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<Business ethics, in the sense of ethics for business, illustrates this: its perspective is that of an ‘enlightened self-interest’ where the constraints that are put on the individual, thanks to the ability to see the unfortunate consequences for oneself, postpone the ‘war’, in a direct or metaphoric sense of the word (ibid.: 70-71). This enlightened self-interest forms the base not only of the market economy, but also of a social organization and manifestation of human rights, and even of some ethical theories. It is a calculated and voluntary renunciation of one’s own freedom in order to obtain in return security and other common goals (ibid.: 72). The fact that economic, political and legal theories appeal to enlightened self-interest does not imply, however, that we should discard them. Nor should we reject proclamations of human rights, legal constraints of individual freedom and, for that matter, business ethics, even if they are based on an enlightened self-interest. It is rather the opposite: such institutions and knowledge are indispensable because the primary quality of the enlightened self-interest is that it restricts egocentricity. Our practical reason (which was Kant’s words for the reason that governs our acts, where the moral law is embedded as a principle) includes the knowledge that it can be rational to lay certain restrictions on individual freedom. In this way practical reason may postpone (for an indefinite time) violence and murder among people. This has primarily been the raison-d’être of politics and the state, but it is today taken over more and more by corporate organizations, as expressed in the new term for business ethics, as corporate social responsibility and corporate citizenship (see chapter 2). Thanks to this ‘postponement of violence’ provided by politics and economic rationality, people may unfold their freedom within the laws and regulations set up by society (Burggraeve, 2003: 77).>

(Aasim, The Professionalization of Political Culture, Capitalism Nature Socialism Vol 17 Num 3, 11/21/06)

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The existence of capital is informed by a continuous confrontation between accumulation and legitimacy. Capitalism has survived, partly, through the absorption of critique.[40] The spirit of capitalism is the backbone of accumulation, which both places limits upon legitimate accumulation and is able to disarm potentially dangerous critique. In many ways, the radical challenge of identity politics has been disarmed and subsumed under neoliberalism’s valorisation of individual difference. Without an explanatory theory for identity, identities appear as ready-made, crystallised facsimiles of social struggle. Divorced from the material history of identity, identity politics becomes complicit with diversifying capitalism. This is exemplified by the calls to end ‘classism’ as discrimination against working-class people, a misguided attempt at understanding how relations of domination function through class. ‘Classism’ is a symptom of a capitalist society which relies upon class exploitation. Focusing on the cultural effects of identity leads to a dematerialised analysis which cannot understand the class system as necessitated by the exploitation of labour, rather than in terms of a denigrated identity which must be liberated. This is contextualised within the social and political logic of neoliberalism which treats the market forces of capitalism as inevitable and unassailable. The prevalence of discursive shifts towards framing oppression in terms of prejudice and stigma, which the language of classism epitomises, is part of this naturalisation. This decouples oppression from a useful systemic analysis which acknowledges the crucial systemic function that oppression plays. In turn, this naturalises systems of oppression. Classism is the most obvious example of this. In this analysis, poor and working-class people suffer because of the attitudes of middle and ruling-class people towards them, rather than because they are exploited by capitalist modes of production. Wealth- and income-inequality is attributed to prejudice: ‘classism is differential treatment based on social class or perceived social class. Classism is the systematic oppression of subordinated class groups to advantage and strengthen the dominant class groups. It’s the systematic assignment of characteristics of worth and ability based on social class.’[41] The organisation Class Action has as its tagline ‘Building Bridges Across the Class Divide’, locating class discrimination in interpersonal relationships that stem from systemic patterns of prejudice. Instead of abolishing class relations, classism emphasises the mitigation of the individual effects of the class relationship, for example, ‘feelings of inferiority to higher-class people’. Instead of seeking to dismantle the capitalist class-system, Class Action emphasises recognition of the suffering caused by interpersonal relations as a solution to inequality, flattening the function of race, class and gender by equalising them through the prism of descriptive identity. I do not dispute that the suffering which marks the lives of oppressed subjects must play a role in resistance to oppression. However, the impulse towards culturalism evidenced in contemporary identity-politics leads to resistance being conceived of as an inward turn towards the symptoms of oppression and away from the systemic causes. This turn to the self is embodied in the popularity of privilege theory. Privilege theory is an example of how structural inequalities are located in individual subject-positions. Peggy McIntosh’s conception of white privilege is germinal to current understandings. She compiles a list of 50 daily benefits of white privilege: ‘I have come to see white privilege as an invisible package of unearned assets that I can count on cashing in each day, but about which I was “meant” to remain oblivious’.[42] The concept of personal privilege as ‘unearned advantage … because of prejudice’ has become ubiquitous in identity-politics discourse.[43] ‘Check your privilege’ has become a political rallying-cry, suggesting that resistance must begin from acknowledgement of one’s own personal positionality within the system. Again, the systemic effects of oppression are held to be located in the individual. Not only is politics individualised, but it relies on ‘new and seemingly progressive ways of centering politics on the white identity’.[44] This reduces solidarity with the oppressed to a politics of guilt, where political agency is replaced with moralism and self-denunciation. Privilege discourse is geared towards individual affect; all individuals are privileged in some way and must accept their privilege: ‘the next step is one of simple self-realization: you are privileged. … What you need to realize is that we all have privilege to some degree: white privilege, male privilege, heterosexual privilege, etc.’[45] Its contemporary popularity is in line with the neoliberal individualism which renders it compatible with systemic injustice; as a programme for action, privilege theory foregrounds change upon the self, rather than upon the world, as resistance is reduced to self-reflection. Undoubtedly, making visible what the social system renders unseen is important in challenging the lived effects of oppression, and challenging individual effects and attitudes is crucial in the process of collective-building. However, when resistance is held to be located primarily in individual actions and beliefs, the political becomes wholly a question of ethics, leading to a depoliticised politics which seeks justice through interpersonal relations. Racist and patriarchal systems become reduced to racist prejudice and sexist attitudes.

Sophia Burns, communist and devotional polytheist: "Revolution Is Not a Metaphor: A Response to Critics," GODS & RADICALS, published June 15, 2018.

This week, two people have published critiques of my work, using it as a stand-in for the political tendency I’m part of: revolutionary base-building, exemplified by the Marxist Center network, Cooperation Jackson, and parts of DSA Refoundation. Revolutionary base-building means rejecting “activist networking” in favor of organizing the unorganized outside of elections. It involves independent workplace organizations, tenant unions, community self-defense, and mutual aid. Antonio Balmer argues that base-building is just empty populism. He compares it to the Narodnik movement of 19th-century Russia, which saw middle-class anti-monarchists “go to the people” by moving to peasant villages and occasionally assassinating aristocrats. Balmer contrasts them with the Bolsheviks, who built an organized political party capable of leading a revolution, and suggests that base-builders pay too little attention to Marxist theory and revolutionary leadership. Shamus Cooke takes a different angle. He quotes Lenin’s pamphlet “Left-Wing” Communism: An Infantile Disorder to claim that I reject class struggle in favor of a depoliticized mutualism. (Mutualism is a flavor of anarchism that calls for worker-owned co-ops to peacefully replace capitalism by out-competing traditional firms in the marketplace.) According to Cooke: Burns’ gradualist approach ignores the fact that revolutionary situations are often brief, requiring a battle for power at all levels of society. Nearly all revolutions begin as massive, mostly-spontaneous mobilizations, so it would behoove a revolutionary to understand the abc’s of organizing mobilizations. Mass mobilization, however, barely registers as an activity that Burns believes a revolutionary should engage in. The term class war implies there is an open struggle between the classes. Burns wants us to only engage in guerrilla tactics that don’t attract the attention of the establishment. But if ever such tactics actually succeed in challenging power, the ruling class would aggressively respond, since their economic and political power would actually be threatened, at which point Burns’ approach would be rendered useless, requiring a completely different strategy. The “completely different strategy” he advocates involves combining base-building methods, electoral work, and conventional activism to shift “the balance of forces” against “the establishment.” What does that look like concretely? Cooke repeatedly cites the city-level electoral and lobbying efforts of his own organization, Portland Tenants United. Balmer and Cooke agree: revolutionary base-builders are anti-theory, anti-political, don’t believe in party-building, don’t believe in class confrontation, and don’t have a vision for socialism or revolution. Base-building means mutual aid, and mutual aid is another word for depoliticized charity work. Base-builders say they want socialism, but don’t have the stomach to fight for it. Now, if you reduce revolutionary base-building to mutual aid, you’re misrepresenting it. Workplace and tenant organizing (along with community self-defense) account for much more of what base-builders actually do than mutual aid. But, it’s true that “base-building” is itself not a political strategy; it’s a set of techniques. So, what defines revolutionary base-building? Is it just methods? Are Balmer and Cooke right – do base-builders really expect to win socialism without a strategy, without the bother of class struggle? MEANS AND ENDS Anyone can base-build. How does any organization develop a base of support? It organizes previously-unorganized people. It campaigns against their enemies while offering mutual-aid, cultural, and social activities. It puts its own work above networking with the already-converted. Churches, businesses, political parties, and fan clubs all use some variant of the formula. Base-building methods, in that sense, are just how you build an effective organization. Since revolutionary base-builders use those techniques and most of the activist Left doesn’t, they provide the tendency’s form. They don’t provide its content. Base-building is a tool, nothing more. A hammer can help you make a table; it can also smash a flowerpot. “Youth organizing” can mean the March for Our Lives. It can also mean the Black Panther Party. Without the methodology of base-building, you can’t organize a constituency capable of exercising social power. But who are you organizing? What is that social power for? We are revolutionaries. That’s literal. We seek “the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions.” That includes the private ownership of economically productive property; the division of labor and benefits according to white supremacy, patriarchy, and empire; and the existence of the capitalist government. That won’t happen by winning elections or voting for socialism. It won’t happen through one-cooperative-at-a-time mutualism, either. Rather, it means building up revolutionary capacity by cultivating a mass base within the working class. When the conditions are right, it will mean launching a revolutionary uprising to establish a monopoly on the legitimate use of force by participatory-democratic organs of the working class. It will mean restructuring the economy according to a democratic, ecological, and scientific plan based on production for human use, not private profit. Our ideas don’t make us revolutionary. Ideology runs deeper than the things you think. What’s the long-term trajectory implied by what you’re actually doing? That’s your ideology. We build institutions of class confrontation and mutual aid outside of the state, against the state, and in order displace the state. That trajectory makes us revolutionary – what we are, not what we say. Electioneering, lobbying, and waving signs may well involve revolutionary slogans, taking the form of radical politics. But, they lack the content. What happens when activist leftists have a mass movement? They tie it institutionally to the state, cutting off its ability to exercise social power directly, on its own terms. That road doesn’t lead to collective power – just brokerage within the existing order. We don’t base-build for the sake of base-building. Our practice flows from and, in turn, shapes our revolutionary agenda. We are not cultivating an electorate for “movement” politicians. Revolutionary base-building is a process of preparation for collective self-government, for the seizure of power by the working class. Sure, delivering here-and-now gains does matter, but it’s never the point. Socialism means more than “a chicken in every pot.” DRAWING LINES Government socialism can’t end capitalism. Structurally speaking, the capitalist state can’t be separated from its function; it serves the ruling class, bottom to top. Expanding it doesn’t advance socialism. At best, it just rearranges exploitation (while institutionally tying the Left to the survival and success of the state). The impulse to deliver real gains, even if they’re small, make sense, but government socialists squeeze the revolutionary essence, the political content, out of socialism. Protest militancy isn’t up to the task either. Small-group heroics don’t make history. Organized power does. Confrontational protests feel “more revolutionary” to their participants because they’re more disruptive. But do they lead to oppressed people becoming organized in a durable way? Do they increase their long-term capacity to exercise collective power? Government socialists want tangible benefits and ignore or defer revolutionary ideas. Protest militants treat their ideas as a substitute for mass organization. Revolutionary base-builders, though, synthesize organizing for tangible gains with the long-game commitment to literal revolution. That synthesis doesn’t mean talking like protest militants and behaving like government socialists, though. Rather, it’s built into the process of organizing the unorganized to change their own conditions and confront their enemies themselves, rather than mediating it through the nonprofits or the state. (Indeed, the Marxist Center network takes its name from the course between those two possible distortions.) Base-building methods aren’t conventional activism. That matters, if only because “base-building” is another word for “organizational techniques that actually work” – but revolutionary base-builders are after more than just a social base. No matter what Bernie Sanders says, political revolution means replacing the government, not reforming it. The point is to create organizational structures through which power can be transferred from the few to the many, from the ownership class to the dispossessed. That transfer doesn’t happen piecemeal. It isn’t a gradual process where reforms (or mutualist co-ops!) stack on top of each other until one morning, you wake up to find that capitalism is gone. The capitalist state can’t not uphold the rule of the capitalist class. Base-building just to create another electoral or activist constituency, without that revolutionary goal and opposition to the state, has nothing to do with socialism. It doesn’t weaken capitalism. It just creates another avenue for capitalist politics, even if you call it “socialism,” even if it takes the form of base-building.

