Liu Pengfei and Gu Yongchun: 21st-Century Foreign Leftist Scholars' Critiques of Biocapitalism
Since the beginning of the 21st century, alongside the widespread application of biotechnology at the levels of production and daily life, the life sciences have permeated every layer of capitalist society with unprecedented scale and speed. Against this backdrop, several insightful and forward-looking Western left-wing scholars have attempted to examine the development of contemporary life sciences and biotechnology within the horizon of a critique of capitalism, seeking to theorize and systematize these developments. In 2006, the renowned American scholar Kaushik Sunder Rajan published his representative work, Biocapital: The Constitution of Postgenomic Life. Grounded in a frontier perspective on the development of life sciences and biotechnology, this book organically integrates the theoretical core of Marxist political economy into the organizational framework of Foucault’s biopolitics. It endeavors to elucidate the interactive relationship between biotechnology and contemporary capitalism, thereby constructing a brand-new theoretical category for studying contemporary biotech and its systems of exchange and circulation: "biocapital." So-called "biocapitalism" is a new existential form of capitalism in which biocapital, by virtue of life sciences and biotechnology, continuously extracts profit and realizes the expansion of capital within the contemporary world capitalist system. Subsequently, the issue of biocapitalism has attracted extensive attention from Western scholars, and several left-wing scholars have successively conducted evaluative research on biocapitalism from the perspective of the critique of political economy, opening a new horizon for the critique of contemporary capitalism.
I. The Latest Mode of Capitalist Rule in the Era of Life Sciences
Rajan argues that the emergence of biocapital does not mean that capitalism has entered a distinct epochal stage; this stage does not leave behind the capitalism we are familiar with, nor does it fundamentally undermine capitalism. On the contrary, biocapitalism is a continuation, an evolution, a subset, and a form of capitalism distinct from what preceded it. Biocapitalism arises during the process of capitalism’s modernizing transformation and represents the latest mode of capitalist rule in the era of life sciences. As a new contemporary form of capitalism, it conforms to the developmental law of the unity of universality and particularity.
(1) Biocapitalism remains a political and economic system dominated by the will of the bourgeoisie. It acquires ownership of biological information and biological products by appropriating "genetic codes," subsequently utilizing economic advantages to place living organisms within an inescapable "biological shadow of existence," ultimately seizing economic and political hegemony over the world.
From the perspective of its generative logic, biocapitalism is the result of capital seeking rent from biotechnology; its ultimate goal remains the maintenance of capital expansion and the reproduction of capitalist relations of production. In the past thirty years of biocapitalism’s vigorous development, the life sciences have become increasingly dependent on the capitalist mode of production, becoming—ever more nakedly—a tool for maintaining capital expansion and capitalist relations of production, and for conducting new rounds of expansion, penetration, and profit-seeking. Nikolas Rose has pointed out that contemporary molecular biomedicine requires years of large-scale financial investment to produce results: purchasing expensive equipment, maintaining well-staffed laboratories, conducting multiple clinical trials, and covering the costs of overcoming regulatory hurdles. Similar to previous forms of capitalism, most of this funding comes from venture capital provided by private companies and capital raised through the stock market. Consequently, these investments naturally have the power to demand that the recipients comply with all the urgent needs of capital, such as guaranteeing a certain output of profit and satisfying shareholders' demands for returns on value. In this context, life sciences and capitalism share a symbiotic relationship: on the one hand, life sciences depend on the support of capital to grow and develop; on the other hand, capital needs to establish monopoly positions in the field of life sciences to obtain surplus profits. Under the continuous rent-seeking of capital, biotechnology is easily controlled and coerced by capital, eventually losing its scientific neutrality and degenerating into a profit-making tool for capital.
