Commodifying Life and Its Critics

TCS Daily ^ | 9/5/2006 | Michael Rosen

[Jane2005]

In Marxist theory, capitalist drones afflicted by false consciousness are constantly indulging in the fetishism of commodities -- placing material possessions on an absurdly high pedestal.

Likewise, critics of the practice of obtaining patent protection on life forms -- generally found on the neo-Marxist left -- object that by patenting life we heartlessly commodify it.

More fundamentally than either the argument from exploitation (or that from enclosure), the commodification objection confronts the very essence of the practice of patenting life.

If exploitation critics focused on the potential for suffering by one side of the transaction, and if the enclosure opponents railed against unfair gains accruing to the other side of the bargain, commodification objectors attack the internal characteristics of the deal itself. The first two challenge the terms of the bargain, the last, its very existence.

[ClearCase_guy]

The patenting of living creatures receives further endorsement from anti-commodification objectors. Fortified by the responses to exploitation and enclosure concerns described earlier, this idea of promoting a major telos of life through the inventive monopoly is a final, potent ethical defense of the practice of patenting life.

Compare with the random garbage spewed by the Chomskybot program:

"Clearly, most of the methodological work in modern linguistics can be defined in such a way as to impose irrelevant intervening contexts in selectional rules. For one thing, the fundamental error of regarding functional notions as categorial is not quite equivalent to an important distinction in language use."

Such garbage cannot be generated by a thinking human. It takes a tool running on automatic pilot.