 2020). Nation competition has effaced a commitment to quality of life and to preventing chronic illness. Perhaps ironically, many of the countries that have most effectively combatted the pandemic are those that spent least time obsessing over statistics. Instead, leaders spent more time creating rapport with their populations and conveying messages around civic responsibility and solidarity. In summer 2020, I worked with an interdisciplinary team to explore how nine jurisdictions (South Korea, Taiwan, Germany, Canada, Senegal, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, Denmark) and two Canadian provinces (British Columbia and Ontario) had communicated around Covid-19 (Tworek et al. 2020). Amongst other findings, we point to the importance of values, emotions, and stories alongside scientific facts. We also show the culturally-situated ways of conveying values and emotions that have frequently resulted in much greater compliance with public health guidelines. Examples were highly contextual and indeed, we pushed back against the idea that our report might pit countries against one another. Instead, we derived principles of effective communications that were implemented quite differently in different jurisdictions. In Taiwan, physical distancing was portrayed as an act of civic love. “The deeper the love,” went one key government slogan, “the greater the distance you keep.” The Health and Welfare Minister, Chen Shih-chung, has called for journalists and citizens alike to have empathy for other Taiwanese residents. “Have a heart!” Chen often urged the public. In British Columbia, meanwhile, chief medical officer Dr. Bonnie Henry conveyed statistics but has never given specific numbers as a guide for certain actions. Her mottos focused not on specific statistical values (like getting below 50 cases per 100,000 residents, as in Germany), but rather on asking people to work together, use layers of protection, be humble, and not shame those who did not seem to be following the rules. Henry frequently calls for empathy, noting that “we don’t know everyone’s story… we are all working hard to stay safe” (citations in Tworek et al. 2020). Finally, vaccine delivery has become a new form of nation ranking and a serious source of competition. Media outlets like Bloomberg have created maps showing how many tens of millions have been vaccinated. Israel became the envy of much of the world for vaccinating its population so quickly, though most reports omitted that Palestinians have yet to benefit. Such fierce competition has consequences: in early January 2021, around 25 vaccines had been administered in low-income countries, while over 25 million people had received at least the first vaccine jab in high-income nations. Tobias Werron and Johannes Nagel’s historical examination of “scarcity nationalism” could not be more apt for thinking about debates over vaccine deliveries in Europe and North America. Though writing about US ideologies of economic and naval power in the nineteenth century, so too in the twenty-first century has scarcity discourse become “a discursive mechanism, which links notions of scarcity to the imagining of competition.” Rather than global collaboration under the World Health Organization’s Covax scheme to deliver vaccines to the most vulnerable around the world, high-income countries compete to vaccinate their entire populations. Nation rankings and competition can cost lives. Looking at Covid through the dynamics of competition illustrated in this volume can conceptualize our current crisis in new, interdisciplinary ways. While denaturalizing competition shows the strange cruelty of national comparison, other chapters also offer important reflections on who might use competition to frame economic recovery. Dieter Plehwe’s chapter examines how “Economic Freedom Indices” created by the Canadian Fraser Institute and American Heritage Foundation became a “neoliberal policy tool.” Such efforts and mindsets may shape the recovery to come. Plehwe’s work alerts scholars and policymakers to be more critical of the “agenda-setting capacity of neoliberal think tanks.” Competition, particularly in rankings, seems here to stay. But scholars can offer vital interdisciplinary reflections on how and why competition emerged as well as how it affects diverse populations around the world. This volume poses vital questions: who is competing and for what? What discursive power does competition exert and how does that discursive power translate into policy? We might also end by asking: who is left out of competition, and whom does competition harm? These questions are all too real in times of Covid.