In my previous article for The Forge, Against Electoralism For Dual Power, I argued that it is necessary to forward a base building strategy over and against the current electoral strategy which dominates the socialist movement in the United States. I recommend reading that article before reading this one, as this is meant to expand on that article. My emphasis in that article was demonstrating that Lenin’s theory of the state is still relevant to our contemporary concerns. I argued that instead of focusing on electing candidates to official positions within the bourgeois state, we ought to build socialist institutions which can meet the needs of the working class and oppressed masses. This idea is not particularly novel, and has been forwarded by many thinkers within the broader base building movement in the United States. Tim Horras and Sophia Burns have both written prolifically on this strategy, and their work has helped to popularize the base building tendency. This emerging tendency has adopted a fairly big tent approach. Base building strategy can be found within multiple organizations including the Democratic Socialists of America, portions of the Party for Socialism and Liberation, and within the litany of local and autonomous parties and organizations affiliated with the Marxist Center network. Because of the eclectic nature of the base building movement, there is an open question as to what sorts of organizational model will come to the forefront of the movement. While base builders can agree on the need for building socialist institutions, there is still room to debate how such institutions should be built. One of the prominent criticisms of the base building movement forwarded by Marxist-Leninist-Maoist theorists in particular has focused on the lack of party organizing within the movement. These criticisms have largely argued that without a unified party, base building simply creates “red charities” which only meet the needs of the masses, while failing to organize, radicalize, and lead the masses. Furthermore, these criticisms have focused on a failure to publicly emphasize the revolutionary nature of base building. Critics from the left have claimed that the base building movements creates a sort of mutualism which settles for mutual aid as a parallel economy to capitalism, and which lacks a means of transitioning from dual power to unitary socialist power. My goal here is not to forward a defense of base building tactics in light of these criticisms. Most who are involved with the movement have made it clear that the goal is not a prolonged situation of dual power and parallel economies, but is socialist revolution. Base builders have been clear that dual power is a strategy which has to lead to revolution. The goal is to eventually establish unitary power in the hands of the working class. Sophia Burns, one of the more prominent and prolific theorists in the base building movement, has put forth an important and crucial response to such criticisms in her article Revolution Is Not a Metaphor. I am not going to rehash ideas which have already been forwarded by exceptional theorists. My goal here is to take these criticisms seriously and to suggest that the base building movement ought to pursue party organizing as a means of avoiding the potential pitfalls of mutualism. The critics of base building are correct that if base building settles for building socialist institutions which simply function as a cooperative oriented alternative to capitalism, then base building strategy fails to be sufficiently revolutionary. I do not think that this description of base building accurately reflects the work being done within the movement. The individual organizations which constitute the movement often have close working relationships with groups like the Socialist Rifle Association and John Brown Gun Club to ensure that oppressed communities are capable of arming themselves and competently defending themselves. Such work indicates that a serious militant stance exists within the base building movement. Individual organizations have undertaken various strategies to ensure that the dual power organizations they are building are tied to a broader systemic critique of capitalism and an emphasis on revolutionary socialism. The fact that most base building organizers do not simply enter into coalition work, but rather found their own revolutionary socialist organizations to organize around, demonstrates that base builders have an understanding of the need for revolutionary organizations instead of an unorganized conglomeration of socialist institutions with no broader plan for overcoming capitalism. It remains, however, somewhat unclear what organizational structures will emerge from the movement . The Marxist Center network remains a loose coalition of organizations, but there have been calls for formal national unity, and unification will be debated at the upcoming Marxist Center conference in December. Base builders within the DSA have been working not only to create dual power institutions at the local level, but also to take positions of power within DSA national to create a national movement. The DSA Refoundation caucus, a group of revolutionary Marxists associated with the base building movement, have explicitly stated that their goal is to produce “ a mass, independent socialist party in the US.” Debate and theorizing around organizational structure must necessarily occur as talk of unification and establishing a national tendency emerges. The Need For A Party: I would argue that within the base building movement, there is a move towards party organizing, but this trend has not always been explicitly theorized or forwarded within the movement. My goal in this essay is to argue that base building and dual power strategy can be best forwarded through party organizing, and that party organizing can allow this emerging movement to solidify into a powerful revolutionary socialist tendency in the United States. One of the crucial insights of the base building movement is that the current state of the left in the United States is one in which revolution is not currently possible. There exists very little popular support for socialist politics. A century of anticommunist propaganda has been extremely effective in convincing even the most oppressed and marginalized that communism has nothing to offer them. The base building emphasis on dual power responds directly to this insight. By building institutions which can meet people’s needs, we are able to concretely demonstrate that communists can offer the oppressed relief from the horrific conditions of capitalism. Base building strategy recognizes that actually doing the work to serve the people does infinitely more to create a socialist base of popular support than electing democratic socialist candidates or holding endless political education classes can ever hope to do. Dual power is about proving that we have something to offer the oppressed. The question, of course, remains: once we have built a base of popular support, what do we do next? If it turns out that establishing socialist institutions to meet people’s needs does in fact create sympathy towards the cause of communism, how can we mobilize that base? Put simply: in order to mobilize the base which base builders hope to create, we need to have already done the work of building a communist party. It is not enough to simply meet peoples needs. Rather, we must build the institutions of dual power in the name of communism. We must refuse covert front organizing and instead have a public face as a communist party. When we build tenants unions, serve the people programs, and other dual power projects, we must make it clear that we are organizing as communists, unified around a party, and are not content simply with establishing endless dual power organizations. We must be clear that our strategy is revolutionary and in order to make this clear we must adopt party organizing. By “party organizing” I mean an organizational strategy which adopts the party model. Such organizing focuses on building a party whose membership is formally unified around a party line determined by democratic centralist decision making. The party model creates internal methods for holding party members accountable, unifying party member action around democratically determined goals, and for educating party members in communist theory and praxis. A communist organization utilizing the party model works to build dual power institutions while simultaneously educating the communities they hope to serve. Organizations which adopt the party model focus on propagandizing around the need for revolutionary socialism. They function as the forefront of political organizing, empowering local communities to theorize their liberation through communist theory while organizing communities to literally fight for their liberation. A party is not simply a group of individuals doing work together, but is a formal organization unified in its fight against capitalism. Party organizing has much to offer the base building movement. By working in a unified party, base builders can ensure that local struggles are tied to and informed by a unified national and international strategy. While the most horrific manifestations of capitalism take on particular and unique form at the local level, we need to remember that our struggle is against a material base which functions not only at the national but at the international level. The formal structures provided by a democratic centralist party model allow individual locals to have a voice in open debate, but also allow for a unified strategy to emerge from democratic consensus. Furthermore, party organizing allows for local organizations and individual organizers to be held accountable for their actions. It allows criticism to function not as one independent group criticizing another independent group, but rather as comrades with a formal organizational unity working together to sharpen each others strategies and to help correct chauvinist ideas and actions. In the context of the socialist movement within the United States, such accountability is crucial. As a movement which operates within a settler colonial society, imperialist and colonial ideals frequently infect leftist organizing. Creating formal unity and party procedure for dealing with and correcting these ideas allows us to address these consistent problems within American socialist organizing. Having a formal party which unifies the various dual power projects being undertaken at the local level also allows for base builders to not simply meet peoples needs, but to pull them into the membership of the party as organizers themselves. The party model creates a means for sustained growth to occur by unifying organizers in a manner that allows for skills, strategies, and ideas to be shared with newer organizers. It also allows community members who have been served by dual power projects to take an active role in organizing by becoming party members and participating in the continued growth of base building strategy. It ensures that there are formal processes for educating communities in communist theory and praxis, and also enables them to act and organize in accordance with their own local conditions. We also must recognize that the current state of the base building movement precludes the possibility of such a national unified party in the present moment. Since base building strategy is being undertaken in a number of already established organizations, it is not likely that base builders would abandon these organizations in favor of founding a unified party. Additionally, it would not be strategic to immediately undertake such complete unification because it would mean abandoning the organizational contexts in which concrete gains are already being made and in which growth is currently occurring. What is important for base builders to focus on in the current moment is building dual power on a local level alongside building a national movement. This means aspiring towards the possibility of a unified party, while pursuing continued local growth. The movement within the Marxist Center network towards some form of unification is positive step in the right direction. The independent party emphasis within the Refoundation caucus should also be recognized as a positive approach. It is important for base builders to continue to explore the possibility of unification, and to maintain unification through a party model as a long term goal. In the meantime, individual base building organizations ought to adopt party models for their local organizing. Local organizations ought to be building dual power alongside recruitment into their organizations, education of community members in communist theory and praxis, and the establishment of armed and militant party cadres capable of defending dual power institutions from state terror. Dual power institutions must be unified openly and transparently around these organizations in order for them to operate as more than “red charities.” Serving the people means meeting their material needs while also educating and propagandizing. It means radicalizing, recruiting, and organizing. The party model remains the most useful method for achieving these ends. The use of the party model by local organizations allows base builders to gain popular support, and most importantly, to mobilize their base of popular support towards revolutionary ends, not simply towards the construction of a parallel economy which exists as an end in and of itself. It is my hope that we will see future unification of the various local base building organizations into a national party, but in the meantime we must push for party organizing at the local level. If local organizations adopt party organizing, it ought to become clear that a unified national party will have to be the long term goal of the base building movement. Many of the already existing organizations within the base building movement already operate according to these principles. I do not mean to suggest otherwise. Rather, my hope is to suggest that we ought to be explicit about the need for party organizing and emphasize the relationship between dual power and the party model. Doing so will make it clear that the base building movement is not pursuing a cooperative economy alongside capitalism, but is pursuing a revolutionary socialist strategy capable of fighting capitalism. The long term details of base building and dual power organizing will arise organically in response to the conditions the movement finds itself operating within. I hope that I have put forward a useful contribution to the discussion about base building organizing, and have demonstrated the need for party organizing in order to ensure that the base building tendency maintains a revolutionary orientation. The finer details of revolutionary strategy will be worked out over time and are not a good subject for public discussion. I strongly believe party organizing offers the best path for ensuring that such strategy will succeed. My goal here is not to dictate the only possible path forward but to open a conversation about how the base building movement will organize as it transitions from a loose network of individual organizations into a unified socialist tendency. These discussions and debates will be crucial to ensuring that this rapidly growing movement can succeed.

