Biotechnology innovation and privatization through IPR creates a biopolitical regime that furthers ecological disruption, oppression, and exploitation of developing countries.

In the new millennium, with the rapid development of biotechnology—the most important human science Foucault described, transactions connecting with the body appear to have become the most important areas of the market economy. As a consequence, knowledge of genetics does not only represent the new orientation of scientific knowledge and history of science in response to the special economic needs or the social and historical conditions, but is accompanied by the politicization of science. This moves into the new materializing structure with power and subjectivity, and in an unprecedented form and scale, broadly and profoundly influences the economic, political and cultural life of contemporary capitalism. A new biopolitical system, named biocapitalism, is taking shape and redefining the living circumstances of modern people.

As a new stage or sub-form of capitalist development, biocapitalism, to some extent, presets a biotechnological “utopia” of promoting and optimizing life. On the same hand, biotechnology has come to represent the capitalistic advanced productive forces, opened up new room for the technological, industrial and consumptive innovation of capitalism, and promised health, beauty, wisdom, longevity and environmental protection through organ transplant, reproductive intervention, bio-medicine, genetically modified food and bio-fuels, and other benefits. A genetically based value system is created, and life is no longer a natural and immutable destiny, but rather a cultural or artificial construct open to calculative and regulative interventions of administration (Rabinow 1999, 407–416). However, what one discovers beneath biotechnological revolution and its seductive promises is actually a “control revolution.” (Shenk 1997, 45) Modern biotechnology is no longer satisfied with the external plastics or anatomy of nature, but tries to play the role of God through dominating the inner mechanism of life to reorganize nature thoroughly, creating “technosapiens” and causing a animal-like state of life. Therefore, compared to industrial technology, the key specialty of biotechnology, especially genetic engineering, is its biological nature. Body is knowledge, and knowledge is power.

Propelled by informational logic “the body is information,” life sciences possibly define the most basic form of life as a disciplined and controlled process of coding and decoding, taking the “explicit calculation” about “life and its mechanisms” as the key to biopower (Foucault 1978, 143). On the other hand, life sciences can reap huge profits through the transubstantiated biological material ties of genetic substance, DNA chips, and stem cells in the burgeoning “bioeconomy” (Helmreich 2008,465). The fetishism of biotechnology, genetic determinism, no doubt, is one of the most important ideologies of biocapitalism. It declares the omnipotence of the gene, which not only prescribes the fundamental vital movement, but also internally determines the evolution of culture, so any physical and mental purpose can be achieved through the intervention on the “blueprint of life” and the subjugations of bodies. Ultimately, “life” is equated to “gene,” then reduced to the carrier and slave of gene.

Under neoliberal economic policies, genetic determinism is even identified to be in the national interest, and, as such, widely influences the official agendas of some wealthy countries. As the feminists have observed, nationalism and science are entwined as a dual justification for the use of women as a resource (Cho 2005). Therefore, genetic determinism and market fundamentalism are mutually promoted, and the interests of nations and companies are also tightly intertwined, jointly advancing the deduction of biopolitical logic. It is anticipated that, stimulated by biopolitical activities like the Human Genome Project, bioprospectings and biopiracies, highly capitalized biotechnology will push biocolonialism greatly, toward a more in-depth, comprehensive colonization across ethnics, nations, species and generations, resulting in an irreversible change in the gene pool including that of humans. As a broader, more fundamental and far-reaching biologically predatory action carried out by developed countries and their multinational corporations, scientific communities against poor countries and the regions inhabited by indigenous peoples, biocolonialism may best illustrate the possible negative socio-political consequences of the biotech revolution and the complexities of current biopolitics. Therefore, with the general theoretical purport lying in unearthing the common cultural roots of the destruction of nature and the oppression of women, ecofeminism takes a comprehensive, in-depth exploration and a vivid, brilliant interpretation to the causes, the operating mechanism, the features and impacts, as well as the path to fight against biocolonialism. Besides the important role of reproduction (cloning, IVF, pre-implantation genetic diagnosis) in the remaking of politics, which is focused on by the general feminists, the persecution and exploitation of indigenous people and farmers in the spread of genetically modified crops, the aggression and domination of women and nature promoted by the expansion of Intellectual Property Rights, the strengthened corporate rule under the backdrop of globalization, and the biopiracy in the research and development of modern biotechnology are all central concerns (Shiva 1998, 1999, 2005; Salleh 1997; Sharma 2000,113–119; Hawthorne 2004; Isla 2007, 323–332; Tauli-Corpuz 2007). As the ecofeminists have argued, biocapitalism, has created a highly complex and complicated risk culture by means of the manipulation and control of biotechnology.

