ECONSALUT

02 d’agost 2022

Can capitalism be reimagined ?(5)

Woke Capitalism. How Corporate Morality is Sabotaging Democracy

The Oxford dictionary’s definition woke refers to being ‘well informed’ or ‘alert to racial or social discrimination and injustice’.

Essentially, we have two opposing positions. One, from a liberal left position such as Elizabeth Warren’s, agrees that corporations should genuinely and authentically support the broad interests of society rather than just focusing on shareholders. Another, from a traditional right-wing perspective, believes that corporations should be purely economic entities and not interfere directly in social or political matters. This book has taken a third position. That is, despite how it looks on the surface, corporate engagement with progressive politics is harming democracy and preventing actual progress. What this means is that being critical of woke capitalism does have to necessitate a dismissal of progressive politics. Waking up to the realities of woke capitalism means not being fooled into thinking that it represents any genuine underlying change to the primary interests that capitalist corporations are willing or able to pursue.
The real effects of woke capitalism are not about the success of left activism in gaining support from big business. They are about ensuring that there is no fundamental reform of the dominant neoliberal world order that has exacerbated inequality, fuelled fascist populism, and stood by as the climate crisis escalates. Dismissing woke capitalism as just another example of virtue signalling is counterproductive in that it fails to take seriously the real damage that woke capitalism can do. Laughing at corporate progressiveness as a superficial and inauthentic business practice entirely underestimates its real power. This is not simply about the short-term profitability assumed by the ‘go woke, or go broke’ credo. Going woke is about ensuring that market capitalism can continue on the trajectory that it has been on for the past 40 years. Woke capitalism is a strategy for maintaining the economic and political status quo and for quelling criticism.

29 de juliol 2022

Against patents, again (3)

Patent Politics. Life Forms, Markets, and the Public Interest in the United States and Europe

Comparing battles over patents on animals, human embryonic stem cells, human genes, and plants in the United States and Europe, she shows how political culture, ideology, and history shape patent system politics. Clashes over whose voices and which values matter in the patent system, as well as what counts as knowledge and whose expertise is important, look quite different in these two places. And through these debates, the United States and Europe are developing very different approaches to patent and innovation governance. Not just the first comprehensive look at the controversies swirling around biotechnology patents, Patent Politics is also the first in-depth analysis of the political underpinnings and implications of modern patent systems, and provides a timely analysis of how we can reform these systems around the world to maximize the public interest.

28 de juliol 2022

Against patents (2)

Medical Monopoly. Intellectual Property Rights and the Origins of the Modern Pharmaceutical Industry

Medical Monopoly combines legal, medical, and business history to offer a sweeping new interpretation of the origins of the complex and often troubling relationship between the pharmaceutical industry and medical practice today. Joseph M. Gabriel provides the first detailed history of patent and trademark law as it relates to the nineteenth-century pharmaceutical industry as well as a unique interpretation of medical ethics, therapeutic reform, and the efforts to regulate the market in pharmaceuticals before World War I. His book will be of interest not only to historians of medicine and science and intellectual property scholars but also to anyone following contemporary debates about the pharmaceutical industry, the patenting of scientific discoveries, and the role of advertising in the marketplace.

25 de juliol 2022

On epigenetics and health (2)

The Epigenetics Revolution. How Modern Biology Is Rewriting Our Understanding of Genetics, Disease, and Inheritance

The ‘epi’ in epigenetics is derived from Greek and means at, on, to, upon, over or beside. The DNA in our cells is not some pure, unadulterated molecule. Small chemical groups can be added at specific regions of DNA. Our DNA is also smothered in special proteins. These proteins can themselves be covered with additional small chemicals. None of these molecular amendments changes the underlying genetic code. But adding these chemical groups to the DNA, or to the associated proteins, or removing them, changes the expression of nearby genes. These changes in gene expression alter the functions of cells, and the very nature of the cells themselves. Sometimes, if these patterns of chemical modifications are put on or taken off at a critical period in development, the pattern can be set for the rest of our lives, even if we live to be over a hundred years of age.
There’s no debate that the DNA blueprint is a starting point. A very important starting point and absolutely necessary, without a doubt. But it isn’t a sufficient explanation for all the sometimes wonderful, sometimes awful, complexity of life. If the DNA sequence was all that mattered, identical twins would always be absolutely identical in every way.