But how did one industry come to have such influence over US national trade policy? To understand this process, we must look not only at Big Pharma’s success regarding TRIPs but also regarding its steady accumulation of power within the US itself, including domestic patent reform. This latter process, however, is a history that incorporates not just Big Pharma but also two other key sectors: the emergent biotechnology firms and the life science departments of (leading) US universities. During the early 1980s, these three sectors found themselves converging into a broad-based and singleissue political coalition in favour of domestic patent reform (Tyfield 2008). As this coalition grew in political influence, it acted as a springboard and background for the further efforts of Big Pharma regarding global patents. Indeed, through its domestic connection with biotech and life science research, not least in the minds of Washington policy makers across both major parties, Big Pharma could plausibly cast itself as a uniquely important national asset – and one besieged by weak international patent rights. The importance of this connection cannot be underestimated. Big Pharma was not alone in the late 1970s in facing problems of profitability. Political demands from this industry for stronger patents could easily have been rejected by a generally pro-free-trade Congress as the protectionist demands of a mature, if not declining, industry (cf. Republican objections to the current bail-out of the automotive sector). Yet the pharmaceutical industry’s demands were met with unparalleled and bipartisan support (Slaughter and Rhoades 2002) because Big Pharma could depict them as the demands also of the ‘technology of the future’ (biotech), which would resolve the current crisis of profitability, and a crucial national asset (molecular biology research). Let us briefly consider how these three sectors converged into a pro-patent coalition. First, in the late 1970s Big Pharma was, like most industries at the time, facing a significant profitability crisis. This was due in part to ever-increasing R&D costs – not only a result of a dwindling pipeline for new products but also increasing regulatory costs following the thalidomide scandal – and in part to growing competition within the industry, including from generic drug manufacturers from developing countries. The recouping of R&D investment in the pharmaceutical industry, however, is unique in its dependence upon patents. In particular, drugs are often relatively straightforward and inexpensive to reverse engineer, meaning that trade secrets and know-how are not always effective in preserving monopoly innovation rents, while much of the huge R&D expense is spent on regulatory trials that yield no easily appropriable advantage. While it remains unclear whether Big Pharma needs strong patents to be financially viable, their attraction is plain. It follows that the pharmaceutical industry in particular was the most likely industry to lobby hard for stronger patents. Furthermore, as regards TRIPs, the growing R&D expenses also meant that costs could only be recouped through international sales, which would need commensurate international patent coverage. Note, however, that the United States market remains overwhelmingly dominant (at 68 per cent of global pharmaceutical revenues of Big Pharma in 2005) while developing countries are less than 10 per cent, focused in Latin American, Eastern Europe and the Asian newly industrializing economies (PhRMA 2005). Second, ‘biotech’ refers primarily to the biological applications that involve genetic manipulation. Such work follows from a number of scientific breakthroughs in recombinant DNA (rDNA) techniques in the 1970s. This work was not carried out with commercial applications in mind but in the context of the contemporaneous economic crisis and the historical experience of the economic impacts of previous breakthroughs in such fields as organic chemistry and electromagnetism. These scientific results were quickly latched upon as the obvious ‘next step’ by financiers. Patents, and patent reform, were seen to be crucial for this fledgling industry. Biotech is exceptional in the direct involvement of basic science in commercial applications. Such science, as abstract knowledge relatively disembodied from technical know-how, is relatively easily appropriated by competition. Biotechnology start-ups have R&D expenditures commonly as high as 50 per cent of sales, so that such threats of imitation jeopardize the whole business plan (Dutfield 2003: 153). The added security of patents over trade secrets was thus enormously attractive to biotech start-ups, matching Big Pharma’s interests. For patenting to be possible in biotech, however, two particular changes in US law seemed to be necessary. First, it was unclear that biological materials were patentable at all, given restrictions on patenting scientific discovery rather than invention. Second, given the location of this biotechnological research in university departments, the illegality of the patenting, and hence private appropriation, of the results of publicly funded basic science research was a major problem.4 This leads to the university molecular biology research groups where this basic science was being conducted. By the late 1970s, the budgets of American universities were under considerable strain, like Keynesian welfare spending more generally. Purely from the perspective of seeking to continue existing research projects, therefore, American universities found themselves compelled ‘to compete increasingly for external dollars that were tied to market-related research’ (Slaughter and Leslie 1997: 8). Biotechnology was unsurprisingly the focus of this move, given the striking scientific breakthroughs of the period. Furthermore, the percentage of federal research funds devoted to the life sciences was large and growing, so biological research was plausibly presented as a national competitive asset ripe for commercial exploitation. Amongst biology faculties, while there were mixed reactions regarding the embrace of commerce, there was widespread acknowledgement of the possibilities of funding their research in this way. Furthermore, we have seen how patents were (seen to be) a crucial factor for this to be possible in biotech. Indeed, as Kenney notes (1986: 257), it was the universities who had most interest in patent reforms as trade secrets were unavailable to them, not themselves being businesses. There was thus a clear prima facie compatibility of interests regarding domestic patent reform from these three parties: Big Pharma, biotech, and universities. Yet this alone does not explain how overwhelming bipartisan political support was forthcoming for the reforms demanded, if only because this discounts the high degree of controversy that accompanied (and in some cases, still besets) these changes in each case. For instance, regarding biotechnology, in the late 1970s rDNA experiments generated a great deal of public concern, and legislation regarding their strict regulation was being negotiated by parliamentary committees (in both the US and the UK) with the full expectation of uncomplicated passage into law. Similarly, the increasing penetration of commercial interests into academia continues to elicit grave anxiety regarding the effects on the open circulation and criticism of results, the direction of research agendas and the more generalized public trust in science. Yet in each case, these objections were suddenly swept aside in 1979/80. For instance, all legislative discussion of regulation for rDNA experiments simply evaporated between 1978 and 1982 (Wright 1994). Similarly, while moves to allow university patents in the 1970s were completely unsuccessful and rapidly defeated, in 1980 the Bayh-Dole Act, allowing just such patenting, was passed by an overwhelming bipartisan majority – with biotechnological pharmaceuticals the primary argument behind the legislation. Indeed, 1979/80 is a clear watershed for the fortunes of all three players. First, as regards Big Pharma, the profitability of the industry took off from 1980, rising to make it the single most profitable industry in the US economy by the turn of the century. In the midst of a downturn in 2003, the ten Big Pharma firms in the Fortune 500 list of largest US companies accumulated a profit that exceeded the aggregated profits of all the other 490 companies combined. Second, regarding biotech, the public listing of a biotech company, Genentech, on the New York Stock Exchange in 1980 was not only the first such listing, but also one of the most successful ever, with the fastest rise in the history of the New York market. Yet biotech was still a fundamentally risky technology and Genentech itself was far from profitability. Similarly, the legal framework for biotech was transformed from 1980, not only through the BayhDole Act, but also case law confirming the patentability of biotechnological commodities (Diamond vs. Chakrabarty), the creation of a specialist patent court in 1982 that has made US law much more pro-patent, and a series of laws supporting the university-industry complex of biotechnology (Slaughter and Rhoades 2002). Finally, following these legal changes, university patenting has ballooned since 1980, with particularly striking growth in the life sciences. Patents granted to universities more than doubled in 1979–84, and again in 1984–9 and 1989–97 (Mowery et al. 2001), and these have been disproportionately concentrated in biological classes represented in 49.5 per cent of all university patents in the early 2000s (Owen-Smith and Powell 2003). At Columbia and Stanford universities, both major protagonists and beneficiaries of the changes, by 1995 biomedical patents accounted for more than 80 per cent of their substantial licensing revenues (Mowery et al. 2001: 107). In short, therefore, the privatization through strong patents of such biological research suddenly became an acceptable change, if not an urgent priority, at exactly the time of the neoliberal counterrevolution. For it was the structural demands of the global capitalist political economy – with the US at its centre, so that these demands were most effective there – for a new round of capital expansion that enabled the formation of this coalition. Financialization after 1980 gave political power to finance capital and its favoured investments, the most important being biotech, to amend economic regulation to its advantage. Without this changed context, given that the initial demands of each party were prima facie weak and greatly contested, the patent coalition’s demands were unlikely even to stumble to success, let alone stride through virtually unopposed. Simply by pursuing its own disparate interests, however, the US life sciences patent coalition has been a crucial agent in the history of neoliberalism and a key player in neoliberal processes of primitive accumulation, creating a global IP regime that especially covered the life sciences, the industries for which such IPRs are most controversial.

Biden’s efforts are falling short because, with some exceptions, great power competition is threatening to become a dominant security narrative among U.S. foreign policy elites. The window is still open for alternative narratives – such as “competitive coexistence” – to guide policy. But if the great power competition narrative becomes entrenched, it will be difficult to overturn – and that could produce serious pathologies in U.S. grand strategy.

Security narratives are stories about a country’s strategic environment. They identify what countries play major roles, what they want, and why they might pose a threat to a nation’s interests. In the current narrative of great power competition, the major characters are the U.S., China, and Russia. The U.S., as protagonist, hopes to maintain a liberal world order against increasingly aggressive and assertive opponents.

