Theorizing the Bioeconomy

Introduction

Ever since the origins of modern biotechnological knowledge in the 1970s with research on recombinant DNA and monoclonal antibodies, there has been a growing interest in (and expectations for) the development of a “biotechnology” industry. Numerous attempts to measure the biotechnology industry have been undertaken, while similar energy has been poured into promoting policy initiatives that seek to capitalize on new biotechnological knowledges (see Birch 2007a). Almost from the outset, then, biotechnology has been characterized as a new industrial sector that will transform our societies and economies.

The most recent evidence of this massaged exuberance are the policies pursued by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and European Commission (EC). For example, the OECD (2006, 1) has a produced a “policy agenda” pushing biotechnology as a new “bioeconomy,” or “. . . the aggregate set of economic operations in a society that use the latent value incumbent in biological products and processes to capture new growth and welfare benefits for citizens and nations.” The EC similarly stresses the value inherent in the bioeconomy, although with a much less clear definition: “The bio-economy is one of the oldest economic sectors known to humanity, and the life sciences and biotechnology are transforming it into one of the newest” (EC 2005, 2). The vagueness of these formulations has not stopped technoscientific and political–economic investment in the idea of the bioeconomy; in fact, as some argue (e.g., Hilgartner 2007), the very concept of the bioeconomy is not simply a way to anticipate or conceptualize future socioeconomic developments, it is also an attempt to shape these developments, drive them forward, and embed them in wider institutions (see also Birch, Levidow, and Papaioannou 2010).

In this article, our aim is not to attempt another definition of the anticipated or promised transformative restructuring represented by the so-called bioeconomy. It is instead to look at how science and technology studies (STS) scholars have gone about theorizing the bioeconomy and to critique some of the “bio-concepts” that they have come up with. We are interested in how they have gone about thinking/rethinking the relationship between the life sciences and their capitalization. We are seeking to do this in order to critique certain theories that posit the emergence of new sociotechnoeconomic processes and relations characterized variously as “biocapital” (Rajan 2006), “biovalue” (Waldby 2000), “bioeconomics” (Rose 2001), or similar (Cooper 2008). In short, we argue that because of their particular technoscientific focus, these STS theorists have posited a transformation of modern capitalism without due attention to the transformation of economic and financial processes in modern capitalism.

Our first aim is to problematize the fetishization of all things “bio” evident in these theoretical discussions and to consider the relationship between political economy and biotechnology anew. In the first part of the article, we highlight the problematic adoption of Marxist language in these bio-concepts without the necessary adoption of Marx’s theoretical formulation of the labor theory of value (LTV) underpinning key terms like value, capital, and surplus value. In adopting Marxian concepts, the fetishization of the “bio” has meant that—to different degrees—STS scholars like Waldby, Rose, Rajan, and Cooper have missed an important opportunity to update the understanding of the bioeconomy in light of the financial and economic restructuring of the economy. This is because these STS theorists have either not incorporated more recent political–economic analyzes or, if they have, then they have failed to adequately address their implications. In particular, we want to highlight the need to consider the importance of asset-based economic processes (e.g., property, rent, etc.) in any understanding of the bioeconomy. These asset-based processes contrast markedly with commodity-based processes (e.g., production, labor, etc.) that characterize the Marxist language and concepts on which STS theorists draw.