Labor Tax: How Underpaying Minority Workers Fuels AI Development In their investigative piece “The Exploited Labor Behind Artificial Intelligence," Williams, Miceli, and Gebru [16] shed light on the harsh realities faced by gig workers, essential in the AI industry, and disproportionately drawn from vulnerable populations. Big tech players such as Amazon and Facebook heavily rely on these laborers, including data labelers, content moderators, and delivery drivers. These workers, despite their indispensable contributions, often endure abysmal pay, constant surveillance, unrealistic quotas, and even safety hazards. Shockingly, data labelers, responsible for critical AI training data, can earn as little as $1.77 per task. In the troubling case of content moderators in Kenya, they are relentlessly monitored to make split-second decisions, even when confronted with disturbing content. These workers, whose labor sustains billion-dollar companies, are unjustly compensated. Izaguirre [7] discussed a very recent example of labor exploitation within the gig economy from the ridesharing giants, Uber and Lyft. In New York, these companies are set to pay a staggering $328 million to settle complaints that they wrongly imposed taxes and fees on their drivers that should have been covered by passengers. State Attorney General Letitia James unveiled this settlement, emphasizing how Uber and Lyft had systematically deprived their drivers of millions of dollars in earnings and essential benefits. The drivers, akin to those engaged in data labeling for AI, toiled for long hours in challenging conditions while being undercompensated. The repercussions of such labor exploitation have wide-ranging implications, demonstrating the persistence of these issues across different sectors of the gig economy. These drivers, often working long hours in challenging conditions, waited an arduous eight years for justice, emphasizing the enduring time burden in their battle for rights–we’ll will explore the ‘time’ dimension in the next subsection. Moreover, racial capitalism also rears its head in other ways in generative media AI applications. Startups have built systems to synthesize fake profile photos by exploiting images of minority models without consent or payment. The marginalized provide raw material|their unvalued data and likenesses|to advance technologies from which they do not benefit. An example of this is the Argentina-based design firm, Icons8, which built generative AI systems to synthesize fake profile photos by exploiting minority likenesses [6]. Though the models’ images provided core training data, they received no payment for this labor, nor any share of the systems’ profits derived from their inputs. Once again, capitalism fueled AI development by commodifying bodies. The models’ data and likenesses became raw materials for tech advancement from which they did not equally gain. This case provides further evidence that we must scrutinize and address the human exploitation underlying much AI progress. Time Surcharge: The Burden on Minorities to Fix Biased Systems In 2019, a pivotal federal study by NIST unveiled the entrenched racial biases within facial recognition algorithms, revealing higher false positive rates for Asian, African American, and Native American faces compared to white counterparts [5]. This disparity is not merely a technical oversight but a reflection of a broader societal issue where fairness is often assessed through a predominantly white lens, perpetuating and amplifying harmful racial stereotypes. These algorithms, failing more frequently with Black and Asian individuals, not only reinforce the misconception of homogeneity within these communities but also echo Cedric Robinson’s argument that capitalism morphs pre-existing social differences into racial disparities, using technology to further these divides. These biases extend beyond race to gender and age, with algorithms showing elevated error rates for women, the elderly, and the young compared to middle-aged white men. Simone Browne, in Dark Matters [2, p. 113], elucidates how these systems perpetuate stereotypes, such as misclassifying Asian males as females and Black women as men, illustrating how AI, like capitalism, disseminates racial and gender stereotypes on a massive scale under the guise of technological neutrality. The case of Brandon Mayfield, as discussed by Browne , exemplifies how biases in AI can have real-world consequences, where erroneous algorithmic matches based on fingerprints can lead to wrongful accusations, as seen in the 2004 Madrid bombing investigation [2, p. 115]. Mayfield’s wrongful identification highlights how minoritized groups not only bear the brunt of these biases but also face a "Privacy Levy," paying a significant personal and financial price due to prejudiced technological systems. This systemic bias embedded within AI technologies serves capitalist ends in several ways. Firstly, it perpetuates a cycle where the burden of correcting and navigating biased systems falls disproportionately on marginalized communities, consuming their time and resources| a “Time Surcharge" that benefits the status quo by maintaining existing power dynamics. Secondly, the deployment of such technologies, especially in law enforcement and surveillance, opens lucrative markets for tech companies, capitalizing on the state’s desire to monitor and control, often at the expense of those already marginalized. In essence, these biased algorithms are not just products of existing societal inequalities; they are tools that capitalism exploits to further entrench its dominance, ensuring that the costs of innovation are borne by those least able to bear them, while the profits accrue to those already in positions of power. Thus, the development and implementation of biased AI systems are stark manifestations of racial capitalism, where technological advancements are leveraged to amplify and profit from racial and social disparities. The need for a concerted effort to address these biases is not just a matter of technical accuracy but of challenging the capitalist structures that incentivize and benefit from the perpetuation of inequality. The Wellbeing Toll: How AI Progress Erodes Minority Health The advancement of AI technology, hailed as a cornerstone of modern innovation, often conceals a human toll disproportionately borne by marginalized communities. D’Ignazio and Klein’s observation [3, p. 183] that the tech industry relies on the precarious labor of older women of color, contrasts sharply with the privileged demographics of Silicon Valley. This labor force, essential to refining AI technologies, faces not just economic exploitation but significant mental health challenges, as Billy Perrigo’s investigations [12, 13] into the conditions of data labelers reveal. Workers engaged in making AI systems safer endure traumatic content exposure for meager wages, suffering profound mental health impacts without adequate support. This reality underscores a capitalist calculus where AI progress is prioritized over the well-being of those who enable it, revealing a stark exploitation that benefits technological advancement and profit margins at a significant human cost. In her work Automating Inequality [4, p. 173], Virginia Eubanks provides comprehensive evidence of the discriminatory outcomes resulting from automated social services. One striking example is the case of Angel and Patrick’s family. Angel seeking help from a counselor and taking medication to manage her PTSD is undoubtedly a responsible decision aimed at becoming a better-equipped caregiver for her children. However, her use of public assistance|due to their socioeconomic status|to access these essential services has an unintended negative consequence. It affects the family’s AFST (Allegheny Family Screening Tool) score, putting them at risk of having social services intervene and potentially remove their children. This situation raises a critical question: Why should it be a choice between the parents’ well-being and the children’s welfare? Instead, it should be an ‘and’ rather than an ‘or,’ emphasizing the importance of supporting families as a whole. Moreover, this scenario exemplifies the “Privacy Levy" where the act of seeking private counseling and prescriptions wouldn’t flag the same concerns, highlighting the disproportionate burden placed on marginalized communities. These instances reflect a broader trend of "algorithmic exploitation," where the relentless pursuit of efficiency and profit in AI development and application exacerbates social disparities. This exploitation is twofold: firstly, it leverages the labor of marginalized workers under deplorable conditions, enhancing AI capabilities while neglecting the workers’ health and economic stability. Secondly, it deploys these technologies in ways that disproportionately harm minority communities, whether through surveillance, law enforcement, or social services, thereby reinforcing systemic inequalities. The capitalist benefit derived from these practices is multifaceted, encompassing direct economic gains from reduced labor costs and expanded market dominance, as well as indirect advantages through the perpetuation of a socio-economic order that maintains a readily exploitable workforce. The prioritization of technological advancement and profit over human dignity and equity reflects a fundamental misalignment of values, where the potential of AI to serve the common good is compromised by a capitalist ethos that values profit above people. Addressing these issues demands a reevaluation of the objectives and ethics guiding AI development and deployment. It necessitates a shift towards a more equitable approach that recognizes the intrinsic value of all labor, respects the dignity of every individual, and prioritizes the well-being of marginalized communities. Only through such a transformative shift can we harness the potential of AI to contribute positively to society, rather than perpetuating the injustices of a capitalist system that exploits the vulnerabilities of the least among us. Conclusion This comprehensive exploration reveals compelling evidence that contemporary AI development mirrors and perpetuates the exploitation and marginalization of minoritized groups witnessed under historical racial capitalism. AI not only reflects but also concentrates deep societal biases ingrained in our structures. Despite promises of progress, this emerging technology entrenches social divides, much like capitalism historically intensified differences into racialized hierarchies. Uncontrolled AI poses a significant threat, exacerbating current oppressions and expanding racial disparities across dimensions such as labor, rights, and well-being. Undervalued minority workforces fuel systems they cannot equally access or shape, while flawed data and algorithms covertly deny opportunities and resources. The relentless pursuit of AI innovation disregards the resulting trauma among marginalized builders. In our extensive review of AI’s role in perpetuating historical inequalities, we’ve laid the foundation for understanding the intricate intersection of technology, capitalism, and social justice. We’ve discussed how labor exploitation, unequal time burdens, erosion of minority well-being, and the violation of personal privacy are all interconnected threads in the complex fabric of AI development. These dimensions are not isolated; they intersect and amplify each other, perpetuating historical inequalities. To truly address these issues, it is crucial to recognize that the exploitation of marginalized communities affects every aspect of AI, from its inception to its implementation. As we navigate the modern frontier of AI exploitation, the goal remains to inform and create awareness about the profound impact of technology on minoritized communities. Without diversity, inclusion suffers. Rather than rushing to ‘Move Fast and Break Things’, like Ruha Benjamin [1], we encourage you to move slower, fix the broken processes, and empower people.