The capitalist media in Australia are full of news and opinion designed to create fear and suspicion of China and its so-called “communist” government. To advance this agenda, many real and alleged instances of bad behaviour by Beijing are cited. This is having the desired effect. Public opinion is shifting against China and giving the Liberal Government (aided and abetted by the Labor “Opposition”) more room to join the United States in its anti-China military manoeuvres. And here is the link to the bigger picture. The United States has taken an increasingly anti-China stance in recent years because it is afraid of losing its global dominance. The US remains the single most powerful country by a long way, despite receding from its overwhelming superiority in the 1950s and facing a declining position in recent decades. The USSR collapsed in 1991. Other potential imperialist rivals rose to a threatening position, but their challenges faded away. The great size of the US, its control of world institutions, its multi-national corporations and its massive rent from intellectual property forced first Germany, then Japan and finally the European Union to concede a subordinate position. Germany and Japan, being substantially smaller in population and stuck on a lower GDP per capita figure, have no prospect of overtaking the US. The EU, though a promising project which had the necessary scale to compete with the US, has fallen victim to intractable conflicts between its constituent capitalist classes. China is a different kettle of fish. With a population more than four times that of the US, it can surpass the United States without becoming as rich. Even if its GDP per capita hits a ceiling of half that of the US, China’s total GDP would be more than double the US. Apart from exerting a stronger economic influence on the world economy than the US, it could build a stronger military with a lower share of GDP devoted to paying for it. The advantages which enabled the US to defeat previous challengers may not be enough to prevent this scenario. This prospect is, of course, intolerable to the US capitalists. As a result, they have united against China. While US Congress is bitterly divided under the Trump regime and is stalemated on virtually every other question, the Democrats and Republicans have repeatedly combined to pass anti-China resolutions almost unanimously. This is not just one of Trump’s solo frolics. It is necessary to step back and take in the entire international picture. In order to preserve its global dominance, US imperialists are attempting to prevent China becoming a developed country and its people acquiring the standard of living that goes with that. To force China deliberately to stay underdeveloped, and so to keep the bulk of its people in poverty, would be a crime of staggering proportions. It is an objective which would probably require war. All the actions of the US and Australia, as well as the actions of China, have to be examined from this perspective. Complaints from Australian politicians and in the media about China’s behaviour have mostly fallen into two categories: complaints about genuinely poor behaviour by the Beijing Stalinists, and complaints about their violation of the rules-based international order. The repression of the Uighurs and the Tibetans have to be Beijing’s worst crimes. In both cases Beijing is swamping the local population with ethnic Han migrants who have immense privileges and establish dominant economic positions. In the case of the Uighurs, the repression amounts to an attempted cultural genocide. A somewhat lesser crime, though a total disgrace in itself, is the suppression of civil liberties in Hong Kong. Beijing’s violation of the “one country, two systems” agreement isn’t designed to integrate Hong Kong into the People’s Republic, but to give Hong Kong the worst of both worlds – to combine Beijing’s political tyranny with a billionaires’ free market paradise. In the process, of course, they are blowing away any chance of a voluntary reunification with Taiwan, the province which the Kuomintang dictatorship retained in 1949 and which has subsequently had its own political evolution. Beijing’s violations of the rules-based international order are more complex. This order didn’t arise in a vacuum. It expresses the institutionalised power of the United States, both in its rules and its mechanisms for enforcement. It is particularly galling to see the US complaining that China is violating the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea with its fortifications in the South China Sea, given that the US is one of only a handful of States that have refused to sign, let alone ratify, it. China’s alleged theft of intellectual property is no crime at all. Property is theft and intellectual property is perhaps the worst kind of theft, since it is the legal protection of an unnatural monopoly that impoverishes the world so that capitalists can collect rent. Finally, although many of China’s alleged cyber-attacks are genuinely objectionable, we need to consider what we’re not being told. Anyone who thinks the United States isn’t doing the same, or worse, to China is so naive they should never buy a used car. Beijing just keeps quiet about it all so that the US doesn’t find out how much Beijing knows. Certain complaints from the Australian media, though, have revealed the real agenda. China’s Belt and Road initiative has been attracting many beefs from capitalist politicians and pundits, with very thin justifications. And recently Australian media published objections to China’s aid to South Pacific countries to fight the coronavirus. What they’re complaining about is not China’s misbehaviour, but China’s development and growing international prominence.

As noted in the Introduction, although all countries may take a nationalistic approach to IP, this Article focuses on delineating the dangers of IP nationalism as exhibited by wealthy countries of the Global North that focus on promoting strong IP rights globally and thereby price essential goods out of reach for many citizens of the Global South. For countries that have high exports of IP protected products, such as drugs, technology, and entertainment (film and movies), this promotes domestic economic interests if other countries provide strong IP rights that maximize revenue. For example, overall GDP will increase if a nation’s exports of copyrighted films are protected in other countries by strong copyright laws since those copyright laws will result in profits to domestic industries. Given the fact that US is a major exporter of IP-intensive goods, it is not surprising that US government officials have often made statements about promoting “strong” or “effective” IP rights.78 Of course, such actions also impose substantial costs on the Global South that then struggle with to pay an IP premium on needed medicine as well as other essential items such as books that are central to education.

IP nationalism can also include actions to protect domestic IP from being stolen. For example, visa limits on Chinese students and scholars were purportedly enacted to limit such individuals from stealing IP for China.79 In addition, a ban on US companies from working with Chinese company Huwei to avoid IP being stolen can be considered IP nationalism.80 Also, laws as well as proposed laws to protect domestic IP are included.81 Similarly, IP nationalism can extend beyond simply protecting domestic IP and include negative characterizations of other nations. This is reflected in a statement by the Assistant Attorney General for National Security when charging hackers that “the Chinese Communist party [has an] insatiable hunger for American and other non-Chinese companies’ hard earned intellectual property, including COVID-19 research.

