Reclaiming the Commons - Expanding our Critique to include Pharma & Intellectual Property

This failure to stay on message about the larger issues has meant that the Bio spin misters have been able to say that the protesters are disconnected with reality. The Bio industry association mostly has people working in Pharmaceuticals and not directly in agriculture fields. For example, Monsanto didn't even set up a booth this year. They are right and wrong. Ag issues are part of Bio, which is a business/industry convention and they are important. But most of the focus is on Pharma, which is about researching, developing, producing, and marketing drugs.

This is a field we SHOULD be having major protests about. We're right to be out here in the streets protesting, we just don't have the issues all lined up yet. There are liberals such as Jamie Love and his NGO, the Consumer Project on Technology, which address these issues. There also has been some focused work by groups like Health Gap, and Act-Up Philadelphia who are focused on issues of mandatory licenses for generic drugs. But that movement has spread beyond a narrow spectrum of activists.

Reclaim the Commons should have been an event to broaden the debate and deepen our collective critique of the bio-tech industry. We have advanced and clearly articulated issues around genetic engineering for agricultural products, but the medicine and pharma issues are deeper and perhaps more important. This is a process. By talking about our work as one of staking collective claim to biotechnological property then we need to be articulating an argument against all intellectual property. I don't feel like this has been happening in this mobilization yet.

We need to be talking about how the BioTech industry can invest billions in the development of drugs which serve the needs of rich people and people in the last year or two of old age, while ignoring the diseases which plague the global south. Millions of people die every year from diseases which there is no financial incentive to cure. While at the same time countless amounts of money are poured in to the development of yet another drug for upset stomachs and headaches. Once a drug does exist which can help with illnesses that poor people get, it's sold at prices which they can't afford. This means only the upper classes in the developing world can even get access to these drugs. These are not hard drugs to produce and some countries like India and Brazil produce them for domestic consumption. This is a practice which drives the Biotech Industry crazy. They see themselves as owning these drugs. They make more profit if they control the production and sales at prices which the poor can't afford.

The actions of the Biotech Industry kill people.

It's just that simple. They put pressure on trade negotiators from governments to prevent the cheap access to generic drugs which are already being produced in the global south.

This is a message which people don't understand in the protests. We are not making clear demands around these issues.

The liberals are pushing for mandatory licensing, meaning a country could say this drug is a critical health need for our country and therefore we are going to allow ourselves to produce or buy cheap generic versions.

What we as radicals should be considering is something which attacks the fundamental basis of the pharma/biotech industry. We should be calling for the abolishment of patents. Not just patents on life, or patents on DNA, or patents on biotech which is extracted from existing indigenous plants.

The abolishment of patents is about saying intellectual goods are held in common. You can not own them.

What do we replace them with? This is a question that each of needs to answer this ourselves. It's like what we replace capitalism with. To me it's an economic system based on participatory planning and allocation based on the ideas of parecon; n educational system which is open and not tied to corporate funding and the privatization of research; a system of power where by a few small very wealthy companies control the health and welfare of our societies.