In parallel, artificial intelligence (AI) emerges as a contemporary manifestation of these age-old disparities, capable of mirroring and magnifying biases embedded within the data it processes. Just as capitalism leveraged pre-existing social hierarchies for gain, AI risks doing the same, reinforcing racial disparities under the guise of technological advancement. In a sense AI technology, just as capitalism, functions as a machine that exploits existing patterns|in data|to accelerate production|of outputs. Scholars like Ruha Benjamin and Simone Browne caution against an unchecked AI, which could not only perpetuate but also amplify systemic oppressions through sophisticated means of profiling and control. This scenario underscores the imperative to critically examine AI through the prism of racial capitalism, recognizing the potential for these technologies to further entrench inequalities rather than dismantle them. AI: The Modern Frontier of Exploitation AI doesn’t operate in a vacuum; it mirrors the society that gives it life. The tech sector manufactures tools embedded with social biases, training AI models that ‘think’ like a corporation|which are predominantly steered by white men|at the expense of ambitions and morals [11]. This predilection for efficiency over human values carries profound implications for the implementation of AI-driven social services and their consequences for marginalized communities. The rapid proliferation of automated systems in these services raises concerns surrounding fairness, transparency, and accountability, driven by the relentless pursuit of efficiency. In this section, we aim to illustrate how capitalism’s influence on AI systems consistently drives them to perpetuate disparities, whether in terms of labor exploitation, unequal time burdens, or the erosion of minority well-being, underscoring how marginalized communities are disproportionately affected across various dimensions of AI development. Labor Tax: How Underpaying Minority Workers Fuels AI Development In their investigative piece “The Exploited Labor Behind Artificial Intelligence," Williams, Miceli, and Gebru [16] shed light on the harsh realities faced by gig workers, essential in the AI industry, and disproportionately drawn from vulnerable populations. Big tech players such as Amazon and Facebook heavily rely on these laborers, including data labelers, content moderators, and delivery drivers. These workers, despite their indispensable contributions, often endure abysmal pay, constant surveillance, unrealistic quotas, and even safety hazards. Shockingly, data labelers, responsible for critical AI training data, can earn as little as $1.77 per task. In the troubling case of content moderators in Kenya, they are relentlessly monitored to make split-second decisions, even when confronted with disturbing content. These workers, whose labor sustains billion-dollar companies, are unjustly compensated. Izaguirre [7] discussed a very recent example of labor exploitation within the gig economy from the ridesharing giants, Uber and Lyft. In New York, these companies are set to pay a staggering $328 million to settle complaints that they wrongly imposed taxes and fees on their drivers that should have been covered by passengers. State Attorney General Letitia James unveiled this settlement, emphasizing how Uber and Lyft had systematically deprived their drivers of millions of dollars in earnings and essential benefits. The drivers, akin to those engaged in data labeling for AI, toiled for long hours in challenging conditions while being undercompensated. The repercussions of such labor exploitation have wide-ranging implications, demonstrating the persistence of these issues across different sectors of the gig economy. These drivers, often working long hours in challenging conditions, waited an arduous eight years for justice, emphasizing the enduring time burden in their battle for rights–we’ll will explore the ‘time’ dimension in the next subsection. Moreover, racial capitalism also rears its head in other ways in generative media AI applications. Startups have built systems to synthesize fake profile photos by exploiting images of minority models without consent or payment. The marginalized provide raw material|their unvalued data and likenesses|to advance technologies from which they do not benefit. An example of this is the Argentina-based design firm, Icons8, which built generative AI systems to synthesize fake profile photos by exploiting minority likenesses [6]. Though the models’ images provided core training data, they received no payment for this labor, nor any share of the systems’ profits derived from their inputs. Once again, capitalism fueled AI development by commodifying bodies. The models’ data and likenesses became raw materials for tech advancement from which they did not equally gain. This case provides further evidence that we must scrutinize and address the human exploitation underlying much AI progress. Time Surcharge: The Burden on Minorities to Fix Biased Systems In 2019, a pivotal federal study by NIST unveiled the entrenched racial biases within facial recognition algorithms, revealing higher false positive rates for Asian, African American, and Native American faces compared to white counterparts [5]. This disparity is not merely a technical oversight but a reflection of a broader societal issue where fairness is often assessed through a predominantly white lens, perpetuating and amplifying harmful racial stereotypes. These algorithms, failing more frequently with Black and Asian individuals, not only reinforce the misconception of homogeneity within these communities but also echo Cedric Robinson’s argument that capitalism morphs pre-existing social differences into racial disparities, using technology to further these divides. These biases extend beyond race to gender and age, with algorithms showing elevated error rates for women, the elderly, and the young compared to middle-aged white men. Simone Browne, in Dark Matters [2, p. 113], elucidates how these systems perpetuate stereotypes, such as misclassifying Asian males as females and Black women as men, illustrating how AI, like capitalism, disseminates racial and gender stereotypes on a massive scale under the guise of technological neutrality. The case of Brandon Mayfield, as discussed by Browne , exemplifies how biases in AI can have real-world consequences, where erroneous algorithmic matches based on fingerprints can lead to wrongful accusations, as seen in the 2004 Madrid bombing investigation [2, p. 115]. Mayfield’s wrongful identification highlights how minoritized groups not only bear the brunt of these biases but also face a "Privacy Levy," paying a significant personal and financial price due to prejudiced technological systems. This systemic bias embedded within AI technologies serves capitalist ends in several ways. Firstly, it perpetuates a cycle where the burden of correcting and navigating biased systems falls disproportionately on marginalized communities, consuming their time and resources| a “Time Surcharge" that benefits the status quo by maintaining existing power dynamics. Secondly, the deployment of such technologies, especially in law enforcement and surveillance, opens lucrative markets for tech companies, capitalizing on the state’s desire to monitor and control, often at the expense of those already marginalized. In essence, these biased algorithms are not just products of existing societal inequalities; they are tools that capitalism exploits to further entrench its dominance, ensuring that the costs of innovation are borne by those least able to bear them, while the profits accrue to those already in positions of power. Thus, the development and implementation of biased AI systems are stark manifestations of racial capitalism, where technological advancements are leveraged to amplify and profit from racial and social disparities. The need for a concerted effort to address these biases is not just a matter of technical accuracy but of challenging the capitalist structures that incentivize and benefit from the perpetuation of inequality.

The Russian invasion — brutal, reckless and condemnable by any standard — has sparked debate on NATO’s proposed expansion into Ukraine and the role that it played in motivating the Kremlin. U.S. officials were keenly aware, in fact, that the drive to expand NATO to Russian borders would eventually push Moscow into a military conflict. “We examine a wide range of nonviolent measures that could exploit Russia’s actual vulnerabilities and anxieties as a way of stressing Russia’s military and economy and the regime’s political standing at home and abroad,” notes a 2019 study by the RAND Corporation, a Pentagon-affiliated think tank. “The steps we examine would not have either defense or deterrence as their prime purpose,” it states, but rather, “these steps are conceived of as elements in a campaign designed to unbalance the adversary, leading Russia to compete in domains or regions where the United States has a competitive advantage, and causing Russia to overextend itself militarily or economically.” But the provocation could not be reduced to geopolitical competition, however important, as most observers were keen to do. Missing from the larger picture was the centrality of militarized accumulation — of endless low- and high-intensity warfare, simmering conflicts, civil strife and policing — to the global political economy. Militarized accumulation refers to a situation in which a global war economy relies on the state to organize war-making, social control and repression to sustain capital accumulation in the face of chronic stagnation and saturation of global markets. These state-organized practices are outsourced to transnational corporate capital, involving the fusion of private accumulation with state militarization in order to sustain the process of capital accumulation. Cycles of destruction and reconstruction provide ongoing outlets for over-accumulated capital; that is, these cycles open up new profit-making opportunities for transnational capitalists seeking ongoing opportunities to profitably reinvest the enormous amounts of cash they have accumulated. There is a convergence in this process of global capitalism’s political need for social control and repression in the face of mounting popular discontent worldwide and its economic need to perpetuate accumulation in the face of stagnation. Wars provide critical economic stimulus. They have historically pulled the capitalist system out of accumulation crises while they serve to deflect attention from political tensions and problems of legitimacy. It took World War II to finally lift world capitalism out of the Great Depression. The Cold War legitimated a half century of expanding military budgets and the Iraq/Afghanistan wars, the longest in history, helped keep the economy sputtering along in the face of chronic stagnation in the first two decades of the century. From the anti-Communist fervor of the Cold War, to the “war on terror,” then the so-called New Cold War, and now the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the transnational elite, led by Washington, have had to conjure up one enemy after another to legitimate militarized accumulation and deflect crises of state legitimacy and capitalist hegemony onto external enemies and contrived threats.