https://cpim.org/intellectual-property-knowledge-capital-and-labour/]//ETang

[…] Several justifications are provided for the need for intellectual property. Advocates argue that incentive is needed to encourage further effort; inventors deserve property in the fruits of their labour and intellectual property is important to ensure both natural right and efficiency. But for Marxists, there is nothing ‘natural’ about property. Property formation is an ideological and material process and there is always an attempt to obscure the political acts that produce property norms and property regimes. The power relations that organize property form(s) of public, private and commons in knowledge production are hidden in the legal details, which capital accesses from the nation state(s) through the efforts of lawyers and lobbyists. More recently the capitalist character of the contemporary narrative is under use for the justification of intellectual property. These claims include the benefits of introduction of markets into knowledge production; the requirement of private property in knowledge for efficient use of knowledge and information; ensuring more and better innovation through markets in knowledge and information; little stimulus would exist for innovation without intellectual property; innovators must be incentivized and rewarded to commercialize knowledge; innovators require private monopolies to obtain the return on investment; and that progress in science and technology depends on the existence of markets in knowledge supported by stronger IP. […] Thus, for Marxists there lies hidden the story of the commodification of knowledge and information in the intellectual property laws.[2] Historically, the production of knowledge has not taken place in the market, but rather in guilds, universities, religious bodies and state institutions. The production of knowledge was rewarded through patronage, prestige, prizes, or income tied to rank or status rather than to economic performance. In the Medieval world, knowledge was often interpreted as a gift from God, and for this reason ideas were seen as inappropriate objects of property. This changed through the rise of capitalism and possessive individualism. Patents and other forms of intellectual property rights are seen as legal devices in the service of the process of commodification of knowledge; in this case, royalties that can be defined as the market price for the right to use patented knowledge. Universities can sell and license their patents to corporations and establish external sources of revenue in the form of royalty payments. Knowledge as commodity can exist and acquire different commodity forms; Jessop (2007: 122-125) has argued that knowledge can circulate in various ways. Knowledge can circulate as intellectual commons. In this case knowledge has a non-commodity status especially if it is produced and distributed through a non-market mechanism (e.g. patronage). Knowledge is a fictitious commodity when it is enclosed through non-market mechanisms and circulated as private property within the market. Knowledge becomes a quasi-commodity when knowledge production (intellectual labour) is formally subsumed under capitalist control and competition. Knowledge becomes a real capitalist commodity when the real subsumption of intellectual labour takes place, i.e., when knowledge is subsumed under the capitalist labour process. Knowledge may also become a form of fictitious or fictive capital when revenue streams to knowledge producers (e.g. universities) are guaranteed by intellectual property rights. Marx himself foresaw under capitalism the advancement of enclosure of knowledge accelerating through the processes of primitive accumulation of capital as well as the dynamic of capital accumulation. Knowledge can circulate in various ways within and between social systems. Ample evidence exists of how through the processes of primitive accumulation of capital and the dynamic of capital accumulation, commodification of knowledge proceeded first in a slow and gradual way, and then rapidly under 20th-century capitalism. Personal and technological forms of surveillance in the production process are necessary elements of the capitalist economy (Fuchs 2012: 14). Commodification of knowledge is a process that is contributing to the increased surveillance of academic labour since this process is able to enhance corporations’ accumulation of capital in knowledge capitalism. Commodification of knowledge and the related integration between universities and market forces requires the direct as well as ideological control of employee behaviour within higher education institutions. Academic labour is increasingly getting subjected to the discipline and logic of accumulation in which monopoly, finance and informational capital are important actors. Evidence also exists of how even under capitalism progress in science and technology could occur without the creation of private property in knowledge and information. There exist mechanisms of government patronage, prizes and procurement to continue with the progress in production of knowledge (Mazzucato, 2014). Societies need not depend upon the introduction of markets in knowledge production. The markets for knowledge have been organized and provided social legitimacy in the capitalist society through the narrative that ‘knowledge produced for sale’ is efficient. The truth is that the fiction of ‘knowledge has to be produced as commodity’ allows monopoly capital to gain a foothold in the knowledge production and distribution process. […] The increasingly global reach of intellectual property law and the neo-liberal assumptions embedded in it raise many important issues that need to be analysed. The first issue is the skewed distributive effects of the TRIPs Agreement on ‘have’ and ‘have not’ nations. The TRIPs Agreement permits intellectual property exporting nations to erode their rights extraterritorially. The Agreement erodes historic notions of territoriality and sovereignty, and disadvantages those developing nations which have very little proprietorship in knowledge resources and few resources to pay for essential intellectual property-protected goods. The increasing global reach of intellectual property laws requires greater engagement with the challenge of formulation of strategies to protect a public domain that cannot be fully owned as intellectual property. The inequalities relating to the exploitation of intellectual property as a form of bio-colonialism or bio-piracy allow the developed nations to remove natural resources and discoveries out of developing nations as raw materials that can be manipulated and transformed into intellectual property with no recognition or economic benefit (see Keith Aoki 1998). Drahos and Braithwaite (2002) point out how the redistribution of intellectual property rights involves a transfer of knowledge assets from the intellectual commons into private interests, like media conglomerates and integrated life sciences corporations, rather than individual scientists and authors. The effect of this is to raise levels of private monopolistic power to dangerous global heights, at a time when states, which have been weakened by the forces of globalization, have a lesser capacity to protect their citizens from the consequences of the exercise of such power. These concerns are closely connected to the issue of the changing balance between protecting knowledge, innovation and creativity as private property versus disseminating it widely in for public use. The tension between these two can be captured in the concept of the ‘public domain’, or sometimes, the ‘intellectual commons’ or ‘knowledge commons’, which denotes areas of social life where public access is privileged over intellectual property rights. Because the expanded global reach of intellectual property protection threatens access to knowledge commons, free speech and democratic participation in the process of intellectual labour is being made to appear as capital’s own process, and the capitalist is being designated as the ‘legitimate’ owner of knowledge and information. As the owner of means of production used within the production of knowledge and the purchaser of labour power, capital is effectively becoming the manager of the processes of knowledge production. ‘Capital’ for Marxists refers to a social relation, namely that of waged labour employed in the production of commodities to be sold for a profit. With the ever-increasing penetration of the capital relation into knowledge production, intellectual property is actually creating a social possibility space for capital’s expansion. Intellectual property has a central role in the neo-liberal project. A capitalist economy must expand continually if it is not to collapse, a consequence of the dynamics of self-interested investment upon which it depends. The dynamics of a capitalist economy and the production of profit are now far more dependent upon the spread and intensity of capital in the field of production of knowledge. Today, IP is an important instrument of primitive accumulation in the hands of capital as it has allowed formal and real subsumption of all types of knowledge production throughout the world. Capital is excluding and displacing its costs to spaces such as the universities of both North and South. In the field of knowledge production, the process of formal subsumption of intellectual labour to capital includes the establishment of the wage labour relation. Universities are a terrain of contested development. In the publicly funded higher education institutions, academics are beginning to oppose the introduction of principles of new public management-intellectual technology of primitive accumulation. Academics are opposing the introduction of stronger intellectual property rights. […] Knowledge is a public good not only in terms of economic benefit but also in terms of the moral sense. Scientific knowledge is not only a public good which has characteristics of a non-rivalrous and non-exclusionary nature, but it is also an inexhaustible resource. Scientific knowledge can be put to infinite uses. Generic knowledge, be it scientific or technological knowledge, is not an asset that has limited specific use but is an asset with the characteristics of fungibility. Generic artefacts of knowledge have the potential of multiple meanings. New meanings of generic knowledge are possible. Science is the activity of manipulating nature with the use of conceptual machines, the study of technology and machinery can reveal facts of science just as the study of commodity reveals the nature of value and abstract labour. Capital is trying to separate head and hand. Intellectual property widens the separation of head and hand. Technology reveals the active relation of man to nature, the direct process of the production of his life, and thereby also lays bare the process of the production of the social relations of his life, and of the mental conceptions that flow from those relations. The dynamics of rent generation in global value chains lays bare this separation. Today, trans-national capital originating from the United States, Europe and Japan controls intellectual property and uses it for surplus extraction from all over the world. Science and technology give capital a power of expansion which is independent of the given magnitude of the capital actually functioning. There is a clear parallel between scientific abstractions, concepts and conceptual systems on the one side and value as the manifestation of abstract labour on the other. The intellectual property system is imposing on science the rule of capital. Science is the cognition of necessity. For Marxists, socialism is recognition of necessity. Knowledge is liberation. Capital envisages for knowledge commons a role in the process of capital accumulation. Socialism envisages knowledge commons for transformation. Science is for transformation. Science is not for domination. Capital is trying to dominate humanity as well as nature. Monopoly over knowledge is a threat to democracy, public interest and progress – scientific, technological and economic. Even under capitalism, intellectual property monopolies are undermining social and scientific progress. For Marxists, class struggle starts with the resistance against immediate threats arising out of the strengthening of the property form and the imposition of the value form of knowledge production for market-based exchange. Struggles being undertaken to save and protect the space for social, scientific and technological progress need to be given importance. Production of knowledge for use towards the advancement of public interest, social progress and democracy is the integral goal of socialism. When science is in the process of being subsumed to capital the challenge of protection of public interest in science requires struggle against the regressive trend of strengthening of intellectual property. For the achievement of counter-hegemony for social transformation Marxists must actively contribute to the struggle for transformative science which promotes the value form in which reflexivity, broadening of space for socially responsible innovations, participation, self-organization and public scrutiny and change in class correlation to alter the balance in favour of public interest, social progress and democracy are equally well counted. Ambiguity in the definitions of ‘knowledge’ and ‘information’ may cause misunderstanding if the meanings of these terms are not distinguished. The term ‘knowledge’ implies the satisfaction of three conditions: a belief, a truth and a justification condition. Information understood ‘as data transmitted from a sender to a receiver’ does not have to satisfy these three conditions. Thus, information refers to such objects as databases (lists and statistics) and downloadable files (e.g. songs in mp3 format). Information can be treated as a sub-category of knowledge. Both information and knowledge can be commodified. It can be added that objects such as ‘datasets’, have to be activated and used by those who are able, partly due to their knowledge, to interpret and process. When understood this way, knowledge refers to something people possess, i.e., a cognitive capacity, and information refers to something passive that needs to be interpreted by those who have a cognitive capacity. However, it would not be incorrect to suggest that information matters. Cognitive capacity involves access to information. [2] In Marxian terms, knowledge becomes a commodity only under certain relations, i.e., what counts as a commodity is socially determined. Commodification of knowledge in itself is a complex process. The capitalist commodification process consists of the following elements: privatization (exclusive right to control an object), alienability (an object can be detached from its seller), individuation (separating an object from its context via legal/material boundaries), abstraction (assimilation of a specificity of an object to a broader type), valuation (monetization), displacement (concealing involved social relations). Under capitalism the labour process is subjected to competition that implies that there is pressure to reduce the time during which commodities are produced and how long it takes to realize the surplus value that commodities imply; commodities’ market-mediated monetary value for the seller gains more importance in relation to commodities’ use value than their material and/or symbolic usefulness to the purchaser. In a capitalist market economy, only those commodities are produced for markets that have exchange value.