Our second aim is to critique the various bio-concepts (e.g., biovalue, biocapital, etc.) in light of the transformation of economic processes that necessarily alter our understanding of the political economy of the life sciences. This involves highlighting three key processes: first, a shift in value creation from productive to immaterial labor; second, the emergence of a financialized-rentier regime of accumulation; and third, the shift from commodity-based to an asset-based market exchange. In illustrating the first transformation, we draw on the work of autonomist Marxists who have done much to reformulate notions of biopower in Marxian terms (e.g., Lazzarrato 1997, 2004; Hardt and Negri 2000; Holloway 2002; Vann 2004). Of particular note is the theory of biocapitalism (see Morini and Fumagalli 2010; Marazzi 2011), which stands out because of the “bio” terminology while actually contrasting with the STS fetishized emphasis on all things biological that we criticize in this article. We then draw on the work of Zeller (2008) to illustrate the second transformation and Aspers (2007, 2009) to illustrate the third transformation. These two latter transformations involve the emergence of an asset-based economy—in contrast to the commodity-based economy underpinning Marxist thought. In simple terms, the key difference between an asset and a commodity is that the former is a tangible or intangible resource that can be used to produce value and, at the same time, has value as property. In contrast, a commodity is an object produced for exchange. More importantly, a key difference is that as an asset’s value increases so does demand for it, whereas the opposite relation obtains for commodities (as in classic supply–demand curves; G. Cooper 2008, 8). This distinction has implications for how we understand the realization of value through capitalist market exchange. In this article, then, we explicitly address the implications this distinction has for the bioeconomy including the emergence of new forms of intangible or immaterial labor; the dominance of a rentier regime; and the distinctiveness of market exchange in asset-based industries like the life sciences. Evidently, many of the knowledge and material resources developed and employed in the life sciences are ambiguous in that they embody characteristics of a commodity and an asset at the same time. Thus we are not arguing that the bioeconomy is only characterized by one form (e.g., asset) or the other, but rather we want to explore and outline the importance of the “asset-like” qualities of biotechnological knowledge and resources which is currently unexplored and unacknowledged in existing STS theories.

In this article, we start by outlining the deployment, by STS scholars, of concepts drawn from political–economic approaches, especially Marxist ones, such as “capital,” “value,” and “surplus value” (Conceptualizing the Bioeconomy section). We want to highlight the contradictions, ambiguities, and assumptions underlying the deployment of these concepts in these STS theories (Assumptions, Ambiguities, and Other Issues section). We do this to make the new claim that we need to understand the implications of new and different political–economic processes when considering the bioeconomy, rather than deploying political–economic concepts as an undertheorized add-on to other forms of social theorizing. We finish by offering another way to conceive of the relationship between biotechnology and political economy by looking at the transformation of financial and economic processes (Reconceptualizing the Bioeconomy section).

Conceptualizing the Bioeconomy: Biovalue, Biocapital, Bioeconomics…

Several STS scholars in the past decade or so have theorized the articulation of capitalism and biotechnology. Out of this meeting have come a number of theories positing particular political–economic relationships including biovalue (Waldby 2000), bioeconomics (Rose 2001), biocapital (Rajan 2006), and life as surplus (Cooper 2008). There are a number of other accounts of this articulation worthy of a full review in their own right (e.g., “genetic capital,” “organic capitalism,” “biowealth,” etc.); something that is beyond the scope of this article. However, Stefan Helmreich (2008) has written an enlightening review of the evolution of these various concepts, which does much of the work for us. He identifies two particular clusters of theories or “species of biocapital”: first, a Marxist-feminist cluster concerned with production and reproduction; and second, a Weberian-Marxist cluster concerned with how “relations of production are described alongside accountings of ethical subjectivity” (Helmreich 2008, 471). This latter cluster is also heavily influenced by the Foucauldian concept of biopolitics. In this article, we focus on this latter, largely Foucauldian perspective. It is clear that scholars from both “species” are engaged in a serious attempt to rework Marxist categories, which we do not want to denigrate. However, we would suggest that some of these reworkings are less productive than others, especially in their adoption of political–economic categories and terminology. This is particularly clear once we take seriously the foundation of a Marxian political economy, namely the LTV (or value theory of labor per Elson 1979).

Before looking at the more Foucauldian approaches, we want to start with Catherine Waldby (2000, 2002) since her concept of biovalue is an early and influential conceptualization of a link between capitalism and the life sciences. She argues that new biological technologies and materials such as genetic tests, stem cells, and so on, “involve a reorganization of the boundaries and elements of the human body” (2002, 308) creating new identities, socialities, and subjectivities. Deeply implicated in the “biotechnical trajectory” engendered by these new technologies and materials is the production of biovalue, which Waldby has defined as:

…a surplus value of vitality and instrumental knowledge which can be placed at the disposal of the human subject. The surplus value is produced through setting up certain kinds of hierarchies in which the marginal forms of vitality—the foetal, cadaverous and extracted tissue, as well as bodies and body parts of the socially marginal—are transformed into technologies to aid the intensification of vitality for other living beings. (2000, 19)

…the yield produced by the biotechnical reformulation of living processes. Biotechnology tries to gain traction in living processes, to induce them to increase or change their productivity. (2002, 310)

The concept of biovalue is here underpinned by a “logic of vitality,” in which “biotechnology produces a margin of biovalue” from human well-being represented by a “surplus of fragmentary vitality” (ibid.); that is, “left-over” (presumably “healthy”) biological material. The incentive behind the pursuit of biovalue is twofold: first, there is the use value of new technologies in the production of health and well-being; and second, there is the exchange value of new biological commodities produced for market exchange. Here we note some ambiguity in Waldby’s argument, specifically with reference to the relationship between these two rather different (and Marxian) notions of value. On one hand, biovalue is “translated” into health (2002, 317); on the other hand, and slightly contradictory, biovalue is the “yield” of vitality or health (ibid., 310). Thus it would seem that there is nothing valuable about biological “fragments” (e.g., tissue) per se; it is rather the vitality or health they provide that is valuable, contradicting the need to conceptualize a new, specifically “bio-” value relationship.

Following Waldby—in time and drawing on her theoretical insight—other STS scholars have used the “bio-” prefix to conceptualize the political economy of the life sciences. As mentioned, there are a number of such analyses, but we wish to focus more explicitly on the Foucauldian perspectives in this article. Now it is perhaps pertinent, considering the importance of vitality in Waldby’s work, to turn to the work of Nikolas Rose (2001, 2007a, 2007b, 2008) and his discussion of the “politics of life itself” or “vital politics.” In making his argument, Rose has turned the concept biopolitics onto the molecular, interrogating changing subjectivities in light of new “bio”-technologies. He argues that “Biopolitics becomes bioeconomics, driven by the search for what Catherine Waldby has termed ‘biovalue’: the production of a surplus out of vitality itself” (2001, 15).

Like Waldby, Rose specifically links together two different meanings of the term value. The first is a political–economic, and Marxist, use of the term value to refer to economic or market practices (e.g., profit and shareholder value), while the other is a more ethical framing of the term value, which could perhaps (like Waldby above) more distinctively be termed values (e.g., ethics, meanings). This is most explicit when he argues that bioethics, for example, has become “part of the machinery for governing the bioeconomy” since it facilitates “the circuits of biological material required for the generation of biocapital” (Rose 2008, 47). As such, Rose (2007a, 2007b, 2008) several times links what he calls a “somatic ethics” with the “spirit of biocapital” in his work, arguing that the “re-shaping of human beings is thus occurring within a new political economy of life in which, in part at least, biopolitics has become bioeconomics” (2007a, 17). Thus Rose not only draws on Waldby’s concept of biovalue in his work, he also directly refers to “a new form of capital—biocapital” (2007b, 6)—largely inspired by the work of Sarah Franklin and Margaret Lock (2003)—which is used to characterize the “capitalization of life itself.” Again, there are some ambiguities in these arguments, notably a certain lack of detail and a reliance on underspecified concepts, as discussed below. Moreover, like Waldby and perhaps as a consequence of drawing upon her concept, there are further ambiguities evident when Rose (2007a, 17-18) posits a “latent value” that can be “captured from vitality,” where the former appears to represent values (e.g., human desires and aspirations) that are embodied in biological material and bodies in order to “extract a surplus—be it food, health or capital.”

