The
Machine Or Life
Adapted by Alan Marston from original article
by George Monbiot for The Guardian Newspaper
All the fuss about the human genome just hides the brutality of
`the machine', where the machine is the power principle applied
within human insitutions, of which the latest incarnation is the
Global Economy. The machine does not understand life and is indifferent
to it just as Nature is indifferent to the machine. A decision has
to be made and made soon... life or power? It is impossible to have
both. Nearly everyone debating the mapping of the human genome now
agrees on one thing: that the identification of our genes invokes
an unprecedented danger, as it might assist a handful of companies
to seize something which belongs to all of us. I wish this were
true. Terrifying as the impending capture of the essence of humanity
is, it is far from unprecedented.
The
attempt to grab the genome is just one of many symptoms of a far
graver danger. We are entering an age where the machines that were
build and invented as aids to humans have become dominant, it is
humans who are now aids to machines and the machine mentality -
faster, bigger more power. Political and economic systems are adjuncts
to the dominant social system and the dominant social system, by
seizing absolute control of fundamental resources has allowed machines
to advance over the globe and life has accepted that, and is in
retreat. On Saturday I met a campaigner from Kerala, in southern
India, who told me that, to the tribal people he works with, the
ownership of land is as inconceivable as the ownership of air would
be in the northern hemisphere. I told him the bad news. In several
American cities, blocks of air, which (once legally transferred
to a suitable site) allow their owners to build skyscrapers, change
hands for tens of millions of dollars.
There
have been a number of legal disputes over the ownership of clouds,
as firms battle for the right to make them drop their rain where
they want it. Companies are now claiming they own asteroids and
landing spaces on the moon. None of these presumptions is any more
absurd than the claim to possess exclusive control over part of
our own planet. But, as property rights proliferate, almost everything
which once belonged to all of us is being seized. In Britain, for
example, despite repeated pledges by the government, playing-fields
and allotments are disappearing faster than ever before. Public
squares are being turned into private shopping malls. Traditional
stopping sites for travellers, some of which survived for five millennia,
have nearly all disappeared during the past 15 years. Knowledge
is rapidly becoming the exclusive preserve of those who can afford
to buy it. Intellectual property companies are monopolising image
banks and picture archives, while academic publishers, concentrated
in ever fewer hands, are able to charge outrageous prices for access
to the work they publish.
Companies are asserting ownership in perpetuity of the material
in their electronic databases. A firm called West Publishing has
tried to insist that it owned the entire archive of US federal law.
The biotech companies have been empowered to seize the human genome
by the very people - Tony Blair and Bill Clinton - who are now begging
them not to do so. Blair's government helped drive through the European
directive on the legal protection of biotechnological inventions,
which enables private companies to claim not only human genes, but
also plant and animal varieties and even human body parts. Every
asset, once secured by the machine is surrounded by a Berlin wall
equipped with border guards. There are ranches in the United States
in which you would be shot on sight if you tried to take a walk.
Disproportionate responses to the feeblest threats are assisted
by the private prison and security industries now seizing control
of another fundamental asset: human freedom. We cross the economic
frontiers at our peril. The worst global inequality in history is
a direct result of this totalitarian order where power is the principal
and the principle.
Two
hundred people now own as much wealth as half the world's population,
for the simple reason that they have been empowered to steal it
from the rest of us by the now electronic token, called money. This
empowerment emerges from an unwholesome union of neoliberal economics
and feudal law. Our legal framework, which pre-dates democracy,
protects property above individuals and individuals above society.
We can't expect our governments to address this inversion of democratic
priorities. The three men who could begin to reform our legal system
- the home secretary, the lord chancellor and the prime minister
- are all lawyers, and all wedded (literally in the prime minister's
case) to the profession which benefits from its iniquities. Property-based
law favours the interests of the rich, which, in turn, favours the
interests of its practitioners. The walls rising around us are beginning
to look impregnable. But before we can decide how they might best
be demolished, we must first recognise that the enclosure of the
human genome is just a single cell in the privatised global prison
the age of the global machine has built.
.
.
posters with messages that demand jobs and an end to poverty.
These foot-soldiers are mobilisi
|