Neoliberalism sees competition as the defining characteristic of human relations. It redefines citizens as consumers, whose democratic choices are best exercised by buying and selling, a process that rewards merit and punishes inefficiency. It maintains that “the market” delivers benefits that could never be achieved by planning. Attempts to limit competition are treated as inimical to liberty. Tax and regulation should be minimised, public services should be privatised. The organisation of labour and collective bargaining by are portrayed as market distortions that impede the formation of a natural hierarchy of winners and losers. Inequality is recast as virtuous: a reward for utility and a generator of wealth, which trickles down to enrich everyone. Efforts to create a more equal society are both counterproductive and morally corrosive. The market ensures that everyone gets what they deserve. We internalise and reproduce its creeds. that they acquired their wealth through merit, ignoring the advantages – such as education, inheritance and class – that may have helped to secure it. The poor begin to blame themselves for their failures, even when they can do little to change their circumstances. Never mind structural unemployment: if you don’t have a job it’s because you are unenterprising. Never mind the impossible costs of housing: if your credit card is maxed out, you’re feckless and improvident. Never mind that your children no longer have a school playing field: if they get fat, it’s your fault. In a world governed by competition, those who fall behind become defined and self-defined as losers.

When, in 2005, China National Offshore Oil Corporation (CNOOC) made a bid to acquire US energy company Unocal, it resulted in widespread political opposition on grounds of ‘national security’, causing CNOOC to withdraw the bid. The incident offered, some said, ‘the first window into the global fear of resource scarcity and the new geopolitics of energy that will likely accompany it’ 1 . The growing importance of energy to state survival and continued economic development has in practice put energy policy into the ‘high’ politics arena of national security2 , making the phrase ‘energy security’ commonplace. The prevailing understanding of energy security is inherently state-centric and linked to a national security paradigm3 , focusing on securing state energy supplies at stable prices. This understanding of energy both impedes cooperation and encourages strategic and/or economic competition between states over energy supplies by tying energy to a national security ‘us vs them’ scenario, as illustrated by the Unocal affair, which is here considered the first case of energy being successfully securitised in US-China relations4 . Limiting security to national security in practice also limits the energy security debate, overlooking insecurities caused by state pursuit of secure energy supplies on the local and the international levels, including human and environmental security5 . This paper suggests desecuritisation as a possible solution to this problem. Moving energy out of the ‘high’ politics of national security would both make cooperation more likely as energy ‘security’ would no longer be framed in us/them terms, and open up the debate on policy alternatives.

This paper uses US-China relations as an empirical case study to illustrate this argument. Not only are they the dominant powers in the current international system and the two largest consumers of energy globally, they are also key importers of energy6 . Consequently, energy is particularly important in their respective foreign policies, and often causes tension in bilateral relations. This has made them the focus of much of the current academic literature on energy security, and a useful case study for this paper. Overall, both states view energy largely in national security terms, though full securitisation of energy has not been successful before 2005. While broadly equated with national security, full and successful securitisation requires both a particular rhetorical structure and a sense of urgency, combined with a suitable external and discursive context to ensure audience acceptance of the designation of the security threat7 . While the relationship has seen many securitising moves before, full successful securitisation has not occurred in energy relations between the US and China before Unocal. As a result, this paper uses CNOOCs 2005 bid for Unocal as a case study to illustrate the problems of securitising energy in US-China relations, and to put forward an argument for desecuritising energy.

The past years have witnessed a transformation in the logic underpinning global economic relations. Not only China and Russia, but also the European Union, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States are increasingly embracing a myriad of economic policies that defy the largely market-oriented rationale of the (neo)liberal order prevailing over the course of the last three decades. This (neo)liberal order was premised on the relative separation of the realms of economic and security policy, and thus of having profit-seeking market players as leading the pace and direction of global economic relations. This attitude is well exemplified by the 1994 declaration which prefaces the agreements launching the World Trade Organization, in which trade ministers hailed ‘the participation of their economies in the world trading system, based upon open, market-oriented policies’ (WTO, 1994, p. 1263). Developments over the last years point in a different direction with major economies actively deploying a mix of innovative as well as time-tested interventions in the economy directed at safeguarding their ‘strategic assets’, ‘critical infrastructures’ or ‘emerging technologies’ from control or influence by foreign state and/or market forces.

In order to make sense of these transformations, this chapter introduces the concept of ‘balancing dependence’ by which we refer to state policies that seek to reduce economic dependencies on foreign actors, both public and private. As great-power competition has been accelerating, most major powers have become increasingly concerned about the security risks that interdependence poses for state autonomy and economic preparedness. On the one hand, these risks are systemic in that they stem from the networked nature of the global economy and the effects of sudden disruptions in multi-tiered supply chains. The fragility of these global economic networks and linkages has been highlighted by the COVID-19 crisis (Farrell & Newman, 2020). On the other hand, these risks are geostrategic, relating to the way asymmetric interdependencies can be manipulated, exploited and leveraged for strategic benefits by the less vulnerable parties in these relationships (Farrell & Newman, 2019; Leonard, 2016; Scholvin & Wigell, 2018). As a result, recent reviews of security doctrines by China, the EU, Russia and the United States have seen unprecedented emphasis put on economic security and policies to reduce strategies dependencies (e.g. Helwig, 2021; McCormick et al., 2020; Trenin, 2021).

