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On its face, the change in formulation might seem relatively straightforward, and some might go so far as to characterize it as obvious and unworthy of patent protection. The original formulation, Lumigan 0.03%, contained 0.03% by weight of bimatoprost (the active ingredient) and fifty parts per million (“ppm”) benzalkonium chloride (“BAK”), among other ingredients. BAK is a 210 preservative used to inhibit bacterial growth in ophthalmic solutions. 211 Pharmaceutical chemists knew, however, that BAK is cytotoxic and that it can damage the cells on the ocular surface and cause undesirable side effects. 212 Allergan, the company that developed the original 0.03% formulation of Lumigan, invested in research to identify some means for reducing the drugs adverse side effects while maintaining therapeutic efficacy. After exploring 213 several alternative formulations of the active ingredient, Allergan scientists discovered that the corneal permeability of bimatoprost could be significantly increased by raising the concentration of BAK from fifty ppm to 200 ppm. This 214 change in formulation allowed for the use of a significantly lower concentration of bimatoprost (0.01%) to achieve an efficacy similar to that of the 0.03% solution, while causing less frequent and less severe hyperemia. Allergan 215 patented this new formulation, and obtained FDA approval to market Lumigan 0.01% for the same indications as the original Lumigan 0.03% product. 216 Significantly, without the prospect of effective patent protection for the new formulation, Allergan would have had little incentive to make the substantial investment in time and money to develop and obtain FDA approval for this improved formulation. Generic companies challenged Allergan’s formulation patents on a number of grounds, including the alleged obviousness of the invention, but ultimately the Federal Circuit affirmed a district court’s decision upholding the validity of the patents. The district court found the solution to the problem at which Allergan 217 scientists ultimately arrived was not only unexpected, it was in fact actively discouraged by the teachings of the prior art. For example, the prior art taught 218 that the use of BAK as a preservative should be minimized in ophthalmic formulations to avoid safety problems, and the appellants’ own expert, in summarizing the prior art’s widespread concern regarding the chemical’s toxicity, described BAK as “a natural-born killer” that was “from Satan.” The district 219 court found that, prior to Allergan’s invention, “BAK was known to cause increased IOP, hyperemia, dry eye, and damage to corneal cells, and to exacerbate other eye disorders,” and that “those known side effects would have discouraged a person of ordinary skill from using higher concentrations of BAK in a bimatoprost formulation, especially when fifty ppm BAK was known to be an adequate preservative in Lumigan 0.03%.” 220 The district court also found the prior art taught that BAK would not increase the permeability of bimatoprost, but in fact, might actually decrease it. Working 221 against this conventional wisdom, “Allergan’s inventors surprisingly determined that the opposite was true, namely, that 200 ppm BAK enhanced the permeability of bimatoprost.” According to the Federal Circuit, the record showed “that the 222 prior art ‘criticize[d], discredit[ed], or otherwise discourage[d]’ the use of 200 ppm BAK in a bimatoprost formulation.” The Federal Circuit concluded that 223 “the district court did not clearly err in finding that the claimed formulation exhibited ‘unexpected results,’ which differed in kind, not just in degree, from the prior art.” In effect, by investing in research that explored alternative 224 formulation strategies that ran counter to conventional wisdom, Allergan scientists had come up with a fundamentally different product—one that could not have been predicted based on prior knowledge, and one which provided patients with a safer and more effective course of treatment. This is the very sort of innovation that should be promoted by patents. As noted by the Federal Circuit, the difference between the 0.03% and 0.01% formulations is essentially “the difference between an effective and safe drug and one with significant side effects that caused many patients to discontinue treatment.” Unfortunately, the recommendations of the Guidelines cast a 225 shadow of uncertainty over the availability of effective patent protection for inventions of this type. 226 It is important to remember that Allergan’s patents on the 0.01% formulation would not cover the original formulation and hence, should not create an obstacle to any generic company that decides to bring the original 0.03% formulation to the market. Of course, in view of its improved safety-efficacy profile, doctors 227 and their patients might prefer the newer formulation. But if that is the case, it is only because the new formulation represents a significant medical advance, and thus a patent on the formulation is doing exactly what patents are intended to do, i.e., spur the development of improved modes of therapeutic treatment. Once the new formulation patents expire, generic companies will be free to sell versions of the new 0.01% formulation. Prior to their expiration, the market can decide 228 whether the improvement of the new formulation justifies the cost differential between it and generically available 0.03% formulation.

