A review of recent scientific and political developments in biotechnology, and an examination of perspectives about biotechnology's social and political context.
Producer: Michael Caplan ise@social-ecology.org
Uploaded by: George King georgekingiv@yahoo.com
This session will begin by reviewing recent scientific and political developments in biotechnology, and then examine the ways that a variety of analytic frameworks can help uncover what biotechnology tells us about the social and political context within which it has been developed. These include progressive economic analysis of the biotech industry and its relationship to global institutions such as the WTO; neo-Marxist approaches to commodification and the rise of a "post-Fordist," "information" economy; anarchist insights about capital and the state, and biotechnology's threat to a cooperative ethic of local self-reliance; and social ecology's dialectical outlook on the evolution of technology in society, questioning of humanity's place in nature, and demand for the radical democratization of technological and social choices.
This talk was presented at the third Renewing the Anarchist Tradition conference, at the Institute for Social Ecology, August 2001.
For further information on the conference, please visit http://www.homemadejam.org/renew/archive/archive.html