Although Rose quite clearly uses the concept of biocapital in his work, he does not really refer to the work of Kaushik Sunder Rajan (2006), who we want to consider next. Although he did not necessarily coin the term biocapital, Rajan’s book Biocapital has done much to popularize the concept and is worth considering as an important extension in the conceptualization of the relationship between capitalism and the life sciences. In identifying the distinctiveness of Rajan’s contribution, Stefan Helmreich (2009, 127) argues that whereas Franklin and Lock’s use of biocapital refers to “reproductive technologies generative of surplus value,” Rajan extends this analysis by conceptualizing the “market potential of bioproducts” [our emphasis]. In this, Rajan identifies speculative value as another constitutive element of biocapital. According to Rajan (2006, 3), both productive/reproductive and speculative capital are entwined in this “new face, and a new phase, of capitalism” in that “biotechnology is a form of enterprise inextricable from contemporary capitalism.” This does not make biocapital a “radical rupture” in capitalism, but rather an “evolution” of capitalism (ibid., 10). In his analysis, Rajan (2006, 18) draws on Foucault—and the work of Nikolas Rose—in order to examine the future orientation and speculative evaluations inherent in biocapital; that is, the speculative value of visions, hype, and promises. From this starting point, Rajan is able to make the argument that the “circulation of capital is intimately tied to questions of value,” especially “moral value” (ibid., 41, 56). He thereby identifies the “discursive act” inherent in future visions and promises as crucial moment in the circulation of (speculative) biocapital. Again there are ambiguities in this analysis, discussed below. In part this is a consequence of Rajan treating the relationship between capital and biotechnology as universal, uncomplicated, and entwined. What is missing is the specificity of biocapital, the particularities of certain times and places.

The emphasis on speculative capital (and value/values) in Rajan’s book is reiterated in the work of the final scholar we want to consider here, Melinda Cooper. In her book Life as Surplus, Cooper (2008, 10) argues that “neoliberalism installs speculation at the very core of production.” Although her focus on financialization (i.e., the economic and political dominance of the financial sector) is a welcome contribution to theorizing the bioeconomy, Cooper’s overall thesis is somewhat hard to pin down (Tyfield 2009). She claims that the life sciences are employed in the creation of surplus value, which, in turn, shapes their development; something that, in itself, is true of all capitalist enterprise. However, she highlights a singular novelty in the life sciences regarding a fusion between the perceived self-regenerative nature of biological processes and their autopoietic capacity to transcend the ecological “limits to growth” with the capacity of financial capital to transgress limits to economic growth through the dynamic of speculative promise; a claim that the recent and ongoing financial crisis has spectacularly disproved. Nevertheless, for Cooper it is the self-generative/self-regenerative possibilities of the life sciences subjected to the logic of financialization that promises surplus value from life itself. As she argues:

…what is at stake and what is new in the contemporary biosciences is not so much the commodification of biological life—this is a foregone conclusion—but rather its transmutation into speculative surplus value. (2008, 148)

Furthermore, Cooper argues that this self-regenerative capacity of both life and finance leads to a neoliberalized political economy. For the (seemingly) self-regenerative and self-regulating capacity of living and economic processes of valorization appears to legitimate the perspective that “such systems evolve most productively when they are free from external regulation” (ibid., 44); that is, in “free market” conditions or in “nature.” We now critique these arguments in more detail.

Assumptions, Ambiguities, and Other Issues

Having outlined some of the existing theoretical discussions of the relationship between capitalism and modern bioscience, we now want to provide a more in-depth critique of these conceptualizations. In particular, we identify a number of key ambiguities across the works we discussed above. First, there is an issue with how these concepts—particularly those marshaled by Waldby and Rose—link “vitality” and value. Second, there is an issue with how they conceptualize value as a dual concept comprising (broadly speaking) ethical and economic value. Third, there is an issue with the theorizing of financial speculation, especially in relation to the production of surplus value from biological resources. Finally, there is a general issue with the appropriation of Marxist terminology (e.g., surplus, capital, value, etc.) in that these concepts are selectively adopted without adequately addressing their original formulations in the LTV. We argue that this adoption of Marxist terminology, separated from the LTV, renders these STS theories of the bioeconomy opaque.

The key point to emphasize is that all these existing conceptualizations—to a greater (e.g., Waldby) or lesser (e.g., Cooper) extent—are engaged in an entirely different intellectual pursuit to that of Marx and the critique of political economy. That is, the strength of these sociological and anthropological studies of science and technology is in the development of thick description and the associated playing with conceptual vocabulary in a bid to create a new terminology that is appropriate to a similarly new social reality. However, the questions that remain are: (1) is the reality described so new and different that existing theories are in fact incapable of similar insights? and (2) why the coy use of Marx, which actually opens up this work to the criticism that they confuse more than they illuminate? We will outline an alternative deployment of Marxist ideas in a more satisfying way in the next section when we refer to the work of autonomist Marxists.