From the perspective of its operational logic, biocapitalism is the product of a "collusion" between the logic of capital and the logic of power it drives. Since its birth, the development of biocapitalism has always been influenced by the joint forces of the logic of capital and the logic of power. One important manifestation of this is the application for and use of patents related to the life sciences. In her investigation of the history of patents in the life sciences, Breske Ashleigh found that global demand for pharmaceuticals has led to a continuous increase in biopiracy [1] in the Global South. As soon as biological companies discover drugs they consider profitable, they immediately apply for related patents so that no other company can profit from them. Because the "tool" of life sciences inherently requires high levels of sustained capital investment and all-around political support, those who can utilize this "tool" for a new round of profit-seeking are often capital oligarchs with deep pockets and strong political lobbying capabilities. In fact, under the protection of the laws of various countries, patents can be regarded as a "legal monopoly right." Due to the existence of patent barriers, no economic entity intending to participate in world trade can infringe upon the patents belonging to others; otherwise, they will face severe sanctions and be denied entry into the capitalist world trade system. This results in biological companies in most developing countries generally lacking the capacity to compete directly with the numerous multinational corporations in developed countries that possess ample capital reserves and state policy support. This divergence largely increases the price of patent medicines, allowing multinational corporations and developed countries to obtain vast economic interests and political hegemony while simultaneously leading to even more severe inequality on a global scale. Taken as a whole, biocapitalism has developed gradually alongside the birth of neoliberalism. It is a community of capital and power composed of scientific practices in capital and life sciences technology, supported in all aspects by the state apparatus. It seeks to make biological life a part of economic growth, thereby "capturing the latent value in life processes." This community of capital and power has not changed the nature of capitalism—which has always used every possible means to pursue surplus value—but instead uses life sciences to further construct a "powerful production system" [2] for capitalism by utilizing various life forms (such as genes, cells, reproductive organs, and plant compounds). In this way, the logic of capital and the logic of power continue to "collude" in the era of biocapitalism. The fundamental nature of the private ownership of the means of production in biocapitalism has not changed; rather, it has shown an increasing trend toward centralization in industries related to the life sciences.
Within the framework of biocapitalism, the relation of production in which a few members of the bourgeoisie exploit the vast majority of the proletariat remains unchanged. The equal exploitation of labor power is the primary human right of capital, and the stage of biocapitalism is no exception. Johanna Oksala has pointed out that while the life sciences industry and markets are experiencing rapid development, they also bring an urgent problem: they create a demand for new types of biological services and products (e.g., surrogacy, the sale of body tissues, and participation in clinical trials). However, the providers of these services and materials are often the unemployed or underemployed from the Global "South." This means that in the biocapitalist mode of production, if capitalists are to obtain profit, they must still rely on extracting the surplus value of a vast number of biological laborers; there is no essential difference from the era of industrial capitalism. Generally speaking, biological laborers consist of two parts: technical practitioners with biology-related knowledge, and "volunteers" who use their own physical bodies to participate, directly or indirectly, in biological experiments for various biotechnology enterprises and institutions. Both groups primarily provide their own physical or mental labor to obtain remuneration from capitalists. Compared to the former, the latter often endure greater exploitation while receiving the least benefit. Clearly, this has not changed the class relations between people under the capitalist system. In the distribution of profit, the big capitalists still pocket the vast majority of the income, while what biological laborers receive are mere "scraps from the table." Specifically, biotechnology-related fields are often invested in by large capital syndicates, and thus they also acquire the monopoly inherent to capital: once a biotechnology enterprise has achieved a de facto monopoly in a certain aspect of the industry, it simultaneously acquires the power to set prices for related products, such as new drugs, in that field. New drugs and therapies also imply massive costs, such as research and development funding; by virtue of their monopoly status, the pricing of many biotechnology products is beyond the reach of the general public. Similarly, the distribution of profit is entirely controlled by monopoly capital. Compared to the capitalists who "clip coupons" [3] in leisure, biological laborers participating in biotechnology R&D can only obtain a meager income that is disproportionate to their amount of labor.
(2) Although biocapitalism has not changed the essence of the capitalist mode of production, it shifts the channel for exploiting surplus value from "man as labor power" to "man as a biological organism." This shift not only causes a revolutionary change in the way biocapitalism realizes capital expansion but also significantly increases the degree and scope of progressive capital accumulation. Therefore, biocapitalism, born in the new era of life sciences, possesses certain new changes and exhibits the particularity of the current era.