American policy describes threats to technological innovation in classic national security terms as a threat to the foundation of American economic strength and, subsequently, its national power. A series of National Security Strategy (NSS) statements have stressed that economic wealth is central to national power, American leadership, and the future of American global primacy. The 2010 NSS stated that, ‘Simply put, American innovation is the foundation of American Power’ (White House Citation2010, np, 2, 28, 51), while the 2015 NSS noted that the United States sought to ‘advance a model of American leadership rooted in the foundation of America’s economic and technological strengths and the values of the American people’ (White House Citation2015a, 1, 21). A shift in tone occurs under the Trump Administration towards more combative and pessimistic language, although the underlying message is the same, as is the underlying policy (Wolfe Citation2018, 202). The 2017 NSS stated that ‘Losing our innovation and technological edge would have far-reaching negative implications for American prosperity and power’ (White House Citation2017, 21; OSTP Citation2019). Contemporary socio-technical imaginaries of innovation in American policy are not reflective of the short-term drifting desires of policy experts (cf. Jepperson Citation2020, 52–53), but rather articulate the long-standing idea that technological innovation is central to the competitiveness of the American economy (Berman Citation2013, 417). Fears about the erosion of US economic power through the decline of its technological leadership centre primarily on the vulnerability of intellectual property rights due to the insecurity of digital networks (White House Citation2018a, 2, 16, passim; US Department of Justice Citation2018, 65; White House Citation2013). China is identified as the single most important source of threat to intellectual property rights – and thus technological innovation – in American policy, as it has been for nearly three decades. US security concerns around innovation are intertwined with the broadest possible geopolitical anxieties surrounding China’s rise and America’s decline. American officials stress the substantive economic shock of IP theft, in lost revenue and lost jobs. For instance, the United States Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator (IPEC) asserts that some 45 million jobs, or 30% of the American labour market, are in IP intensive industries (IPEC Citation2016). Estimates of lost revenue are hard to accurately determine, but are substantial by any account; the US government estimates losses between 1–3% of GDP per year, or roughly 600 USD billion dollars a year, while President Trump suggested a figure of 300 USD billion dollars a year (United States Department of Justice Citation2018, 28; White House Citation2017). While clearly conscious of the present impact of cybertheft on the US economy – reversal of harmful trade practices and IP theft was a central plank in the permanent campaign of the Trump Administration – American policy discourse conspicuously focused on the future impact of present threats. Former director of the National Security Agency and head of U.S. Cyber Command General Keith Alexander called cyber-enabled IP theft ‘The greatest transfer of wealth in history,’ asserting ‘that our future disappearing right there’, a view endorsed by the Commission on the Theft of Intellectual Property (Rogin Citation2012; IP Commission Citation2013; Blair and Alexander Citation2017). Cyber-enabled intellectual property rights theft is not merely a threat to present corporate profitability. While present threats to lost corporate revenue and lost jobs are certainly significant in US discourse (White House Citation2019a; IPEC 2019, 2, 6, passim), IP theft is imagined as targeting and undermining the very incentives that, in the causal narrative of US socio-technical imaginaries, are required to drive innovation forward into the future. The 2018 National Cyber Strategy (White House Citation2018a, 16) succinctly states this long-held policy view Strong intellectual property rights ensure continued economic growth and innovation in the digital age. The United States government has fostered and will continue to help foster a global intellectual property rights system that provides incentives for innovation through the protection and enforcement of intellectual property rights such as patents, trademarks and copyrights. The theory of technological innovation disclosed in American policy has as its core institutional feature the protection of private property rights. These rights generate the incentives, and pressures, required to motivate actors to undertake technological innovation, as absent these innovations will not occur. A pithy turn of phrase by Abraham Lincoln – that intellectual property rights add ‘the fuel of interest to the fire of genius’ (White House Citation2011, 7; IPEC 2016, 2) – is the bedrock assumption on which the institutional apparatus of the United States government innovation ecosystem is built. In US imaginaries IP theft is an existential threat to American innovation because it damages the incentive structure required for technological innovation by making it unprofitable, removing the fuel that generates the combustion necessary for technological progress. Prominent strands of American culture inform these imaginaries. The prototype of the ‘lone genius,’ with Thomas Edison as its exemplar, remains prevalent in wider US socio-technical imaginaries around innovation (Lemley Citation2012; Pfotenhauer and Juhl Citation2017; Bix Citation2000, 11). The lone genius trope hold that the genius ‘can solve problems that stump the experts’, beetling away in home laboratories to build their inventions and reap their material reward (Lemley Citation2012, 710). Donald Trump’s high-profile comparison of Elon Musk to Edison (and the inventor of the wheel) captures, in a slightly mangled and exaggerated form, this wider notion: ‘[…] he’s one of our great geniuses, and we have to protect our genius. You know, we have to protect Thomas Edison and we have to protect all of these people that – came up with originally the light bulb and – the wheel and all of these things’ (CNBC Citation2020; White House Citation2018b; White House Citation2011, 9). Lone genius prototypes focus policy attention on threats to individual incentives in the marketplace rather than threats to innovation capacities that exist, for example, due to restrictive immigration policies. The theory of social action presented in US policy derived from the lone inventor myth thereby focuses on markets as the source of innovation in American society, with the private sector identified as the location of invention. Explicitly acknowledging the central role of state support to the process of technological innovation, Trump Administration Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross asserted that ‘Many of these innovations [the Internet, smart phones, and medical science] got their start with the help of Federal R&D funding. But it was the private sector that spun these technologies out of the laboratory and into the economy’ (Ross Citation2018). In other words,‘The private sector is America’s innovation engine’ (White House Citation2011, 9). American cybersecurity policy is designed to enabled the state to take steps to address market failures, particularly through the establishment of public-private partnerships designed to meet cybersecurity threats. Yet the point of this practice, enabled through these specific imaginaries, is to enable market-led innovation in the economy as a whole; the state’s role is always conceptualised as supportive of, and external to, the innovation process (White House Citation2011; cf. Pfotenhauer and Juhl Citation2017). The impact of these imaginaries is to reproduce the institutional separation between the public sector and the private sector, or that between politics and economics, within American society as a whole. In pursuing the security of technological innovation American policy makers are attempting to maintain a series of existing boundaries between what is, and what is not, political. In the causal account of technological innovation outlined above, American pursuit of the security of innovation is merely a means to the end of American national security, defined in conventional terms as economic and military power. This is an account of how technological innovation occurs, demonstrated through American exemplars, and, in turn, how it is threatened by cyber-enabled IP theft. It links a micro-level theory of human action linked to the broadest questions of world order and American global leadership. Yet, while these aspects of the US imaginary disclose something resembling instrumental rationality, the security of technological innovation is not valued solely for impact on national power and cannot be encapsulated in these terms. Intertwined with apparently generic means-ends calculations is a normative account of how and why the continued security of technological innovation is of signal importance to the American way of life. It is to this facet of US socio-technical imaginaries that we now turn. Protecting ‘our way of life’: market-led innovation and American national identity In contemporary US national security policy actualising the creativity and the entrepreneurial spirit of the American people is understood as central to the American way of life. Threats to technological innovation threaten the very practices that comprise American’s ways of ‘being in the world’. US imaginaries articulate the processes and products of material culture as central to the identity of the national community. Securing market-led technological is thereby understood as a normative