To start, Waldby’s (2000, 2002) conceptualization of biovalue as a ‘surplus of vitality’ implies several problematic assumptions, which are further evident in Rose’s arguments. First, there is an assumption that vitality—that is, health and well-being—is already present and even abundant (Waldby 2002, 311); that is, a surplus of vitality. This assumption contradicts the notion that vitality is open to exploitation through the production of commodities, because the surplus implies that vitality is already available, meaning that there is little reason to produce or pay for it. Marxist political economy raises this very question of how scarcity is constructed so that there is reason to pay for commodities. For example, the production of (valuable) commodities depends on such scarcity because value, in its economic or exchange sense, is derived from the exclusion of people from access to resources (biological or otherwise); a scarcity which ultimately depends on socioeconomic institutions such as property rights (Birch 2007a) and not upon the characteristics of the biological material. Second, representing biovalue as a surplus of vitality—while being both abundant and scarce at the same time—is also problematic. In Waldby’s conceptualization, we have to accept that health and well-being (i.e., vitality) are attributable to the biophysical characteristics of vital fragments (e.g., tissue, drugs, etc.), contradicting the sociological perspective that health and illness are socially constituted (Cunningham-Burley and Boulton 2000). A final issue is that vital fragments cannot, therefore, be the source of value in themselves because what is valuable is vitality, not some unmodified biological matter. What this would imply is that it is the knowledge and knowledge labor required to transform these fragments into commodities that are valuable, implying that the prefix “bio-” is rather irrelevant in this case. We may as well term it “knowledge-”value instead since it is knowledge (or, more accurately, knowledge labor) which creates value and not the latent qualities of the biological material itself.

Unfortunately, these problematic assumptions are necessary to the concept of biovalue because otherwise there is little conceptual difference between biovalue and value. The reason for this is that there is nothing intrinsically “bio-” about the value relationship itself, as described in this conceptualization, since it cannot relate to the specific biological resources but rather reflects the knowledge needed to develop those resources as socially constituted vitality. It would presumably be more apt then to refer to (socially constituted) health value. Waldby (2002) herself points out that health is “owed” to others and it is therefore relational rather than an immanent characteristic of either biotechnology or the capital relations surrounding it (i.e., we can think of it as a process rather than state). As such, vitality comes across as a preference (or social value) of individual citizen consumers rather than a new value (or capital) relation. Consequently, “bio-values” and not “biovalue” seems a better concept; that is, the social or ethical values that make biotechnology a profitable venture.

Once this step has been made, however, the concept of “bio-values” can also be easily incorporated within a Marxist political economy perspective, such as cultural political economy (CPE; Jessop and Sum 2006), insofar as such social values about life, health, and so on, condition what is and is not a profitable line of business, as regards issues of (coproduced) social acceptance (or not) of, and hence market demand for, particular biotechnological innovations and their production processes. This means that while the fetishization of the “bio-” is problematic in our view—in that there is no “biovalue” in a political–economic sense—theorists like Waldby, Rose, and so on, still contribute to our understanding of “imaginaries” that pattern political–economic processes. From this perspective, the values, debates, and quandaries about what is deemed technologically “possible,” culturally demanded or rejected, speculatively hyped, and so on, can be seen as crucial elements of the regularization of capital accumulation. The problem that then arises, however, is whether bio-values are so important that an entirely new prefix, signifying some momentous change, is merited. Given the relative failure of most biotech to date (see Nightingale and Martin 2004), at best the answer is likely to be “possibly, but only just beginning” or even “not yet.”