In the stage of biocapitalism, the mode of capital expansion has undergone a revolutionary change. In general, the form of value acquisition in biocapitalism is more virtualized. It is not satisfied with exploiting the present value of human beings but is based on creating "future concepts" and producing "future products," with the aim of exploiting the future value of human beings as well. Clayton Pierce has pointed out that the more common drivers of biocapitalist development come from investments in biotech products such as virtual drugs, gene therapy drugs, and plant compounds. To a certain extent, these biotech products are regarded as potential exchange value contained within the "imaginary production zones" under the horizon of expectations uniquely created by biocapitalist society. Pierce refers to this investment in "potential future" and "virtual" biological products and their exchange value as the "expectational value framework" of biocapitalist production. One of the most important features of this framework is its ability to "manufacture" commodities that have not yet been formed but possess value. In terms of value realization, the ultimate realization of the "future value" invested in by biocapitalism is similar to the ultimate realization of value under traditional capitalist relations of production—that is, both require the exchange process to complete social reproduction. The potential consumers of these biotech-infused "future products" are often the laborers mentioned above. According to Rajan’s research, based on the development of pharmacogenomics or "personalized medicine," the medical "risks" faced by current or future patients are entangled with the hopes for new treatments developed through life science innovation. Because of the differences in their genomic profiles and risks, every individual is a potential target for therapeutic intervention: "In the precise calculations of biocapitalism, everyone is a patient-in-waiting, and simultaneously a consumer-in-waiting." Therefore, when the discourse of "high-risk" patients and consumers becomes entangled with investment in life sciences R&D, relevant companies no longer need to manufacture concrete products to make money. On the contrary, patented knowledge is sufficient to increase the price of their stocks in the market, thereby benefiting shareholders. This is the source of the virtualized characteristics of capital expansion in biocapitalism.
In the stage of biocapitalism, the degree of capital's expanded reproduction and the scope of its expansion and penetration continue to increase.
The scope of surplus value exploitation under bio-capitalism has undergone further expansion; it is no longer satisfied with merely appropriating human labor time, but seeks to occupy the entirety of human life-time, regarding life itself as the source of value. According to the formulations of classical Marxist authors, under the capitalist system, the composition of a worker's labor time after selling their labor power to the capitalist is generally divided into two parts: necessary labor time and surplus labor time. Generally speaking, workers reproduce the value of their own labor power during necessary labor time and produce surplus value for the capitalist for free during surplus labor time; time outside of work should be the worker's own time for rest and development. In researching the issue of human "well-being" [4] in the era of bio-capitalism, Ilyushenka Nadzeya found that in the traditional capitalist model, workers did indeed have a clearly demarcated work time and leisure time. In the era of bio-capitalism, however, this situation has changed: as the production of immaterial labor has gradually become dominant, the importance of so-called "Fordist labor" has significantly decreased; key value comes not only from labor in the workplace but also from human life itself. Consequently, labor has begun to continuously extend into and "capture" all spheres of life, and a new characteristic of the bio-capitalist era is the blurring of the boundaries between work time and leisure time. This blurring of boundaries is a manifestation of the shift in the source of value under bio-capitalism. Trigo Abril similarly points out that bio-capitalism, in the form of commodities, renders both the objective and subjective spheres of human social life into sources for the extraction of surplus value; human life is not merely a source of value, but has become value itself. Bio-capitalism extracts value not only from the body as a "material tool of work," but from the body as defined by the entire dimension of life. It is not satisfied with merely utilizing people's working time, but attempts to increase its appropriation of the free time people use to define their own social identities. This characteristic of bio-capitalism amounts to a new "Great Transformation" [5] of the capitalist system—a pivotal revolution from within—marking the arrival of a New Era.
II. The Instrumentality and Redemptivity of Bio-capitalism within the Horizons of the Logic of Capital and the Logic of Power
Fritsch Kelly points out that bio-capitalism "depends on deregulation, privatization, the shaping of individualized risk, and wealth-creation activities re-aggregated around immaterial financial transactions." Bio-capitalism, which has not changed the essence of capitalism, remains an exploitative entity created through the collusion of the logic of capital and the logic of power for the purpose of acquiring surplus value. The implementation of its economic strategies must be guaranteed by powerful political power, and the operation of political power is in turn nourished by the surplus value it exploits. In the continuous interaction between the logic of capital and the logic of power, bio-capitalism exhibits instrumentality because it is used for exploitative profit-making, while attaining redemptivity due to the innate qualities of the life sciences. Within the deep collusion of the logic of capital and the logic of power, bio-capitalism continues to develop by virtue of its instrumentality and redemptivity.
(1) Under the collusion of the logic of capital and the logic of power, capital and power-holders have continuously increased investment in bio-capitalism, represented by the life sciences, and have leveraged these investments to control and utilize bio-capitalism for exploitative profit-making, thereby investing it with instrumentality.