As the global confluence of struggles undermined the capitalist and imperialist capacities of discipline, the economic order that had dominated the globe for almost thirty years, the Golden Age of U.S. hegemony and capitalist growth, began to unravel. The form and substance of the capitalist management of international development for the postwar period were dictated at the conference at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, in 1944.[8] The Bretton Woods system was based on three fundamental elements. Its first characteristic was the comprehensive economic hegemony of the United States over all the nonsocialist countries. This hegemony was secured through the strategic choice of a liberal development based on relatively free trade and moreover by maintaining gold (of which the United States possessed about one third of the world total) as the guarantee of the power of the dollar. The dollar was "as good as gold." Second, the system demanded the agreement for monetary stabilization between the United States and the other dominant capitalist countries (first Europe then Japan) over the traditional territories of European imperialisms, which had been dominated previously by the British pound and the French franc. Reform in the dominant capitalist countries could thus be financed by a surplus of exports to the United States and guaranteed by the monetary system of the dollar. Finally, Bretton Woods dictated the establishment of a quasi-imperialist relationship of the United States over all the subordinate nonsocialist countries. Economic development within the United States and stabilization and reform in Europe and Japan were all guaranteed by the United States insofar as it accumulated imperialist superprofits through its relationship to the subordinate countries. The system of U.S. monetary hegemony was a fundamentally new arrangement because, whereas the control of previous international monetary systems (notably the British) had been firmly in the hands of private bankers and financiers, Bretton Woods gave control to a series of governmental and regulatory organizations, including the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and ultimately the U.S. Federal Reserve.[9] Bretton Woods might thus be understood as the monetary and financial face of the hegemony of the New Deal model over the global capitalist economy. The Keynesian and pseudo-imperialist mechanisms of Bretton Woods eventually went into crisis when the continuity of the workers' struggles in the United States, Europe, and Japan raised the costs of stabilization and reformism, and when anti-imperialist and anticapitalist struggles in subordinate countries began to undermine the extraction of superprofits.[10]

Society is increasingly humanizing the cosmos. Satellites have for some time been central to the flow of information, to surveillance, and to the conduct of warfare. As these examples suggest, however, the humanization of the cosmos is primarily benefiting the powerful. These include major economic and military institutions. Furthermore, the forthcoming commodification and colonization of the cosmos is again likely to enhance the interests of the powerful, the major aerospace companies in particular. The time has come to consider alternative forms of cosmic humanization. These would enhance the prospects of the socially marginalized. They would also allow humanity to develop a better understanding of the cosmos and our relationship to it. Humanizing Outer Space The 1969 Apollo 11 moon landing is often seen as the high point of society’s relationship with outer space. Nothing quite so dramatic or exotic seems to have happened in outer space since. But nearby, parts of the solar system (including the moon, some asteroids, and Mars) are now being routinely circled and explored and analyzed by robots. Furthermore, President Obama has recently made important announcements regarding a new U.S. space program that involves manned missions to Mars by the mid-2030s. But the NASA-based Constellation program to the moon and Mars has been cancelled. Instead, NASA will undertake a long-term research and development program aimed at supporting future forms of propulsion and exploration programs. Even more significant in the short-term is a proposed $25 billion being allocated to NASA to kick-start commercial manned spaceflight over the next five years. New forms of transport to the International Space Station will be funded, this time using innovative forms of “space taxis” designed by private sector space companies. These plans entail new relations between the private and public sectors in the United States. Meanwhile, a presence in outer space is being developed by other societies. This is partly because such a presence is seen as an important symbol of modernization, progress, and social unity. The Indian government has announced a manned mission to the moon in 2013, the European Space Agency envisages projects to the moon and beyond, and the Chinese government is planning a similar project for 2020. This last development has caused some consternation over Obama’s plans. One suggestion is that the United States may after all be the next to send manned missions to the moon, because China’s space project is seen by some as a military threat that needs forestalling. Yet among these plans and proposals, it is easy to forget that outer space is already being increasingly humanized. It has now been made an integral part of the way global capitalist society is organized and extended. Satellites, for example, are extremely important elements of contemporary communications systems. These have enabled an increasing number of people to become part of the labor market. Teleworking is the best known example. Satellite-based communications have also facilitated new forms of consumption such as teleshopping. Without satellite-based communications, the global economy in its present form would grind to a halt. Satellites have also been made central to modern warfare. Combined with pilotless Predator drones, they are now being used to observe and attack Taliban and Al-Qaida operatives in Afghanistan and elsewhere. This action is done by remote control from Creech Air Force Base at Indian Springs, Nevada. The 1980s Strategic Defense Initiative, or “Star Wars” program, aimed to intercept incoming missiles while facilitating devastating attacks on supposed enemies. A version of the program is still being developed, with the citizens of the Czech Republic and Poland now under pressure to accept parts of a U.S.-designed “missile defense shield.” This is part of a wider strategy of “Full Spectrum Dominance,” which has for some time been official U.S. Defense Policy. Using surveillance and military equipment located in outer space is now seen as the prime means of protecting U.S. economic and military assets both on Earth and in outer space. Less dangerously, but still very expensively, a full-scale space-tourism industry has for some time been under active development. Dennis Tito, a multi-millionaire, made the first tourist trip into outer space in 2001. Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic has now sold over three hundred seats at $200,000 apiece to its first tourists in outer space. The program is due to start in 2011, with spaceports for this novel form of travel now being built in Alaska, California, Florida, New Mexico, Virginia, Wisconsin, the United Arab Emirates, and Esrange in Sweden. Excursions circling the moon, likely to cost the galactic visitors around $100,000,000, are now under development. Since the Renaissance period of the sixteenth century, the word “humanization” has been used to connote something beneficial, especially to human beings. As we will now see, humanizing the cosmos is regarded in just these terms by some influential proponents of space travel and space colonization. The Space Renaissance Initiative One response to cosmic humanization is to welcome it as an early stage of a wholly beneficial cosmic human society, one eventually encompassing the solar system and beyond. Such is the view of the Space Renaissance Initiative, an international group of over seventy private organizations now promoting the expansion of society into the cosmos. The aims and ideals of the Space Renaissance are made clear by the Initiative’s manifesto published in 2010. It reads: Help the Space Economy Revolution! The global economy is entering a deep crisis, the worst since 1929. This is the second act of the “Crisis of Closed-World Ideologies”, which has been developing throughout the 20thcentury. In 1989 the fall of the Berlin wall was the Crisis of Collectivist Ideology. The recent massive failure of the financial system is the Crisis of Neo-Liberal Ideology. Both these ideologies failed because they are based upon a closed-world, terro-centric philosophy. There are now almost 7 billion humans making massive demands on planet Earth: we urgently need to open the frontier, and move to a wider vision of our world, so as to access geo-lunar system resources and energy. In short we need a new “Open World Philosophy”. The alternative would be the implosion and collapse of our civilization. In short, the Space Renaissance Initiative argues, society is undergoing massive social, environmental, and population crises because it is thinking too small. The energy of the sun can, for example, be made into a source of clean power from outer space, which would solve society’s energy shortages at a stroke. The Initiative argues that opening up the cosmos to humanity—colonizing the solar system, and opening up resources in the moon, Mars, and the asteroids—could be central to social and environmental salvation. The progress made by the private sector in developing technologies and efficiencies for space tourism means that commercial enterprise can now start planning to venture still further afield. The philosophical roots of the Space Initiative are no less than the sixteenth-century Italian Renaissance and the Enlightenment. With the enlightened patronage of such families as the Medicis, an unprecedented new age of development took place: arts knew a wonderful age of innovation, culture took on some essential principles of classical Greek philosophy, and modern science was born, with men like Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, and later Copernicus and Galileo leading the way. This movement led to the Age of Enlightenment and its most famous offspring: the American and French Revolutions. The manifesto also praises the writings of Descartes, Voltaire, and Jefferson. The belief of these philosophers in the enterprising individual, in freedom, in liberty, and in reason all mean that political power should be vested in the common person and not in states, kings, and nobility. The Space Renaissance Initiative believes in these concepts, seeing them as the basis of a new, progressive, liberating, humanization of the cosmos. But there are surely major problems here. For example, any claim that the Medici family (and similar families such as the Borgias) helped overthrow feudalism is far-fetched. The Medicis were bankers and merchants who made their money at the center of an emerging global mercantilist capitalism, one based in Northern Italy. They used this money to enhance their position within their feudal societies. Members of the Medicis even made themselves into popes, thus further enhancing their wealth and that of their many illegitimate offspring. Another of the Medicis was made the Queen of France. The language used by intellectual elites of the day was Latin. This appealed to scholars across Europe but not to the great mass of individuals living in Florence, Milan, or Venice. The Medicis and individuals such as Leonardo are often celebrated as examples of “The Renaissance Universal Man,” one capable of spanning every kind of human practice such as art, music, and politics. This “Man” is perhaps best symbolized by Leonardo’s famous image of a male human being, stretched over the circle of the cosmos, his head in the heavens and his bowels located in earthly regions. But this Renaissance Man—or Woman—can also be seen as prefiguring the self-centered, narcissistic individualism of our own day, one seeing the whole of the cosmos at his or her command. This kind of modern human identity has since been enhanced by consumer-based capitalism and, given the problems it creates both for ourselves and our environment, there seems rather little reason to celebrate or restore it. The general point is that the vision of the Space Renaissance Initiative, with its prime focus on the power of the supposedly autonomous and inventive individual, systematically omits questions of social, economic, and military power. Similarly, the Initiative’s focus on the apparently universal benefits of space humanization ignores some obvious questions. What will ploughing large amounts of capital into outer space colonization really do for stopping the exploitation of people and resources back here on earth? The “solution” seems to be simultaneously exacerbating social problems while jetting away from them. Consumer-led industrial capitalism necessarily creates huge social divisions and increasing degradation of the environment. Why should a galactic capitalism do otherwise? The Space Renaissance Initiative argues that space-humanization is necessarily a good thing for the environment by introducing new space-based technologies such as massive arrays of solar panels. But such “solutions” are again imaginary. Cheap electricity is most likely to increase levels of production and consumption back on earth. Environmental degradation will be exacerbated rather than diminished by this technological fix. A simplistic and idealistic view of history, technology, and human agency therefore underpins the starting point of the Space Renaissance Initiative. Humanization in this shape—one now finding favor in official government circles—raises all kinds of highly problematic issues for society and the environment. What would an alternative, more critical, perspective on humanizing the cosmos tell us?

Resource Extraction: Many people consider it inevitable that resource extraction will be a fundamental part of space exploration, if not the reason for doing it at all. However, it is worth questioning whether our current mode of extractive capitalism is something we should (shouldn’t ) take with us when interacting with other worlds. As we are finding on our own Earth, resources are not infinite, and if resource extraction is a cornerstone of the structures we build on the Moon and other worlds, we are setting ourselves up for the same challenges in the long-term. Enabling those with the wealth to privately engage in space exploration efforts could exacerbate already extreme wealth inequality in the immediate future. There are possibilities for engaging in a truly sustainable way with other worlds, and even redistributing resources in an equitable way that doesn’t exacerbate wealth inequality. To explore these alternatives and enact them will require conscious consideration when designing policy and robust enforcement mechanisms for their implementation.