project, rather than merely the instrumental pursuit of other values. American politicians’ sense of the United States as uniquely creative and entrepreneurial is well captured in a 2016 speech by Barack Obama (Obama Citation2016; White House Citation2015b, 65). Speaking about the role of technological innovation in revitalising the city of Pittsburgh, he stated And that’s consistent with this nation, who we are – a nation born from an idea that became the world’s laboratory. There aren’t a lot of countries where one of your Founding Fathers has an idea to fly a kite in a thunderstorm and helps to fundamentally change how we think about electricity. A place where the women who solved the equations to take us into space, even though they weren’t always acknowledged. A nation whose engineers brought us the Internet. Innovation is in our DNA. Here, popular culture tropes and a mythic presentation of America’s political development intermingle to produce a powerful encapsulation of the dominant national identity constructed in US socio-technical imaginaries. The reference to Benjamin Franklin’s kite ties together innovation with the foundation of the American state. In an image that, while possibly false – the veracity of Franklin’s kite experiment to research electricity remains uncertain – nevertheless suggests that innovation is an essential aspect of the national character. ‘Who we are’, in this context, is a political community that finds its expression through a specific form of scientific and technological innovation, an understanding present throughout US policy in which market-led innovation allows the United States to realise its character. Narratives of American political development support this common-sense sociology of innovation, as contemporary US policy is linked to the historical founding of the republic. Section 1, Article 8§8 of the United States Constitution granted Congress the power ‘To Promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries’ (Constitution of the United States Citation1788). American officials highlight this clause as responsible for the subsequent success of American capitalism and its track record of technological innovation (IPEC 2020, Citation2018; White House Citation2017, Citation2015b). Collapsing two different historical contexts separated by 230 years into a narrative of the historical development of a national community, this idea of simultaneity – the identity of past and present – is of signal importance in producing a techno-nationalist identity (Anderson 2006 [Citation1983], 22–36). Inter-societal comparison is, of course, of central importance in these imaginaries. In the same Obama went on to stress that ‘And it is the thing that sets us apart; that ability to imagine and hypothesise, and then test and figure stuff out, and tinker and make things and make them better, and then break them down and rework them (Obama Citation2016; White House Citation2017, 2, 21). American cultural identity has always been constructed, in part, via the relational-comparative register of technological culture, with societies framed as modern, traditional, civilised or barbaric through American’s contrast of technological artefacts (Adas Citation1989; Citation2006). From the initial colonial settlement through the closing of the frontier at the end of the 19th century white European settlement was justified through technological comparison with indigenous political communities. Taking up the imperial mantel in the 20th century, American global dominance was conceived and conducted in technological registers, particularly in foreign development policy as the United States attempted to physically remake the world in its own image (Ekbladh Citation2010; Adas Citation1989, 402–418). Obama’s indicative statement highlights the weight these comparisons retain in the composition of American nationalism. Indeed, American ingenuity in creating the Internet is an oft-noted point of comparison (White House Citation2018a, passim) used to justify contemporary cybersecurity strategies, its national character materialised in information technology. These comparative exercises are couched in distinctively normative terms. Built around popular historical narratives and myths, the socio-technical imaginaries of innovation disclosed by the American state ascribe specific normative values to the US system of market-led innovation. At one level, these values are closely linked to the broader relationship between private property and political liberty that is foundational to American political thought (Foley Citation2008, 213–237). Private property ownership incentivises innovation but, just as significantly, it provides a sphere of liberty in which individuals are free to decide for themselves how to dispose of their possessions. Thus the causal story in US socio-technical imaginaries, expressed above in the notion that innovation requires fuel in the form of IP protection is buttressed by the normative argument that this reward is also an expression of justice (Delrahim Citation2018; IPEC Citation2016, 32), a view derived from a Lockean justification of private property rights as filtered through the Founding Fathers. The hard work of American entrepreneurs morally justifies property in the product of their labour and its associated material benefits (White House Citation2017, 21). More surprisingly, however, is the framing of technological innovation, and intellectual property rights, in the language of individual and national self-realisation. The most striking example comes from Dana Gioia, Poet Laureate of California, in her ‘Preamble’ to IPEC’s 2016 Report Supporting Innovation, Creativity, & Enterprise: Charting a Path Ahead. In a passage worth quoting at length, Gioia (IPEC 2016, np, italics in original) writes When Walt Whitman wrote, “The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem,” he was not discussing literature. What Whitman praised so prophetically was the vast and transformative creative energy that characterized his young nation and, indeed, democracy itself. The Greek root of poet means one who makes, creates, fashions, composes. The United States created itself – politically, socially, culturally – from the pieces of a colonial empire, and that early appetite for growth and experimentation has never been sated. American history is an achievement woven from innumerable threads of individuals acts of imagination and innovation. For Gioia, the American national character is expressed through its self-making innovations. American individualism and the ‘innumerable threads’ of everyday lives create something greater than their parts. Disclosed is a notion of the self-realisation and self-fashioning of America characteristic of Hegelian normative justifications of property rights. This passage – and the wider US discourse – suggests that the United States cannot realise its own national essence unless it can embark on market-led forms of technological innovation. Threats to intellectual property rights emanating from weaknesses in cybersecurity threaten the practices allowing Americans to express their ‘pioneering spirit’ (White House Citation2019b, Citation2018b; Citation2017, 21). This ethical concern for collective self-realisation captures the security of innovation as a project of national becoming. The teleological conception of American society, understood in terms of fulfilment of a pre-existing national character, belies the otherwise open-ended and contingent future-oriented temporalities that characterise technological innovation as a social practice. Conclusion The process of creation as an expression of American national identity sits at the heart of US national security imaginaries of technological innovation. In addition to fears about the disruption of technological innovation and its impact on geopolitical competition with China US imaginaries articulate a vision of market-led, private-property based innovation as central to the American ways of life. The latter encompass ideas about the nation, its values, and the material practices through which these are brought into being. In this way, US socio-technical imaginaries disclose a comprehensive pre-theoretical world view of the relationship between the everyday lived experiences of Americans and wider questions of geopolitics. In these broader terms, US socio-technical imaginaries are productive of American national security and foreign policies which seek to universalise its way of life through the extension of its preferred form of technological innovation. The practices undertaken to meet these goals – pursuing strong intellectual property rights protection at the World Trade Organization, pursuing technological closure around norms of appropriate Internet use, enacting trade tariffs against China, and so forth (McCarthy Citation2015, 122–147; Jablonski and Powers Citation2015) – are oriented towards reproducing the power and authority of private sector actors domestically and extending their reach globally. The causal and normative facets of US socio-technical imaginaries of innovation frame the institutional separations of American socio-technical orders – between the political and the economic, between democracy and technology, and between the public and private sector – as integral to the expression of the American character. In turn, these institutional separations reproduce the authority of certain segments of American society to design, develop, and maintain its technological infrastructures, with the reproduction of corporate power of particular note. Securing technological innovation thereby reproduces deeply rooted structures of power within American society. Conceived in these terms, innovation is designed to prevent social change, a conservative rather than revolutionary process.