Economists have repeatedly demonstrated that inventors are driven primarily by the expectation of profiting from owning the rights to their inventions. Zorina Khan of Bowdoin College, whose 2005 classic The Democratization of Invention: Patents and Copyrights in American Economic Development was awarded the prestigious Alice Hanson Jones Prize for outstanding work in economic history, observed that “Ordinary people [are] stimulated by higher perceived returns or demand-side incentives to make long-term commitments to inventive activity.” She also found that “their patterns of patenting were procyclical [and] responded to expected profit opportunities.”

Along with her colleague the late Kenneth Sokoloff of UCLA, Professor Khan then summarized the role of patents in helping U.S. startup businesses grow the economy from an agrarian backwater into the most powerful industrial economy on the face of the earth:

Furthermore, patents promote competition to the benefit of American consumers. Prior to the 1980s, U.S. antitrust enforcers deemed patent-licensing restrictions anticompetitive. But economic research came to recognize that such restrictions actually facilitated the adoption of new and rival technologies that would enhance competition for the consumer’s dollar. This new learning caused enforcers to adopt a generally permissive, bipartisan stance toward patent licensing beginning in the early 1980s. This was reflected in enforcement guidelines released jointly by the Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission in 1995 and updated in 2017. The Guidelines’ discussion of the beneficial aspects of licensing restraints is instructive: “Field-of-use, territorial, and other limitations on intellectual property [patent] licenses may serve procompetitive ends by allowing the licensor to exploit its property as efficiently and effectively as possible. These various forms of exclusivity can be used to give a licensee an incentive to invest in the commercialization and distribution of products embodying the licensed intellectual property and to develop additional applications for the licensed property. . . . They may also increase the licensor’s incentive to license, for example, by protecting the licensor from competition in the licensor’s own technology in amarket niche that it prefers to keep to itself.” Obama-era FTC Chair Edith Ramirez stated in 2017, “A strong and competitive IP licensing system benefits consumers and fosters innovation.” Similarly, under President Trump, Assistant Attorney General for Antitrust Makan Delrahim emphasized in 2018 “that the increase in innovation spurred on by the patent laws leads to expanded consumer choice and enhanced competition in the long run.”

The mechanical and electrical industries could live with a patent system which was unsuited to the protection of inventions which resulted from investment in R&D, because they have other ways of obtaining the protection they need, especially through the power to exclude competitors that goes with massive investment in productive assets and in resources for marketing. There is one industry, however, which simply cannot do without patents, and that is chemicals, especially pharmaceuticals. The formula discovered in the laboratory is identical with the formula that is patented and with the formula of what the physician prescribes and his patient takes. Once that formula is known, investment in resources to make the product delivers only a trivial barrier to copying, and if the drug is effective, little persuasion is needed for its sale. Because chemical inventions can be communicated so easily to others, therefore, if patents did not protect them, free-riding would ensure that investment in research would not be justified. This is why it was from a revolution in the pharmaceutical industry that the stimulus for revolution in patents eventually came, and the cause of both was antibiotics.

The first of these was penicillin, but this was never patented, partly because the authorities in Britain, where it was discovered, considered that it was wrong that something which was so much to the benefit of mankind should be a monopoly. The next one of great importance was streptomycin, and this was patented in 1947. Penicillin had undoubtedly been discovered through a “flash of creative genius,” but the origin of streptomycin could not have been more different. It emerged from Merck's funding of the painstaking examination and testing of more than 10,000 kinds of soil microbes for antibiotic activity by a team led by Selman Waksman of Rutgers University, New Jersey; and it started a deluge of inventions from pharmaceutical firms which were (and are) typically the output of large-scale, routine activity which is anything but inspired (see Kingston, 2000 for a full account).

Patents play a multifaceted and crucial role in the pharmaceutical industry, including:

Protection of Intellectual Property: Patents provide pharmaceutical companies with exclusive rights to their innovations. These rights prevent others from making, using, selling, or importing their patented inventions without permission. This protection is vital as it allows companies to invest in research and development (R&D) with the confidence that they can reap the financial rewards of their innovations.