In July 2014, the then British Prime Minister publicly articulated his fears of a ‘return to the dark ages of medicine’, an ‘unthinkable scenario’ in which antibiotics would become useless in tackling even the most common of minor infections. Cameron sketched out the dystopian prospect of a ‘return’ to the past, the unravelling or ‘undoing’ of modernity’s promissory progress. Exactly a decade earlier, Cameron’s predecessor as leader of the British Conservatives (Michael Howard), presented ‘superbugs’ as symptomatic of a fundamental cultural and economic contaminant at the heart of British politics and institutional life. Britain had become ‘the sick man of Europe’, he argued, and only liberal market economic reforms could restore Britain once again to health. This paper focuses on these and other aspects of the recent politics of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) examining the seemingly dystopian capacity of infectious diseases to evolutionarily adapt to and ‘outpace’ the toxins developed to keep them at bay. In so doing, we explore the promissory work of ‘traumatism’ (Derrida, 1999, 2003) and the politics of fear through which the debate has become expressed. Conceptually, we locate AMR in recent biopolitical literature on immunity, anticipatory biopolitics and the sociology of futures. We will argue that the debate has become a significant vehicle for the expression of an ‘economic imaginary’ (Jessop and Oosterlynck, 2008) where microbial resistance is projected onto the ideal operations of neoliberal markets. We bring this focus on economic imaginary together with writing on anticipation and an immunitary perspective on biopolitics. Immunitary theory allows us to recognize the importance of the immune system in configuring, and being configured by, the cross-currents of politics and life science debate. Some perspectives articulate the affirmative prospect of a ‘co-immunity’ between the self and the immunitary other, the human and the microbial (Cohen, 2009). Sloterdijk (2011) reflects on the consequences of the fortified immunitary microspheres of contemporary technological securitization. In following the economic imaginaries of AMR, we document an ongoing traffic in meanings by which biology and the juridical, immunology and economic politics, restructure one another (Martin, 1994; Cohen, 2009; Jamieson, 2016). Our focus here is to trace the transformation of one epistemology (biological resistance) into another (the political economy of markets). This, we suggest, can be expressed as the ‘resistance of economies’. Less explored here are what we have called ‘economies of resistance’, or the way principles of economy are borrowed into biological explanations of AMR. Biological models of ‘genetic capitalism’ in AMR, for example, nicely illustrate the flow of political economy into biology. The wider task to which this critique contributes is to puzzle through the mutually constituting flows between ‘economies of resistance’ and the ‘resistance of economies’ in the politics of AMR. Our key anchor point for thinking about the anticipatory dimensions of the AMR debate is Derrida and his reflections on the links between immunity and terror (2003). For Derrida, our present protections create the circumstances for an inescapably destructive future autoimmunity. His thinking is focused on the role of the imagination and chimes with the dystopian catastrophism underpinning many recent political and policy interventions on AMR. He reflects on an ‘anticipatory catastrophism’ and an ‘immunitary imagination’ that feeds a projected future cycle of excess recoiling destructively back upon our current protections and defences. Our point is to consider the different kinds of futures being constructed through the politics and policy of antimicrobial resistance, especially in its catastrophist formulations (see also Nerlich and James, 2009; Brown and Crawford, 2009). We will explore the very different accounts of ‘resistance’ expressed at different moments in the development of the AMR Brown and Nettleton 495 debate and interrogate to what extent AMR is a site for the continuation or transformation of an immunitary politics at the intersections of the human and the microbial. We use the political interventions of Howard and Cameron to consider the different kinds of futures being constructed through the promissory performance of biotic resistance.

The development of antibiotic resistance is closely tied to the capitalist system of medicine. The overuse and misuse of antibiotics by pharmaceutical companies and healthcare providers seeking profit has led to the proliferation of resistant bacterial strains. This can be seen as another manifestation of the violence inherent in capitalism, where the pursuit of profit takes precedence over the well-being of individuals and communities. The commodification of healthcare has led to the creation of a system where medical treatment is often driven by profit motives rather than by the needs of patients. The links between biowarfare, biopower, and capitalist medicine suggest that addressing antibiotic resistance and improving health equity requires systemic change beyond the biomedical sphere. It requires addressing the underlying power structures and ideologies that enable and perpetuate these issues, including neoliberalism, colonialism, and white supremacy. This systemic change can only be achieved through the destruction of existing legislative, economic, and biomedical institutions, the creation of more equitable healthcare systems, and the promotion of cultural humility in healthcare practice. These changes can lead to a more equitable distribution of healthcare resources, whilst mending out close to irreparable relationships with the bacterial species.