This brings us to the second issue. It is necessary, it seems, to collapse the distinction between ethical and economic value in order to theorize a specifically “bio-” sense of value or capital; such conflation effectively dispenses with exchange value and leaves ethical value as paramount. This would seem to happen because the latter more evidently falls within the remit of STS research, whereas political–economic processes tend not to. However, in valorizing ethical values, especially in terms of health, there is a shift toward reifying the speculative expectations of future usefulness (e.g., benefits of new therapeutic treatments) and fetishizing biological matter (e.g., the “bio-”) as the source of value, rather than any labor or economic process. This conflation is most evident with Rose but is also evident in Rajan and Cooper. It raises the question of whether this conflation of ethical and economic value can be done without completely destroying the meaning of the latter economic sense of value and without assuming the latent potential of all things “bio-.”

Moreover, Rose’s argument that the biosciences have led to a “molecularization” or “geneticization” of society, politics, and economics is premised on the idea that ethics and values inform economic practices. In itself, this is not a problematic idea and indeed resonates with recent developments toward a Marxian cultural political economy (e.g., Jessop 2005), which emphasizes the cultural conditioning of capital accumulation (as above). However, CPE does not thereby repudiate analysis of the intrinsic logic and contradictions of capital as a real abstraction, built upon analysis of the construction of (exchange) value. Conversely, Rose’s focus on the novel construction of economic practice does take a definitive step away from any such analysis of exchange value, and the essential continuity it posits in all capitalist economic growth. For Rose the conceptualization of the bioeconomy is premised on the wholesale reorientation of society (especially social values) and not on changes in political economy; a move that is also common to the other work we are considering here. It is therefore not clear why these scholars adopt Marxist terminology in order to make their claims. Nor is it clear why it is necessary to argue—or what it actually means, since so little space is devoted to explaining it—that there has been this wholesale shift from “biopolitics to bioeconomics,” as Rose (2001, 2007a, 2007b) theorizes. This is especially pertinent since Foucault (1998, 141) himself explicitly argued that:

. . . bio-power was without question an indispensible element in the development of capitalism; the latter would not have been possible without the controlled insertion of bodies into the machinery of production and the adjustment of the phenomena of population to economic processes.

Here it is perhaps the “bio-” prefix that creates the ambiguity. It might therefore be more pertinent to return to Rose’s earlier work (e.g., Rose 2001) on the “politics of life itself” where the “bio” is less obvious (although still present). However, in turning to this earlier work it is evident that “vitality” is not actually the underlying logic of the bioeconomy; in fact, the underlying logic could be very different. ¹ For example, it would seem more relevant, as Birch (2007b) argues, to theorize a “logic of morbidity” in which ill-health enables the biosciences to yield economic value. This is because there is no real point to bioscience research that does not identify illnesses or health “problems” since these morbidities constitute both ethical (e.g., rationales, motivations) and economic (e.g., products) value in the bioeconomy. There is no surplus health or vitality in this sense; there are only a “surplus” of new and existing conditions and symptoms that can be variously identified as social and health problems (e.g., obesity, diabetes, etc.), research goals (e.g., obesity genes), and economic opportunities (e.g., obesity pill).

The third set of issues relates closely to the second when considering the importance that speculation has in the biosciences. As others have argued (see Borup et al. 2006), expectations are constitutive of technoscience although it is not possible ex ante to say in what way expectations will constitute technoscience. In discussions of the bioeconomy, speculation is variously deployed in concepts like Carlos Novas’ (2006) “political economy of hope” and, more relevant here, Rajan and Cooper’s discussion of speculative capital and financialization, respectively. However, in both these latter cases, it is crucial to avoid the assumption made by these authors that speculation and speculative capital necessarily exhausts the constitution of the bioeconomy.

Speculative capital, to which both Rajan and Cooper refer, is represented as a promissory value of new biotechnologies because it enables life science firms to raise the investment capital necessary to develop new products and, as a result, “realize value” (Rajan 2006, 129). Part of this process is the construction of consumers for these new products, hence the need to develop new diagnostic tools to create, in Rajan’s words, “patients-in-waiting” (ibid., 175). In Cooper’s (2008) argument, the promise of “life as surplus” results from the fusion of the self-regenerative nature of biological life and finance capital, which enables the production of surplus value. As Tyfield (2009) suggests, however, this argument problematically fuses issues of self-regenerative nature (or self-valorization in the case of capital) with questions of surplus, despite the lack of a necessary conceptual link between these terms. Cooper’s identification of surplus with the notion of potential is unrelated to the standard use of the former term (i.e., as a surfeit), which is also its connotation in Marx as regards production of more value than is consumed in the purchase of the means of production, including labor power. Hence the appropriation of the Marxist concept of surplus in Cooper’s argument does not reflect the position of surplus in Marx’s LTV, illustrating the selective application of Marxist ideas in these theories of the bioeconomy.