Economists have repeatedly demonstrated that inventors are driven primarily by the expectation of profiting from owning the rights to their inventions. Zorina Khan of , whose 2005 classic The Democratization of Invention: Patents and Copyrights in American Economic Development was awarded the prestigious Alice Hanson Jones Prize for outstanding work in economic history, observed that “Ordinary people [are] stimulated by higher perceived returns or demand-side incentives to make long-term commitments to inventive activity.” She also found that “their patterns of patenting were procyclical [and] responded to expected profit opportunities.”

Along with her colleague the late Kenneth Sokoloff of UCLA, Professor Khan then  in helping U.S. startup businesses grow the economy from an agrarian backwater into the most powerful industrial economy on the face of the earth: Then, as now, the American formula for success was simple: Startups + patents = jobs and economic growth!

For the biopharmaceutical industry, the U.S. patent system provides  for innovation and fuels the creation of new lifesaving treatments and cures for patients. In fact, patents touch nearly every facet of biopharmaceutical innovation from initial drug discovery to new uses identified after Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval, and most medicines are associated with multiple patents.

As medical innovation transforms to target more complex diseases and as genomics and personalized medicines are pursued, manufacturing processes are also becoming more complicated. In today’s IP Explained, we are taking a closer look at four key forms of patent protections and how each plays an important and unique role in supporting innovation throughout the biopharmaceutical lifecycle.

Since the 1990s various health agencies have identified growing antibiotic resistance as a major health threat, but few new antibiotics have been introduced. 31 Concerns about resistance have increased. However, reserving new antibiotics as drugs of “last resort” constrains their sales. Together with rising R&D costs and other challenges, this created a disincentive to investment in developing new antibiotics.

The Generating Antibiotic Incentives Now (GAIN) Act of 2012 was designed to strengthen the pipeline of antibiotic and antifungal drugs for life-threatening or other serious infections by providing several economic incentives ( Exhibit 2 ). These include a five-year extension of regulatory exclusivity from generic competition (supplementing the five years of exclusivity for new small-molecule drugs under the Hatch-Waxman Act and any applicable orphan drug and pediatric exclusivity). These drugs are also eligible for the FDA’s Fast Track and Priority Review programs. Fast Track status provides more frequent interactions with FDA review teams and the opportunity for a “rolling review,” or review of portions of the application before the complete application is submitted. Priority reviews are expected to be completed by the FDA within six months—substantially faster than the ten months required for a standard review.

Craig, “A Life Not Worth Living?”, Studies in Christian Ethics, SAGE

Contrary to those accounts, I would argue that it is death per se that is really the objective evil for us, not because it deprives us of a prospective future of overall good judged better than the alternative of non-being. It cannot be about harm to a former person who has ceased to exist, for no person actually suffers from the sub-sequent non-participation. Rather, death in itself is an evil to us because it ontologically destroys the current existent subject — it is the ultimate in metaphysical lightening strikes. 80 The evil of death is truly an ontological evil borne by the person who already exists, independently of calculations about better or worse possible lives. Such an evil need not be consciously experienced in order to be an evil for the kind of being a human person is. Death is an evil because of the change in kind it brings about, a change that is destructive of the type of entity that we essentially are. Anything, whether caused naturally or caused by human intervention (intentional or unintentional) that drastically interferes in the process of maintaining the person in existence is an objective evil for the person. What is crucially at stake here, and is dialectically supportive of the self-evidency of the basic good of human life, is that death is a radical interference with the current life process of the kind of being that we are. In consequence, death itself can be credibly thought of as a ‘primitive evil’ for all persons, regardless of the extent to which they are currently or prospectively capable of participating in a full array of the goods of life. 81 In conclusion, concerning willed human actions, it is justifiable to state that any intentional rejection of human life itself cannot therefore be warranted since it is an expression of an ultimate disvalue for the subject, namely, the destruction of the present person; a radical ontological good that we cannot begin to weigh objectively against the travails of life in a rational manner. To deal with the sources of disvalue (pain, suffering, etc.) we should not seek to irrationally destroy the person, the very source and condition of all human possibility.