Chapter 4

Early in 2001 nearly 40 South African pharmaceutical companies took the South African government to court in order to defend their massive profits, even if this meant the death of millions of people who are HIV positive. The case opened at the Pretoria High Court on March 5th and ended in partial defeat for the pharma-mafia which were forced to retreat, embarrassed by the negative publicity they were getting from this case. The struggle, however, is far from over. In 1997, the South African government passed the Medicines and Related Substances Control Amendment Act which would allow the government, in certain cases, to use “parallel imports” (importing drugs from other countries where the patent owner is selling them cheaper) and “compulsory licensing” (forcing drug companies to release information allowing the government to produce cheaper generic versions of the drugs). The South African Medicines Act was passed in compliance with the Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPs) agreement which is compulsory for World Trade Organization (WTO) members. TRIPs was developed during the Uruguay round of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), the WTO’s predecessor, and establishes a very hard regime in protection of intellectual rights. Companies have the right to patent products for 20 years; by contrast, for example, Kenya’s patent law, which was introduced during British colonial rule, allows patents to last for only seven years. As this was widely seen as an extraordinarily harsh regime, a clause was added to TRIPs which says that under exceptional emergency cases governments are allowed to use compulsory licensing to force companies to give them information which would allow them to produce cheaper generic versions of the patented product. All governments, including the US and European Union, agreed to this, but immediately proceeded to put pressure on Third World governments to make sure the clause would never be used. As is always the case when a resolution that does not suit the interests of the big powers is passed in an international body, the resolution is not implemented. For instance, after the South African government passed the Medicines Act, the Vice President of the European Commission, Leon Brittain, wrote to the then-Deputy-President Thabo Mbeki arguing that the Act “would appear to be at variance with South Africa’s obligations under the WTO TRIPs…and its implementation would negatively affect the interests of the European pharmaceutical industry.” The US put South Africa on a “Trade Watch List” and threatened economic sanctions, including a bill which went through Congress making all aid to South Africa contingent on dropping the law. The South African pharmaceutical companies also exerted heavy pressure, closing factories, cancelling investments and even taking out scare ads suggesting people would be hurt by generic drugs. When their chief lobbyist, Mirryina Deeb, was asked if the industry’s threat to cut off all new drug discoveries meant they were threatening thousands of South Africans lives, she admitted: “In so many words, yes”! 2. The Scale of the AIDS Pandemic Around the world there are an estimated 35 million people with HIV/AIDS, 25 million in sub-Saharan Africa, the same region which also accounted for 80 percent of the 2.8 million who died of AIDS in 1999. Life expectancy has dropped dramatically and in countries like Botswana 35 percent of the adult population are HIV positive. The figure in South Africa is four million (about 20 percent of the adult population). In the year 2000 there were 3.8 million new infections in the region and more than 16 million Africans have already died since the pandemic started. The enormity of the crisis in Africa is not unconnected to the massive plunder of these countries by imperialism. Over the last decade, the US and Europe have forced African and other Third World countries to open up their markets and privatize their public services (including health and education). In some cases the very structure of the state has collapsed or is on the verge of disappearing under the pressure of imperialist exploitation. The Structural Adjustment Plans (SAPs) imposed by the IMF and the World Bank on African countries have had the effect of destroying their health and education infrastructure by forcing them to “balance the budget” and repay their external debt. It isDownloaded by [UNAM Ciudad Universitaria] at 16:31 21 December 2014 107 in these conditions that HIV/AIDS has been able to spread faster than anywhere else and everyday diseases mean a death sentence for HIV- positive people with extremely weakened immune systems. Even the US Central Intelligence Agency recognized the potential social effects a crisis of this magnitude could have. In a report issued in January 2000 they warned that “these diseases will endanger US citizens at home and abroad, threaten US armed forces deployed overseas, and exacerbate social and political instability in key countries and regions in which the US has significant interests.” 3. Profits Before People’s Needs The fact that the pharmaceutical companies are run on the basis of profit means that they are simply not interested in developing treatments to cure diseases which affect mainly people in the Third World, as these people do not have the purchasing power to buy drugs. Between 1975 and 1997 the multinational pharmaceutical companies brought 1,233 new medications to the market. Only one percent of those (13 medications) were specifically designed to treat tropical diseases plaguing the Third World and which kill millions of people every year.1 In fact, the main emphasis of the research programs of the pharmaceutical giants is on the so-called lifestyle drugs, that is products which treat conditions like obesity, baldness, face wrinkles and impotence, among others. The market for such drugs is worth billions every year. Roy Vagelos, the former head of Merck, a company which now controls 10 percent of the world’s pharmaceutical market, was quite open about this: “A corporation with stockholders can’t stock up a laboratory that will focus on Third World diseases, because it would go broke.”2 But the pharmaceutical giants are hardly struggling to make ends meet! This highly profitable industry has been swept by a wave of mergers and takeovers, creating massive companies worth more than the annual GDP of many Third World countries. The most recent example is the fusion between SmithKlineBeecham and GlaxoWelcome (themselves the results of earlier mergers). The combined worth of the “Big Five” is twice the combined GDP of all sub-Saharan Africa!3 Another growth area for these companies is the “companion animal drug market,” with US sales for 1998 estimated at about $1 billion. There are now drugs to treat dogs that suffer form “separation anxiety,” Alzheimer’s, arthritis, dementia, allergies, cancer and periodontal disease. According to an industry source, US companies spend about half a billion dollars a year for R and D on animal health.4 The priorities of these multinational companies are clear: Pfizer made more then $1 billion in sales of Viagra in the first year on the market. In the same year, the top two drugs that fight allopecia had combined sales of $180 million, and Allegaran earned $90 million from sales of its miracle anti-wrinkle treatment (at $1,000 for three injections). Drug company researcher A.J. Slater, in a paper published in the Royal Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene magazine, concluded that the development of new antibiotics is very costly and their provision alone to Third World countries can never be financially rewarding. In other words, profits come before people’s lives.5 And they will defend their massive profit margins (the highest of any legal industry in the world) by any means necessary. In the US alone, drugs companies spend $75 million a year in lobbying, making sure regardless of whatever government is in power, their interests will be well defended all over the world. It is alarming to learn that there is one pharmaceutical lobbyist for every two members of Congress. During the 2000 US presidential elections, these massive multi- nationals spent an unprecedented $26.6 million, 70 percent of which went to the Republican party.6 Larry Elliot, writing in the Guardian, described the tactics of the multinationals and the US government as “gunboat diplomacy.” He explained, for instance, that “the US offers a special deal to the Dominican Republic for exports of textiles. It is now threatening to withdraw this privilege unless the country scraps plans for compulsory licensing and parallel importing. Brazil and India have also been warned that they could face sanctions under America’s bilateral Super 301 legislation.”7 This is a clear example of how the multinationals use their economic muscle to threaten any countries which take measures which would undermine their profits. In another example of this, GlaxoWelcome has threatened legal action against the Indian generics company Cipla for trying to provide Ghana and Uganda with a cheap version of Combivir. This is a pill which combines AZT and 3TC, two drugs which were developed in the US with public funding! 4. Multinationals’ Lame Excuses One of the arguments that pharmaceutical companies are using to defend themselves and patent rights is that they need to recover the enormous cost of developing new drugs. But if one takes a careful look at the way the companies spend their budgets, it is clear that projected costs are greatly exaggerated. For instance, a great chunk of their spending goes to marketing, exactly twice as much as they spend on Research and Development. Furthermore, many products which do not fall into the category of lifestyle drugs are actually developed by US government laboratories or other publicly funded institutions. The vaccine for hepatitis A was largely developed by researchers at the Walter Reed Army Institute, but marketing rights were given to SmithKline Beecham and Merck. The market for the vaccine, which is sold at $60 per person, is about $300 million annually. For their efforts, the researchers at the Walter Reed Institute got a plaque in exchange. In fact, some of the AIDS drugs which are at the center of the current dispute between the drugs giants and the South African government were discovered by publicly funded laboratories. This is the case for ddI, AZT, 3TC and the protease inhibitor Norvir, some of the drugs which are part of the cocktail which helps prevent HIV positive patients from developing AIDS. The pharmaceutical companies insist in keeping high prices and blocking cheaper generic alternatives for Third World countries even in the case of drugs from which they are earning large amounts of money from sales in the West. This is the case with GlaxoWelcome which sold AIDS drugs worth $1.7 billion. 7Guardian, February 12, 2001.Downloaded by [UNAM Ciudad Universitaria] at 16:31 21 December 2014 110 One of the best examples is fluconzale, a powerful anti-fungal agent which treats both toenail fungus and AIDS-related diseases, like oral thrush and cryptococcal meningitis. Pfizer has the patent for fluconzale and earns large amounts from its sales (worth $1 billion a year) to wealthy US and European patients, but still refuses to provide the drug cheaply to Third World countries, and in order to protect its patent rights has used all sorts of bullying methods and threats. In Thailand, 20 percent of people with AIDS suffer from cryptoccocal meningitis. If untreated the victims die in less than a month. The wholesale price of a dose of Diflucan (fluconzale’s commercial name) in Thailand is $5. But generic versions of the same product produced by Cipla in India are sold for 64 cents a pill and Thai companies produce them for much less, about 30 cents. Thai law did not allow medicines to be patented until 1994 when the Thai government was forced to sign the TRIPs agreement as a condition for WTO membership. Although fluconazole was in the market before the law changed in Thailand, Pfizer managed to include it in an exclusivity program which allowed them to sell the pill for $7 a capsule until 1998 with no competition. Another country which has defied the international drugs monopolies is Brazil. In the early 1990s the country had the fourth largest number of reported cases of HIV/AIDS in the world (about 3 million people). The Brazilian government decided to import, produce and distribute large numbers of anti-retroviral drugs which led to a drop of 38 percent in the number of AIDS-related deaths since 1994. The cost of a year’s treatment is about $600 as opposed to $10,000 for patented versions. Brazil has now been threatened by the US with retaliatory measures if it does not drop its policy on generic drugs and parallel importing. The Bush administration (whose election campaign was heavily funded by the drugs industry) has already asked for a WTO disputes hearing, claiming Brazil is in breach of TRIPs. 5. Making Concessions? Last year the US government, after having been severely criticized around the world, announced that it was going to give $1 billion to AIDS prevention. However, when African countries looked at the small print of the offer they discovered that what was being proposed were loans at commercial rates to be spent only on US manufactured drugs! In other words the “generous” offer amounted to the US government subsidizing US drugs companies and making a nice profit on the interest rate.Downloaded by [UNAM Ciudad Universitaria] at 16:31 21 December 2014 111 This “AIDS aid,” far from solving the problem, would plunge countries deeper into the foreign debt spiral which is already eating up most of their foreign trade earnings and preventing them from putting in place the medical, educational and infrastructural measures that would alleviate the HIV/AIDS crisis. The pharmaceutical companies, fearful of losing markets, also have announced massive reductions in the price of HIV/AIDS drugs. But campaigners pointed out that the 85 percent price reduction announced by the “big five” drugs multinationals would make almost no difference in the number of people able to afford the treatment. The head of Kenya’s AIDS control council, commenting on these announced price reductions, declared: “If the international mafia — the drug companies — really mean business, they should waive their patent rights and let developing countries make drugs themselves under their supervision. Kenya already has the capacity to make most of these drugs. It is the big five who are stopping us.”8 Government figures show that 25 percent of Kenyans are HIV positive but only 2 percent can afford the treatment. In South Africa the situation is even worse, with only 10,000 people among the 4 million who are HIV positive able to afford a treatment of the triple therapy which can cost up to $10,000 a year. Most employed South Africans earn less than $250 a month. Importing the drugs from India could reduce the price of the treatment to less than $300 a year. The same point was made about Pfizer’s offer to donate fluconazole to treat 100,000 South Africans. The donation might seem an act of charity, but in reality it is designed to protect Pfizer’s commercial version of the product which is sold under the name of Diflucan. What the drug companies want to prevent at all costs is governments taking the initiative to produce their own generic versions of the drugs or buying generic versions from third countries (like Thailand, India or Brazil). That would set a precedent which would jeopardize their ability to make profits in the future. The issue is not donations, it’s sustainable low-cost antiretrovirals. And you can only do that through generic competition, according to Zackie Achmat, chairman of the South African activist group Treatment Action Coalition (TAC). (Incidentally, according to TAC, months after the donation was promised, not a single dose of this “generous” offer had yet to reach a single South African patient.) As part of its campaigning work, TAC activists illegally imported 5,000 doses of the Thai generic version of fluconazole (which were bought in Thailand for 14 cents each instead of the $9 they cost in South Africa), distributed them for free and confessed their crime to the police in a bid to force the South African government to do the same. Ironically, although the South African government has been taken to court by the pharmaceutical industry, its actions have been far from defiant of this “international mafia.” For most of 2000 the South African president Thabo Mbeki denied that there was any link between HIV and AIDS. In this way he was trying to avoid the pressure to take decisive action against the drug industry. His argument was that poverty and not HIV caused the collection of diseases known as AIDS. This was a very hypocritical line coming from the same ANC government which has pushed privatization of the public sector, water and other council services, and which has pursued pro-capitalist economic policies that have destroyed hundreds of thousands of jobs. Yes, poverty helps spread a whole host of diseases to which HIV positive people are more vulnerable, but the ANC government is not doing anything to solve the problem of poverty and lack of access to housing, water and electricity facilities. On the contrary, ANC councils (and others) up and down the country are busy evicting people for not paying their rent, cutting poor people from the water and electricity supply because they cannot afford to pay, and so on. The diversion tactics used by Mbeki’s government on HIV/AIDS have allowed the opposition Democratic Alliance (DA) to use the issue in a demagogic fashion. Conveniently forgetting that the parties which are now part of DA ferociously opposed the Medicine Act when it was first discussed in 1997, the leader of DA, Tony de Leon, has come out publicly in favor of importing cheap generic versions of the drugs. 6. Health Warning! Profits Kill! It is clear that the profit motive which drives the multinational companies is causing the death of millions of people every year from diseases which could be easily cured. The only reason why these treatments are not given to people in poorer countries is simply because they cannot afford them. Many other diseases could be cured, but research into those is not carried out because money cannot be made even if a cure is found. But it would be wrong to argue that this is only because the pharmaceutical companies are particularly greedy. In fact this is the whole logic of the capitalist system. Henry Ford once famously said “I am not in the business of making cars, I am in the business of making profit.” Production under capitalism is production for profit, and one cannot expect anything different as long as the system exists. A former head of Merck, Roy Vagelos, justified his industry’s lack of interest in tropical diseases by saying research and development would not be profitable, and he added: “that is a social problem, and the industry shouldn’t be expected to solve it.”9 And he is quite right, in a sense. It is necessary to campaign against the pharmaceutical multi- nationals and force governments to break their will by producing and importing cheap generic alternatives, not only of HIV/AIDS drugs but also of drugs for the other million-killer diseases such as tuberculosis and other diseases in which the multinationals are simply not interested. But at the same time it is necessary to raise the demand for the nationalization of the pharma-mafia. These giant multinationals have in their hands the lives of tens of millions of people and should be put under democratic control and be run on the basis of the interests of the majority of the population, not the profits of the few. The problems of health care in the Third World, however, neither start nor end with HIV/AIDS. The most efficient way to fight disease in the Third World is to fight for decent jobs, decent housing, access to running water, electricity, quality education, and so on. This pandemic has been compared to the Black Death epidemic of plague in Europe in the Middle Ages. The big difference is that at that time the means to combat the epidemic did not exist. They do exist for HIV/AIDS and the only thing which prevents them from being used is a handful of pharmaceutical companies. The current AIDS pandemic serves to highlight that the choices in front of us are today more than ever, “socialism or barbarism.”