Despite emergency appeals to social solidarity during the Covid-19 pandemic and the rediscovery of society by Prime Minister Boris Johnson, the idea of the individual still lies at the very heart of ruling class ideology.1 The ruling class need to promote the idea that capitalism is self-evident and natural rather than organised in the interests of a small group of people.2 Pivotal to this naturalisation of capitalism are assumptions about human nature and motivation. The idea of the atomised, self-seeking human underpins the commodification of individualised labour power the foundation of capitalist production. In his book Marxs Theory of Alienation, philosopher István Mészáros explains the double advantage of this cult of privacy and idealisation of the abstract individual for the ruling class.3 He explains how it protects them from being challenged by the rabble at the same time as providing the illusion of escapism to individuals who, mystified by the mechanisms of capitalist society, feel powerless and isolated. The idea of the individual as the basic unit of society, in what is heralded as a meritocracy, also serves to paint the ruling class as deserving of their wealth, power and privilege, while blaming the working class for their lack of success. Ultimately, the ruling class asserts the primacy of individuality as a bulwark against notions of community and solidarity in the working class, which not only threaten its profits but potentially the very existence of capitalism itself.

This article makes two arguments. First, I argue that there has been a shift in the rhetoric and ideology of the ruling class under neoliberal capitalism in the new millenium. This ideology now centres on successful individuals being enterprising, resilient and robust. It is incumbent on socialists to understand, analyse and challenge these ideas, which we are bombarded with on a daily basis, telling us what it is to be human, promoting individualism and claiming that there is no alternative. Ideas about individual motivation in society have been used to bolster the intensification of work, shift blame for inequality onto working-class people and give a new twist to women’s oppression. Nevertheless, the grip that these ideas have on the minds of workers is overstated. Indeed, ruling-class ideas about the individual are not static or consistent, but must be continually renewed and remoulded to defend them from constant challenges in the workplace and by social movements such as Black Lives Matter.

Our beliefs create the systems we live in. The system we collectively buy into right now is a system of capitalism and patriarchy. At the core, this system holds deeply unforgiving assumptions about human nature. Is there something ingrained in human default settings that has doomed us to create such a distorted system? And is that system doomed to destroy us and this precious planet, because we can’t be better? The collective certainly believes so, otherwise the system couldn’t exist. Humans have reached an extremely powerful point in our evolution. We are wielding energy capable of wiping out the very planet that gives us life, and we are doing exactly that. This is tragic, but it’s not our fate. Let’s unpack the collective beliefs that keep these systems in place. Our society normalizes the idea that hierarchy, domination, and exploitation are unavoidable truths of human nature and there's nothing we can do about it. Some may even point to Darwin's theory of evolution as justification for capitalism. This idea that human beings are naturally evolved to dominate each other and “win” to survive is deeply ingrained in patriarchal ideology. It’s a problematic interpretation, like most historical “facts” that are used to justify harm. In actuality, evolution states that an organism will do whatever it takes to survive and prosper. Human beings have always needed cooperation to survive. How else could we have built the Pyramids of Giza or developed life-saving medicine? There’s that enforcing a hierarchy is detrimental to human cooperation because lower-ranked people tend to be less invested in the goal. Anyone who’s worked a minimum wage job will attest, no study needed. There’s nothing “natural” about organizing human beings into haves and have-nots. There’s nothing “natural” about assigning different values to different people. We are all worthy, we are all valuable, just as we are. Imagine if we institutionalized this kind of self-love. Instead, we have institutionalized self-loathing. Miki Kashtan, creator of the , writes on her blog ‘’ about the feeling people in the Global North feel knowing our lifestyles come at the expense of people in the Global South. She calls this feeling “moral anguish”. She argues that perpetuating violence, even unintentionally, creates inner pain. To deal with this inner pain, we numb and distract ourselves with consumerism, drugs, or we become depressed or anxious. From this perspective, capitalism goes against human nature. We must continually deny and suppress our humanity to keep this system going.

For some 20 years we have been experiencing and witnessing the consequences of the naïve neo-liberal belief that ‘we’ve got competition in a box, ready to roll out’. In both cases, these consequences can be described in terms of ‘blowback’ (Johnson 2004).This article has addressed the effects of the fetishization of competition as a principle of societal organization and its role in subordinating society to the logic of profit-oriented, market-mediated accumulation. It began by noting the polyvalence of the ‘market economy’ (commercial economy, market economy, capitalist economy, financialized economy, finance-dominated economy) and the extent to which this could be exploited in efforts to legitimate neo-liberal financialization and the drive towards a finance-dominated accumulation regime that extends markets and capitalist (and even financialized) market proxies into areas where they tend to be far more creatively destructive than destructively creative. For competition has a formal, procedural rationality suitable for supplying standar-dized private goods and services (and even then is prone to unplanned disruption through Schumpeterian innovations) and is less rational, even in its own economistic terms, when dealing with customized commodities (where competition has not yet established socially necessary labour and turnover times) and/or where goods and services have strong elements of common pool resources or public goods. Competition is even less suited to the production and reproduction of the four categories of fictitious commodities and the supply of goods and services that advance human flourishing. It was also argued that simple governance solutions to complex problems do not work and are especially inappropriate where there are multiple substantive goals that are hard to specify consistently, let alone measure in terms of a single metric. In this context, the rolling out of competition as a principle of regulation and governance has actually been just one in a repeated succession of attempts to overcome government and governance failure by turning to another mode of governance – which is equally doomed to fail, albeit in its own distinctive ways. The growing unaccountability of capitalist market forces and their tendency to generalize and intensify the contradictions and crisis tendencies inherent in the capital relation make it imperative – but also increasingly hard – to reclaim some measure of democratic accountability in material provisioning and the care economy by limiting markets to areas where the invisible hand works well, and restricting and regulating it where it produces substantively irrational results for humankind and the planet.

‘World Politics as Competition’: Norms and Structures This short conceptual history of competition as both a normative ideal and an analytical category shows that there is a much richer tradition of thinking about competition than the conventional IR literature assumes. Drawing on this brief account, we now turn to a more extended definition of what we understand to be a configuration of world politics in which competition is central. This, we argue, will possess both normative and structural features. A configuration of world politics in which competition is viewed to be central is in the first instance a world of notionally equal, sovereign states—even if, in practice, the key participants in international competition are a select group of “great powers” (Müller 2020).These share a common set of cultural expectations, and means of communication, that enable mutual observation and compari- son according to a shared goal on a sustained basis (Heintz/Werron 2011). As Simmel pointed out, competition is the manifestation of an antagonism not despite but through this mutual recognition and unity deriving from a shared object of desire. This structure of communications and expectation compels them to engage in an open-ended, dynamic competition for power, wealth and status: there is no stable state to be reached, but the continuing need to adapt to changing forms of competition—a capacity that comes to be discussed under the term ‘competitiveness’. This also implies a change in the objects states compete for, or rather, a change of what constitutes power, wealth, and status as scarce objects at different times. A strong sense of mutual recognition among a group of competing states is necessary in order to set limits to the possibilities for violence. All who compete are recognized as legitimate ‘players’ in the international arena. This legitimacy can be additionally conferred through diplomatic practices, or membership of international organizations. As our historical discussion of ideas of competition in eighteenth and nineteenth century Europe indicates, the idea of international competition is also strongly bound up with the history of European colonialism. It was the binding glue of an idea of European ‘civilization’, culturally and racially superior to non-European societies, that enabled eighteenth and nineteenth-century Europeans to conceive of one another as legitimate participants in the international. A conception of world politics based on competition is likely to assign a greater weight to the economic, cultural and technological attributes of states than it will to their raw military capacity. Because these ‘softer’ attributes are often validated by expert opinion, international media systems and (in the modern era) international organisations may become central arenas for competitive behavior. These “rationalized third-parties” (Werron 2013: 66; 2015) supply and collate the information—whether on military expenditure, public health preparedness, or cultural achievement—that makes “competitive comparisons” (Steinmetz 2019) possible. Yet competition is only ‘formally peaceful’: when world politics are organized in this way, existential threats and violent conflict is not eliminated. The modernization race of the mid-twentieth century and the neoliberal reforms of competitiveness since the 1980s had devastating consequences for significant parts of the global population. What is more, violence has frequently been visited on racialized others who are not viewed as legitimate participants in “the international” (Pitts 2018), through the competitive acquisition of colonies that characterized both the European imperialisms of the eigh- teenth and nineteenth centuries, and the ‘proxy wars’ that shaped US-Soviet confrontation of the twentieth (Westad 2005).

Since around 2017, there has been a sharp increase in the number of news articles that include the words ‘China’ and ‘threat’ in close proximity.

Figure 1