(Didier, “Ethics of Survival: A Democratic Approach to the Politics of Life,” http://www.humanityjournal.org/humanity-volume-1-issue-1/ethics-survival-democratic-approach-politics-life)

Survival, in the sense Jacques Derrida attributed to the concept in his last interview, not only shifts lines that are too often hardened between biological and political lives: it opens an ethical space for reflection and action. Critical thinking in the past decade has often taken biopolitics and the politics of life as its objects. It has thus unveiled the way in which individuals and groups, even entire nations, have been treated by powers, the market, or the state, during the colonial period as well as in the contemporary era.

Di Minardi, Totalitarian world in chains from Artificial Intelligence: the grim fate that could be ‘worse than extinction,’ BBC, October 15, 2020, https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20201014-totalitarian-world-in-chains-artificial-intelligence

Researchers at the Center on Long-Term Risk, a non-profit research institute in London, have expanded upon x-risks with the even-more-chilling prospect of suffering risks. These “s-risks” are defined as “suffering on an astronomical scale, vastly exceeding all suffering that has existed on Earth so far.” In these scenarios, life continues for billions of people, but the quality is so low and the outlook so bleak that dying out would be preferable. In short: a future with negative value is worse than one with no value at all.

Eliezer Yudkowsky, “Pausing AI Developments Isn't Enough. We Need to Shut it All Down,” Time, 03-29-2023, https://time.com/6266923/ai-eliezer-yudkowsky-open-letter-not-enough/

Frame nothing as a conflict between national interests, have it clear that anyone talking of arms races is a fool. That we all live or die as one, in this, is not a policy but a fact of nature. Make it explicit in international diplomacy that preventing AI extinction scenarios is considered a priority above preventing a full nuclear exchange, and that allied nuclear countries are willing to run some risk of nuclear exchange if that’s what it takes to reduce the risk of large AI training runs.

This leads to our first hypothesis, which is as follows: Hypothesis 1: Poor economic conditions lead to diversionary actions against the rival. Conflict settlement is also a distinct route to dealing with internal problems that leaders in rivalries may pursue when faced with internal problems. Military competition between states requires large amounts of resources, and rivals require even more attention. Leaders may choose to negotiate a settlement that ends a rivalry to free up important resources that may be reallocated to the domestic economy. In a "guns versus butter" world of economic trade-offs, when a state can no longer afford to pay the expenses associated with competition in a rivalry, it is quite rational for leaders to reduce costs by ending a rivalry. This gain (a peace dividend) could be achieved at any time by ending a rivalry. However, such a gain is likely to be most important and attractive to leaders when internal conditions are bad and the leader is seeking ways to alleviate active problems. Support for policy change away from continued rivalry is more likely to develop when the economic situation sours and elites and masses are looking for ways to improve a worsening situation. It is at these times that the pressure to cut military investment will be greatest and that state leaders will be forced to recognize the difficulty of continuing to pay for a rivalry. Among other things, this argument also encompasses the view that the cold war ended because the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics could no longer compete economically with the United States.