More critically, the core ambiguity behind both these treatments of speculative capital (or surplus value) is the idea that financialization or speculation can rest on almost nothing or on an entirely promissory or self-regenerative capacity. Despite Rajan’s argument, speculative value and financial investment cannot be based on the latent value of a biological resource or promised commodity. Rather these have to be derived from the value of the firm itself (e.g., shares) as evaluated and assessed by investors. As Leyshon and Thrift (2007) have argued in their article on the “capitalization of almost everything,” financialization depends on revenue streams from an asset class. Hence speculative capital or surplus value cannot occur without revenue streams, which are needed to fund the high and regular returns demanded by such investors. In the case of the life sciences, most firms’ speculative value is derived from the trading of shares or investments in the firm (i.e., financial assets) or intellectual property (e.g., knowledge assets) and not from trading a material commodity produced by that firm. This is because most life science firms up to now have simply not produced any “commodity” for sale (Nightingale and Martin 2004; Lazonick and Tulum 2009).

Although a firm’s share value may be based on the (cultural) representation of its technoscientific capabilities, biological material and future commodity production, speculative value still has to reflect the here-and-now asset value of the firm (to investors) and not just the future promissory value of any revenue from biological commodities that a firm may (but is unlikely to) produce. This is particularly marked in the case of biotech firms: most public biotech firms (c. 80 percent) have no products on the market or any positive revenue stream, while private firms are almost wholly without income (Pisano 2006; Lazonick and Tulum 2009), which means that they have no revenue stream to be capitalized. The implications of this have been amply demonstrated by the impact of the financial crisis on the British biotech sector:

More than a third—29 companies—of the listed [UK] biotech sector have gone bust since 2008 and 10 are on the brink, according to work by Paul Cuddon at analysts Peel Hunt. Another 38 are “fine” and six were bought by other companies. (The Guardian 2011)

These bankruptcies reflect the impact of the ongoing financial crisis rather than a sudden crisis of confidence in the supposedly promissory or speculative value of biological R&D or biotechnology products (i.e., commodity production). The latent value of biological resources and promised biotechnology products cannot simply disappear leading to these bankruptcies; instead, it would seem reasonable to assume that the value of these companies did not rest in anything we could characterize as “bio” in the first place. Instead, we would argue, life science firms are asset-based enterprises rather than commodity-based ones, in that their value is derived from trade in intellectual property and financial investments, not from the production of biological commodities or materials.

This brings us to the final issue we want to highlight in this section—the misappropriation or selective adoption of terms from Marxism and critical political economy (e.g., value, capital, surplus, etc.). The STS conceptualizations of the bioeconomy we highlight above adopt these specific political–economic terms without adequately addressing the original formulation of these concepts—namely the basis of value in labor (power). Commodities, be they “bio-commodities” (i.e., fragments of vitality) or normal commodities, are products of a labor process. Value is realized through market exchange, but it is constituted by production (or reproduction in other conceptualizations of biocapital, e.g., Franklin and Lock 2003) and it is the (exploitable) capacities and capabilities of workers (as embodied labor power) that construct value rather than any latent characteristic of a biological product, commodity, or resource.