Past public ire over high drug prices has recently taken a back seat to a more insidious problem – no drugs at any price. Patients and their providers increasingly face limited or nonexistent supplies of drugs, many of which treat essential conditions such as cancer, heart disease and bacterial infections. The American Society of Health System Pharmacists now lists over 300 active shortages, primarily of decades-old generic drugs no longer protected by patents. While this is not a new problem, the number of drugs in short supply has increased in recent years, and the average shortage is lasting longer, with more than 15 critical drug products in short supply for over a decade. Current shortages include widely known drugs such as the antibiotic amoxicillin; the heart medicine digoxin; the anesthetic lidocaine; and the medicine albuterol, which is critical for treating asthma and other diseases affecting the lungs and airways. What’s going on? I’m a health economist who has studied the pharmaceutical industry for the past 15 years. I believe the drug shortage problem illustrates a major shortcoming of capitalism. While costly brand-name drugs often yield high profits to manufacturers, there’s relatively little money to be made in supplying the market with low-cost generics, no matter how vital they may be to patients’ health. The shortage includes chemotherapy drugs, antibiotics, medications to treat ADHD and other critical drugs. Some patients are able to get their drugs, while others are not, and in some cases patients are getting ‘rationed care.’ A generic problem The problem boils down to the nature of the pharmaceutical industry and how differently the markets for brand and generic drugs operate. Perhaps the clearest indication of this is the fact that prices of brand drugs in the U.S. are among the highest in the developed world, while generic drug prices are among the lowest. When a drugmaker develops a new pill, cream or solution, the government grants the company an exclusive patent for up to 20 years, although most patents are filed before clinical testing, and thus the effective patent life is closer to eight to 12 years. Nonetheless, patents allow the drugmakers to cover the cost of research and development and earn a profit without the threat of competition from a rival making an identical product. But once the patent expires, the drug becomes generic and any company is allowed to manufacture it. Since generic manufacturers are essentially producing the same product, profits are determined by their ability to manufacture the drug at the lowest marginal cost. This often results in low profit margins and can lead to cost-cutting measures that can compromise quality and threaten supply.

Amy Kapczynski, April 26 2019, “THE RIGHT TO MEDICINES IN AN AGE OF NEOLIBERALISM,” Humanity, http://humanityjournal.org/issue10-1/the-right-to-medicines-in-an-age-of-neoliberalism/

So far, the debate over judicialization has failed to engage a foundational aspect of the right to medicines cases: the political economy of medicines that they assume. These cases operate against a background of market ordering and private property rights that they typically neither see nor disturb. It is anchored by a World Trade Organization treaty that has helped reshape national law, particularly in the global South, requiring all members to adopt intellectual property laws similar to those prevailing in the North, and to offer patents on life-saving medicines. These patents—monopoly rights that are granted by states and enforced by courts—and not manufacturing costs are the overwhelming determinant of the budgetary implications of the right to medicines. The prevailing political economy in fact, as I will explain, structurally undermines equity, increasing prices without generating significant countervailing innovation to meet the needs of the global poor.

Elizabeth Johnson Department of Geography, University of Durham, Durham, UK Christian AndersonSchool of Interdisciplinary Arts, University of Washington, Bothell, WA.Becky MansfieldDepartment of Geography, Ohio State University, Columbus, OH. Culture and Politics Program, Georgetown University, Washington, DC.Julia Corwin Department of Geography and Environment, London School of Economics and Political Science, London, UK.Scott Prudham University of Toronto, Department of Geography and Urban Planning, Toronto, ON, Canada. Department of Sociology, Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, VA. “ Planetary Improvement: Cleantech Entrepreneurship and the Contradictions of Green Capitalism” https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/2325548X.2020.1722485

We are delighted to introduce this forum on Jesse Goldstein’s Planetary Improvement: Cleantech Entrepreneurship and the Contradictions of Green Capitalism. Goldstein has written an engaging critique of the promise of clean tech and the constraints of capitalist production. Where as techno utopianists anticipate disruptions and the “coming singularity” with bated breath, Goldstein’s Planetary Improvement shows how, on the contrary, innovators are trained to conform to the narrative and ideological expectations of investors. Through a series of interviews with tech inventors and investors as well as richly detailed observations of board room pitch meetings, Goldstein describes how two prevailing forces constrain the aspirations of cleantech inventors. The first is the hegemonic logic of what Goldstein refers to as “planetary improvement.” This is the narrative of capitalist production that lauds efficiency and vilifies waste—a narrative so entrenched that it appears to Goldstein’s research subjects as simple common sense. Gold-stein describes how this sensibility the histories of colonial land enclosures in the sixteenth century to financial markets and spaces of innovation in the twenty-first century. It simultaneously links innovators and their products to the promise of the market as the means for effecting change. With vivid (and often humorous) detail, he describes breakfast pitch meetings and conversations in which the venture capitalists who bring would-be innovations to the market work to entrain innovatorsin practices akin to dressage, enfolding them within tightly constrained investment protocols. Goldstein there-fore paints a compelling portrait of the ways that highly conventional practices of business hem in the capacities ofinnovators.Goldstein’s text ultimately offers a sharp critique of clean-tech and the “cruel optimism” (Berlant 2011) of natural capitalism’s promises. The text also moves beyond critique, inviting reflection on what it might mean to createin—and as the products of—the end times of petromo-dernity. Weaving together the pluriversal politics of Mi-gnolo’s (2011) decolonial scholarship, the amateur experi-mentalism of Lewis Mumford, and feminist politics of care,Goldstein attempts to create a vocabulary of anticapitalistand anticolonial eco-innovation. Set against the sweep-ing futurist manifestos of accelerationism and “full luxury

The profit motive and exclusive proprietary rights are central to capitalist innovation. By law, private firms must prioritize the interest of their shareholders, which tends to be interchangeable with making as much money as possible. Accordingly, investments in any stage of the innovative process must eventually produce profits. To maximize profit, private firms jealously guard the value of their invention through regulations and restrictive contracts. Statutes and regulations help protect their trade secrets. The U.S. Patent and Trademarks Office routinely grants them utility and design patents that “exclude others from making, using, offering for sale, or selling … or importing the invention” for 20 years after the patent is issued. They enforce licensing agreements that can limit the uses and dissemination of all or part of their inventions. To further frustrate efforts to innovate on the back of their inventions, private firms subject their former employees to non-compete agreements that can severely limit them from using their knowledge and skills on competing projects for a period following their departure. Breaches carry dire consequences like expensive lawsuits, big money judgments, and other enormous hassles.

Increasingly, mainstream commentators enthuse about the prospect of Big Business adopting new technologies to pull the planet back from a climate disaster. But Big Business isn’t going to save the world.

A Question of Consumption

At least since the advent of the modern environmental debate during the 1960s, economic and environmental goals have been perceived to be in conflict with each other. Business decisions, it has been argued, build on pursuing profit-maximization; attempts to address environmental concerns simultaneously will therefore imply lower profits and reduced productivity. However, along with increased concerns about the environmental footprints of the global economy and the growth of organic products and labels, material waste recycling, climate compensation schemes etc., sustainability issues have begun to move into the mainstream business activities. In fact, many large companies often no longer distinguish between environmental innovation and innovation in general; the environmental footprints of the business operations are almost always taken into consideration during the innovation process (e.g., [47]). Some even puts this in Schumpeterian terms, and argues that sustainable technological change implies a “new wave of creative destruction with the potential to change fundamentally the competitive dynamics in many markets and industries,” ([37], p. 315). The literature has recognized the potentially important roles that so-called sustainability entrepreneurs can play in bringing about a shift to a green economy; these types of entrepreneurs seek to combine traditional business practices with sustainable development initiatives (e.g., [25]). They could disrupt established business models, cultures and consumer preferences, as well as help reshape existing institutions. Just as conventional entrepreneurs, they are agents of change and offer lessons for policy makers. However, the research in this field has also been criticized for providing a too strong focus on individual success stories, while, for instance, the institutional and political factors that are deemed to also shape the priorities made by these individuals tend to be neglected (e.g., [13]). Ultimately, it remains very difficult to anticipate how far voluntary, market-driven initiatives will take us along the long and winding road to the green economy. In addition to a range of incremental developments, such as increased energy and material efficiency following the adoption of increased digitalization, industrial firms and sustainability entrepreneurs are likely to help develop new and/or refined business models (e.g., to allow for increased sharing and recycling of resources) as well as adopt innovations commercially. In the future, businesses are also likely to devote greater attention to avoiding future environmental liabilities, such as the potential costs of contaminated land clean-up or flood risks following climate change. Far from surprising, large insurance companies were among the first to view climate change as a risk to their viability. One response was the development of new financial instruments such as ‘weather derivatives’ and ‘catastrophe bonds’ [35]. In other words, there is an increasing demand for businesses that work across two logics that in the past have been perceived as incompatible: the commercial and the environmental. There are however huge uncertainties about the scope and the depth of green capitalism in this respect. Moreover, the answer to the question of how far the market-driven sustainability transition will take us, will probably vary depending on business sector and on factors such as the availability of funding in these sectors.Footnote5 As indicated above, there are reasons to assume that in the absence of direct policy support, businesses will not be well-equipped to invest in long-term green technology development. Green product innovations may often be easier to develop and nurture since firms then may charge price premiums to consumers. In fact, many high-profile sustainability entrepreneurs in the world (e.g., Anita Roddick of The Body Shop) have been product innovators. In contrast, green process innovation is more difficult to pursue. It is hard to get consumers to pay premiums for such innovations. For instance, major efforts are needed to develop a carbon-free blast furnace process in modern iron and steel plants (e.g., [1]). And even if this is achieved, it remains unclear whether the consumers will be willing to pay a price premium on their car purchases purely based on the knowledge that the underlying production process is less carbon-intense than it used to be. Moreover, taking results from basic R&D, which appear promising on the laboratory scale, through “the valley of death” into commercial application is a long and risky journey. Process innovations typically require gradual up-scaling and optimization of the production technologies (e.g., [29]). For small- and medium-sized firms in particular, this may be a major hurdle. In brief, the above suggests that it is difficult to anticipate what a baseline scenario of the global economy – i.e., a scenario involving no new policies – would look like from a sustainability perspective. Still, overall it is likely that green capitalism and sustainability entrepreneurship alone may have problems delivering the green economy transition in (at least) two respects. First, due to the presence of knowledge spillovers and the need for long-term risk-taking, the baseline scenario may involve too few radical technology shifts (e.g., in process industries). Second, the baseline scenario is very likely to involve plenty of digitalization and automation, in turn considerably increasing the potential for material and energy efficiency increases. Nevertheless, due to rebound effects, the efficiency gains resulting from new technologies alone may likely not be enough to address the sustainability challenge. This therefore also opens up the field for additional policy support, and – potentially – a rethinking of the role of the state in promoting sustainable technological change.