One of the core claims of this book is that we should replace the dominant anti-capitalist imaginary according to which capitalism is a system that should be overthrown, with the image of capitalism as a set of interrelated practices that need to pulled out from the tapestry that is our social world. Capitalist elements of the social fabric need to be pulled out and replaced with other social forms. The pulling, cutting and reweaving that need to take place, must happen at many social locations. Pulling threads on one place, causes holes on other places, and as we reweave society we need to attend to the short term problem our actions can create, and we need to build a better world from within the fabric of the one we want to challenge. We are constantly making and remaking society though our everyday interactions. The image of reweaving a tapestry is intended to bring to mind the idea, of a constant remaking, of the intimate nature of capitalist processes, and of the ways that change on a macro scale is made up of changes on a micro scale. I follow the ideas outlined in Pierre Bourdieu's The Logic of Practice, where he claims that social structures are something we live through, and which are constructed by the every day practices of those who inhabit those structures. Overthrowing a system brings to mind the image of solid and distinct thing, standing on its own, that can be knocked down. I will argue that this way of looking at capitalism is not very helpful. Rather, we should see capitalism as a set of practices, implicated into and structuring an immense variety of aspects of life. And destroying it will be more a matter of transforming all of those networks than of overturning a structure. The image of overthrow encourages a politics that looks for fulcrums and tipping points. I would like to replace that image with one of a set of projects before us that take place on a variety of completely different social locations all at the same time, with an undetermined sense of how all of those operations will come together to achieve their ultimate goal. We can push back against the devastations caused by capitalism from where we are right now. As capitalism is pushed back, life can become better in the short term as we build toward a total elimination of the practices we call capitalism. Sometimes political movements involve creative thought. There are marvelous moments when people challenging systems of power spend all night talking about what they’re doing and, with their friends in struggle, come up with concepts that capture the meaning of what they’re doing. When people are actively thinking about what they’re doing, the concepts they use are likely to be expressive of what they are trying to accomplish. The desires and intentions of the movement come to have a focus and richness that inspires and guides. Movements often then go into periods of elaboration, where the foundations and pathways forged in those crucible moments come to be accepted as given. In those times, people often shun ideas, and carry on using the ideas that were formed in the crucible. For a while the ideas usually work just fine. Later they can come to weigh a movement down and keep it from responding in new ways to new circumstances. Those advocating for a world free from the devastations caused by capitalism are working in a time of incredible ferment, after many years of dormancy. Possibilities for making a difference and making connections are developing at an unprecedented rate. And yet, the categories we are using remain deeply fossilized. This book attempts to break that fossilization in order to facilitate deeper forms of praxis, where our theory resonates with and helps inform our practice, and where our practice informs our theory. With a fresh understanding of what we are doing we are much more likely to be able to build a politics that is effective at eradicating capitalism

What if, within the constraints created by the global economic environment, there are (some) alternatives at least under conditions of formal democracy – in other words, what if the policy space (Koivusalo et al., 2009) available for redistributive action is more extensive than implied by the preceding discussion? In particular, the account just provided fails directly to confront the possibility that domestic competition state polices are not pragmatic responses to a global environment that leaves few options available, but rather elite initiatives designed to use globalization as a justification for their own agendas, or actively to accelerate integration into global flows of production and finance on terms that would later be difficult if not impossible to reverse.6

The account presented in the preceding section has other shortcomings. For example, although convergence of tax rates is widespread, the pattern is stronger with respect to corporate taxation (Genschel and Schwarz, 2013) than it is with respect to personal income and wealth taxes. This is to be expected given the relative ease with which transnational corporations can shift profits within the corporate structure in order to minimize tax liabilities (see e.g. Tanzi, 2001; Kar et al., 2015; Clausing, 2016). It is hard to make a credible argument that the massive reductions in personal income taxes for the rich in the UK under Thatcher and later the post-2010 Conservative-led coalition, which took place alongside growing fiscal deficits and social policy retrenchment, were motivated by anticipated tax competition. Still less can this be claimed with respect to tax cuts for the rich in the US under Presidents Reagan and later G.W. Bush. Similarly, it is difficult to see the high interest rate policies of the US central bank post-1979, which had worldwide ramifications, as a response to globalization rather than a proactive effort to transform the economic policy landscape. Yet both sets of policies, i.e. high interest rates and tax cuts for the wealthy, are implicated in the rise of public debt (Streeck, 2014, p. 149). And the consolidation state argument is much more persuasive with respect to countries of the Eurozone, which creates distinctive limits on economic policy space (Streeck, 2016, p. 113–141), than with respect to others.