A New Turn of Biopolitics

As a scientific discourse on the new phase of capitalism, modern biotechnology, which extends biopower to the molecular level, will undoubtedly profoundly impact people’s new understanding of current society and nature, and will speed up the reproduction of capital, and the legalization of the new social order (Brooks 2005, 368). The capital also gets new forms of power through the manipulation of genetic biotechnology, and creates new possibilities of depriving the meaning, the value, and the forms of life, thus further increasing the imbalance of social power. The capital-controlled biotechnology always promises to play an active role in enriching, strengthening and improving life, that is to say, through seizing life forms as the objects of its exercise, to supply people with food, clothing and nutrition, give them perfection and health, and create the ideal body and mentality. Unfortunately, it may also disrupt the functioning of natural history catastrophically through overall irresponsibility and radical homogenization, thereby becoming the cardiac sedative of negative biopower and the main manipulative tool of biopolitics. As can be seen, controversies over the issue of gene contamination have no result yet, the fact that genetic contamination spoils germ plasm resources has been widely recognized. The GM contamination of maize in Mexico, the environmental risks posed by transgenic rapeseed in Canada, and the same fate regarding Chinese soybeans are well-known examples. As the direct victims of widely-grown genetically modified crops and bio-fuel crops, numerous indigenous people and farmers were reduced to bio-serfs or were displaced with traditional knowledge and cultural customs also being devastated (Tauli-Corpuz 2001, 252–270).

It is the main path for this new political construction to take life forms as the controlled and regulated object of technology and power, to commercialize and capitalize, and then to change the traditional political and intellectual discourse profoundly, in areas such as citizenship, and the status of intellective subjects or objects. In the direct promotion of modern biotechnology, pluralistic political ecologies, such as political science, international relations, social and inter-species politics, has been greatly remodeled and reconstructed. The concepts “biopower” and “biopolitics” are being endowed with new social and cultural connotations as well. Hence, the picture of biopolitics is always changing with the economic and scientific strength of the nation, and is closely related to social class, race, ethnicity, gender and other forms of social stratification. With complex ideological struggles, biopolitics always results in the development and changes of culture politics and economic politics, and in turn exerts subversive influences on them.

The capitalization extending to lives is bound to accelerate the privatization of biotechnology, and thus will bring great changes to current political science. The close co-operation of business, states and scientific institutions, the rise of academic capitalism and the disparity in the power balance of public-private research, are all exacerbating the complexity of biopolitics. By linking genes with all aspects of social life, and modifying, patenting, monopolizing and dealing with them, the redefinition of the “industry-university-institute-government” system will make us stay away from the broadest and the most creative source of technical wisdom, distorting completely the relations among science, politics and society. The high monopolies and privatization of biotechnology has not only disturbed the ecology of political science, which has greatly hindered the development of technology itself, but also has widened the gap between the hopes for biotechnology and the actual role it plays, by stimulating “technical colonialism” and “risk production.” In light of the uncertainties of modern biotechnology, many developed countries often use third world countries as areas for planting, dumping and experimental fields of genetically modified crops, thereby exporting the ecological risks. These acts externalize ecological costs, among others, depriving many cultural communities’ food sovereignty and rights to safe food. Therefore, in order to obtain more “biocapital” to serve capital accumulation, various new concealed forms of colonialism and imperialism emerge as required. Gene patenting, fast becoming an important tool of “biocolonialism” is a salient case in point.