The metaphorical conflation of organisms with workers is problematic in this sense. As Stefan Helmreich (2007, 293) argues, many “biotech boosters” assume that biotechnology commodities are “latent” in biological materials, thereby leading to the assumption “that biological process itself already constitutes a form of surplus value production” (original emphasis). In Marxist LTV, there would be no value in a biological fragment without the effortful and waged application of knowledge and work to make that fragment into a commodity of some sort. Even though we think that this appropriation of political–economic and Marxist concepts is problematic, we do not want to argue that labor is necessarily the only issue of interest to our discussion of the bioeconomy. Indeed, what the STS perspectives we have criticized here miss is the fact that (biological) nature is an important asset, even if it is not a source of latent value from commodity production. But, in order for nature to be an asset, it needs to be turned into property. We argue in the next section that the current conceptualizations of the bioeconomy have actually missed a major element in capital accumulation in relation to the biosciences; primarily, they have failed to theorize asset-based economic processes and the realization of asset value through market exchange. We think that a discussion of these issues will therefore provide a novel and theoretically rigorous contribution to these debates by highlighting the distinctive relationship between the biosciences and capitalism; something which affixing “bio-” to concepts like value and capital does not actually do. It is this reconceptualization of the bioeconomy that we turn to next.

Reconceptualizing the Bioeconomy

Conclusion

In this article we have, on one hand, provided a critique of existing theories, or bio-concepts, of the bioeconomy and, on the other hand, we have presented a new direction for thinking about the political economy of the life sciences. We started out with the aim of looking at existing conceptualizations of the bioeconomy, especially those that analyze the bioeconomy in political–economic terms. These accounts included concepts such as biovalue (Waldby 2000), bioeconomics (Rose 2001), biocapital (Rajan 2006), and “life as surplus” (Cooper 2008). We highlighted several ambiguities, problematic assumptions, and contradictions in these theoretical discussions of the bioeconomy including the linking of vitality with value; the dual conceptualization of value in ethical and economic terms; the treatment of speculation and surplus value; and, more generally, the appropriation/misappropriation of Marxist and political–economic terminology. In particular, we argued that the last of these (i.e., the adoption of Marxist terms) actually obscures the arguments these scholars put forward, rather than providing an adequate explanation of the supposed transformative effects of the sociotechnoeconomic restructuring represented by the emerging bioeconomy.

Even if we ultimately reject these theories and conceptions of the bioeconomy, we still wanted to engage sympathetically and constructively with them. In order to present our reasons for rejecting these bio-concepts, we outlined three aspects of the political economy of the life sciences that need greater emphasis in future research. First, labor is still central to any political–economic analysis as the work of the autonomist Marxists illustrates; labor may now refer to new forms of labor (e.g., immaterial, informatics, relational, etc.) and new labor processes (e.g., in use, in consumption, etc.), but it is still the root of value in political–economic analyses. This is especially so in terms of the knowledge labor that is both turned into an asset through IPRs and is necessary to turn biological matter into commercial and profitable products. Second, the bioeconomy is underpinned by a rentier regime in which financial asset values are more important than revenues from the sale of biotechnological commodities. In this sense, speculation does not relate to biological promises but to more mundane political–economic ones (e.g., rising value of shares), although these two are not entirely separable. Finally, the “actually existing” bioeconomy is not a set of social relations based on production (e.g., value, capital) or speculation (e.g., surplus) in life science–related industries, but is embedded in particular market relations and institutions of asset value realization. That is, the political economy of the life sciences depends on the realization of value from financial and knowledge assets through exchange on markets that are not only characterized by social order and social structures, as Aspers (2007, 2009) argues, but also by social expectations.

Although these expectations are performative, self-fulfilling, and self-reinforcing—as with other assets (e.g., housing)—they do not necessarily lead to homogenous or convergent political economies. Rather, markets have particular geographies that help illustrate and explain the particularities and specificities of the bioeconomy and militate against universal theories or concepts (Birch, forthcoming). One example of these geographies is the way that asset values are often aggregated when traded, drawing together a range of assets as securities (Leyshon and Thrift 2007); yet the value of these aggregated assets is realized (i.e., exchanged) in specific places, such as London, New York, and so on. What this means is beyond the scope of this article, but would suggest that thinking about the bioeconomy in this way helps to avoid making general theoretical claims that have limited empirical or analytical support. Furthermore, and crucially for our claims here, it also enables a rethink of the transformation of modern capitalism by analyzing the transformation of economic processes and not just technoscientific ones.