The persistent narrative of the effects of technological development in contemporary societies is uncritically accepted by policy designers, decision-makers, and individuals as inevitable and determinedly positive in nature. The agenda for technology development, and in turn (re)shaping much of Western society, is primarily driven by computer scientists and strongly promoted by numerous futurist thinkers in the field. In the absence of critical awareness and dissent, many now equate any and all technological innovation and development with the rhetoric of progress. For the past 200 years or so, this has been a dominant driving force in 86 Irish Journal of Sociology 25(1) Western cultures. In The False Promises of the Digital Revolution: How Computers Transform Education, Work, and International Development in Ways that are Ecologically Unsustainable, C.A. Bowers seeks to challenge the myth that technologies, and in particular print and digital technologies, are culturally neutral and fundamental to modern advancement. Expanding upon his previous work in this area, he argues that the Darwinian/market liberal ideology that is frequently used to justify a colonizing agenda is leading to a world monoculture where data and print either ignore or replace the global cultural commons. What is being lost, he suggests, in this process is the intergenerational knowledge and experience that has provided alternatives to a cash and consumer-driven existence resulting in transformation in the viability of the natural world and growing pressures on scare natural resources. He focuses much of his attention on the way digital technologies gather, store, and have become the prevailing mode of communications in contemporary societies reinforcing abstract thinking which is unable to grasp the complexities of local cultural and environmental contexts. Such cyber-mediated consciousness is unable to comprehend differences between ecologically sustainable and unsustainable beliefs and practices and the importance of such social interactions as face-toface communications, personal memory, and sensory awareness—a given of human existence—are essentially ignored. The connections between digital technologies and corporate capitalism, which is turning the vocabulary of environmentalists into media cliche´s, is considered, as is the uneven scale of influence and imbalance of power between community-centered and corporate capitalism. He argues for innovative ethnographic studies and empirical research into how the introduction of digital technologies are transforming the beliefs and intergenerational support systems in cultures right across the globe, which should focus more robustly on patterns of moral reciprocity and on people living more ecologically sustainable lives. Bowers also argues that a history of regarding technologies as culturally neutral and an expression of progress has led to a condition where few teachers or university lecturers possess the conceptual background necessary for engaging students in debates about the cultural transforming, and sometimes ecologically damaging, nature of various new and existing technologies. It is crucial not to lose sight of the important improvements that technologies have brought to communities and people’s lives, such as contributing to medical advances, the provision of information on a wide range of activities including changes occurring in the natural systems, and relief from the exhausting nature of some physical labor. Technologies have had a powerful influence in shaping consciousness in the West but much of this is based on abstract[s]ion rooted in ideologies frequently at odds with preserving the cultural commons and environmental awareness. So how did this perception take shape and become dominant over time? Implicit in Bowers criticism that scientists and technology engineers don’t take the time away from their high degree of specialization to inform themselves about the traditions of community self-sufficiency that their inventions are undermining is the notion that social scientists are also neglecting this domain of research and appear unwilling, or indeed unable, to engage and debate with technologists at their level. Developers and engineers tend to present new technologies only in a positive light, and social scientists should shoulder a portion of the blame for allowing this occur unchallenged. Social scientists must, therefore, confront the self-serving idea that engineers and developers are purely focused on the well-being of the public and must interfere in the realities of technology innovation and development to provide a more balanced, and perhaps [a] realistic, assessment of its impacts and consequences.

It is beyond doubt that all capitalist economies so far have been growing, with the exception of relatively short periods of crises. This is no coincidence, but follows from foundational aspects of the economic system; it is a ‘generally accepted consensus figure in the financial press and elsewhere of 3 per cent as a minimum acceptable rate of growth’ (Harvey 2014: 227). This growth is endless, as profit and capital accumulation are not only desires for single capitalists but also absolute necessities for the system at large. Individual companies live by the same rule as the macro-economy – growing or dying (Sandler 1994) – while a stationary capitalism is an oxymoron (Blauwhof 2012; Harvey 1999; Marx 1976; Schumpeter 1962[1942], 1983[1934]). As to why capitalism is growing, we lean towards Marxist theory that affirms the economy is growing due to the production of surplus value, derived from productive labour.3 Through this process, as profit is realized in the market, more capital is thrown back into production of more things and commodities, as well as more factories, more infrastructure, more urbanization: more of everything (Harvey 2014).

We do not claim that economic growth is the goal of capital. It rather seems that capital accumulation and profits drive the system. Capital will therefore tend to prefer an accumulation mode with mediocre growth but high profits (neoliberalism) before a mode with high growth but decreasing returns (Keynesianism). But no growth at all is simply incompatible with capitalism.