The biotech era also brings with it a very different constellation of political visions and social forces (Rifkin 2002). The influence of the new biopolitics on different political forces’ division and alliance is increasingly evident, especially in the western developed countries, and there is a growing divergence between liberalism and conservatism, religious and secular forces, around the issues. These issues include questions about how the interaction of science and politics impacts political values like democracy and freedom, or ethical principles like equality and fairness.

Transhumanism, a concept gaining momentum, declares that the limitation is humans themselves. It claims to enhance human intellectual, physical and mental ability through genetic engineering and other new biotechnologies, as well. But to opponents and skeptics like the cultural conservatives, the deep ecologists or the left bioluddites, their concerns are how capital turns the logic of transhumanism into totalitarian ones, and grossly violates human nature and individual rights.

It is clear that the unregulated production of biotechnology will inevitably overthrow the bourgeois law that “all men are created equal,” and lead to new discriminations, polarizations and conflicts, thereby aggravating the proliferation of risks. This is because the opposite side of homogenization is the recognition and expansion of differences, and only a small number of people can get access to designer genes or unrestricted consumerism. Powerful genetic technologies may be used by individuals, companies and countries to obtain material and moral superiority or dominance, but other social subjects, particularly poor, excluded and disabled people will fall into numerous predicaments caused by gene-poverty.

In addition, the safety of genetically modified food has also become the focus of a struggle among developed and developing countries and regions. In a vast number of developing countries and regions, one of the major problems for farmers and indigenous people seem to be “biocolonialism” and “gene hegemony.” Although introduced under the promise of “life industries” ostensibly to improve food and health, genetically-modified foods raise issues of biosecurity and sovereign security.

As a result, the prospects of biopolitics are constantly changing with different specific situations in the context of globalization, and ethnographical comparison among different countries in biocapitalism is particularly necessary. However, what the illegitimate and dehumanizing informal economy and bio-terrorism brings, namely the proliferation and abuse of biopower, the exacerbating disorder in the body economy and biopolitics, and the increasing uncertainties and risks in the development of biocapitalism, are the common difficult problems the whole world must face up to.

In short, the revolutionary meaning of biopower lies in systematic power, which is the key field for the social regulation of life. Biopower is not just situated and exercised at the human level, but extends to the control of nature, focuses on the entire biosphere; it is no longer limited to the macroscopic species, but goes down to the microcosmic molecular level (Brooks 2005, 369). Similar to panopticism put forward by Foucault, gene mapping is expanding its space through increasing variation among organisms, elimination of species isolation, and the spread of gene pollution. Consequently, currently biopower probably does not directly display the required surveillance, control and discipline needed for control, but is rather only a discourse about risk management and the corresponding risk spreading.

As a result, synchronically, biopower may be a dictatorial, colonial power. Through the arbitrary manipulation of life and the comprehensive appropriation of the “biocapital,” this biopower will completely change the way knowledge and profits are produced, and the way individuality is shaped, to meet the needs of disembodied, anonymous consumption and the needs of capital accumulation. Diachronically, this biopower probably will become hegemonious in the future, weakening the important task of providing a safe environment for humankind’s offspring, but leaving political and economic threats, and the possibility of unimaginable biological and ecological disasters to them.

This biopower definitely causes an unprecedented panic about subjectivity, or an increasingly intense so-called ethical and moral debate. More importantly, the privatization of life will thoroughly distort the natural relations among culture, nature and labor, and further spread and deepen the risks of technocapitalism. It stands to reason that the less developed countries as well as the places inhabited by vulnerable groups will firstly be affected and become the sample plot of these ecological and social risks.