I don’t know the answer. Perhaps we can change the world without taking power. Perhaps we cannot. The starting point—for all of us, I think—is uncertainty, not knowing, a common search for a way forward. Because it becomes more and more clear that capitalism is a catastrophe for humanity. A radical change in the organisation of society, that is, revolution, is more urgent than ever. And this revolution can only be world revolution if it is to be effective. But it is unlikely that world revolution can be achieved in one single blow. This means that the only way in which we can conceive of revolution is as interstitial revolution, as a revolution that takes place in the interstices of capitalism, a revolution that occupies spaces in the world while capitalism still exists. The question is how we conceive of these interstices, whether we think of them as states or in other ways. In thinking about this, we have to start from where we are, from the many rebellions and insubordinations that have brought us to Porto Alegre. The world is full of such rebellions, of people saying NO to capitalism: NO, we shall not live our lives according to the dictates of capitalism, we shall do what we consider necessary or desirable and not what capital tells us to do. Sometimes we just see capitalism as an all-encompassing system of domination and forget that such rebellions exist everywhere. At times they are so small that even those involved do not perceive them as refusals, but often they are collective projects searching for an alternative way forward and sometimes they are as big as the Lacandon Jungle or the Argentinazo of three years ago or the revolt in Bolivia just over a year ago. All of these insubordinations are characterised by a drive towards self-determination, an impulse that says, ‘No, you will not tell us what to do, we shall decide for ourselves what we must do.’ These refusals can be seen as fissures, as cracks in the system of capitalist domination. Capitalism is not (in the first place) an economic system, but a system of command. Capitalists, through money, command us, telling us what to do. To refuse to obey is to break the command of capital.

Both the establishment and the ongoing maintenance of capitalism, whether as a mode of production or as a wider social formation, are crisis-ridden. They depend on moments and places in which limits to accumulation are encountered and then transformed into thresholds. This informs the leading trope in David Harvey’s now-classic interpretation of Marx’s principal works on capital, Limits to Capital (1982). In it, the contradictions encountered at every moment of the unfolding of capital’s inner logic constitute ‘limits to capital’. At each stage in Harvey’s exposition, these limits are partly and temporarily overcome, notably through mechanisms of temporal deferral and spatial displacement. And each stage, the circuit of capital is temporarily restored. But at each subsequent stage, Harvey also finds that capital’s contradictions are ultimately intensified and multiplied rather than resolved. Harvey therefore re-affirms Marx’s classical overall conclusion that capitalism’s contradictions cannot be resolved: capitalism itself must be transcended.

Thus capitalist structures (corporations, governments, banks, schools, etc.) are not seized so much as simply abandoned. Capitalist relations are not fought so much as they are simply rejected. We stop participating in activities that support (finance, condone) the capitalist world and start participating in activities that build a new world while simultaneously undermining the old. We create a new pattern of social relations alongside capitalist relations and then we continually build and strengthen our new pattern while doing every thing we can to weaken capitalist relations. In this way our new democratic, non-hierarchical, non-commodified relations can eventually overwhelm the capitalist relations and force them out of existence. This is how it has to be done. This is a plausible, realistic strategy. To think that we could create a whole new world of decent social arrangements overnight, in the midst of a crisis, during a so-called revolution, or during the collapse of capitalism, is foolhardy. Our new social world must grow within the old, and in opposition to it, until it is strong enough to dismantle and abolish capitalist relations. Such a revolution will never happen automatically, blindly, determinably, because of the inexorable, materialist laws of history. It will happen, and only happen, because we want it to, and because we know what we’re doing and know how we want to live, and know what obstacles have to be overcome before we can live that way, and know how to distinguish between our social patterns and theirs. But we must not think that the capitalist world can simply be ignored, in a live and let live attitude, while we try to build new lives elsewhere. (There is no elsewhere.) There is at least one thing, wage-slavery, that we can’t simply stop participating in (but even here there are ways we can chip away at it). Capitalism must be explicitly refused and replaced by something else. This constitutes War, but it is not a war in the traditional sense of armies and tanks, but a war fought on a daily basis, on the level of everyday life, by millions of people. It is a war nevertheless because the accumulators of capital will use coercion, brutality, and murder, as they have always done in the past, to try to block any rejection of the system. They have always had to force compliance; they will not hesitate to continue doing so. Nevertheless, there are many concrete ways that individuals, groups, and neighborhoods can gut capitalism, which I will enumerate shortly.