Because capital and power-holders share the same fundamental interests in the era of bio-capitalism, the development of biotechnology has received dual capital injections from both capital and power. After capitalism developed into the new form of bio-capitalism, the re-growth of profits in the field of biotechnology urgently required policy preferences from power institutions—represented by the governments of capitalist states—and continuous capital injections from major capitalists. Having experienced the deregulation of finance and the development of neoliberal policies of privatization and individualization in the 1970s and 80s, the economies of Western countries generally operate under the "guidance, support, and protection of laws and policies, and the protection of the dissemination of social norms that promote competition, free trade, and rational economic behavior." Market values and market rationality have already become deeply rooted in the popular consciousness. Taking the United States as an example, Melinda Cooper argues that the deregulation of banking and finance in the 1970s, combined with highly liquid stock markets and the increasing tendency toward the securitization of pensions, led to a massive increase in funds available for investment in emerging and high-risk biotechnology firms. To ensure high-speed economic development in the post-industrial era, the US government has invested heavily in the life sciences, with a federal budget for scientific research that is larger than that of any other member of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). In 2003, prospects in the biotechnology sector fell to an all-time low. At this juncture, the US government stepped in to save the sector by formulating a massive plan to fund "Biodefense" research for the next decade. While providing generous funding for drug development, this plan ensured through biodefense legislation that any "national health emergency" would become an excellent opportunity to launch drugs that had not undergone clinical trials. This is but a microcosm of how Western countries utilize the force of capital and power to invest heavily in the life sciences.
Capital and power-holders, by virtue of their massive investment in the life sciences, have turned the high-tech outputs brought about by the continuous development of the life sciences into tools for capitalist exploitation and profit. In investigating the 1980 Bayh-Dole Act in the United States and the US Supreme Court's ruling in Diamond v. Chakrabarty, Kaushik Sunder Rajan discovered that a very complex relationship often exists between the private and public sectors of capitalist states. One manifestation of this relationship is that the private sector is able to obtain enormous profits from projects funded by the public sector. Taking Iceland as an example: Iceland possesses excellent national medical records and rich, accurate genealogical information dating back to the early 20th century. Consequently, by virtue of its so-called genetic homogeneity, it became an ideal location for population genomics experiments. Through his investigation, Rajan found that the Icelandic Parliament granted a genomics research company called "deCODE genetics" an exclusive right to establish a genomic database of the Icelandic population by collecting DNA samples, elucidating gene sequences, and further combining genotypic information with national health records. This project, known as the "Health Sector Database," claimed to have obtained the consent of the Icelandic people, but in reality, the company did not obtain informed consent from every potential participant in the database; it merely allowed individuals to "opt out." Unless an Icelander actively chose to opt out of the database, their medical information would become part of the database, and the company would ultimately profit from this data. Thus, the genomic database became both a product of the interlacing fusion of the logic of capital and the logic of power in pursuit of common interests, and a concrete manifestation of the instrumentality of bio-capitalism.
(2) Under the collusion of the logic of capital and the logic of power, the "salvific" [6] nature inherent to the life sciences has evolved into the redemptivity of bio-capitalism, seeking legitimacy for the exploitation of surplus value.
The fusion of the logic of capital and the logic of power has effectively amplified the "salvific" characteristics inherent to the life sciences, causing them to further develop into the redemptivity of bio-capitalism. Pearce argues that in the era of bio-capitalism, a growing conviction is forming within capitalist states: both capital and power-holders increasingly believe that the continuous development of bio-capitalism will ultimately enable their country to achieve the status of a global economic power. Consequently, they continuously utilize market rules and the public power of the government to develop bio-capitalism in hopes of occupying a dominant position in the highly competitive global economy. After prolonged practical investigation, Rajan found that biotechnology companies which rely on futures investment and capital operations are increasingly inclined to maintain a "pseudo-religious ideology" that links the success of life science research with the salvation of the nation. Specifically, this "pseudo-religious ideology" is constructed at the intersection of life science research and national security guarantees, casting a blurred political veil over science. Under this veil, bio-capitalism—based on a discursive system of technological messianism and nationalism—roots its exploitation of biological resources in the salvific "redemption stories" unique to the life sciences. This "pseudo-religious ideology" also attempts to make both biotechnology practitioners and ordinary citizens believe that with the development of bio-capitalism, not only will the national economy gain a powerful new engine, but it will also "bring about products filled with a sense of potent nationalist discourse, such as security, territorial hegemony, and citizenship," which together support the redemptivity of bio-capitalism.
"Capital" and "Power" utilize the redemptivity of bio-capitalism and label it with "national interest" and patriotism to seek universal legitimacy for the exploitation and expansion of bio-capitalism. Accompanying the continuous development of bio-capitalism, capitalist states have gradually incorporated the goal of achieving progress in the life sciences into their national security strategies. This shift has not only greatly enhanced the subjective initiative of biotechnology research but has also, while obtaining legitimacy for development at the national level, given rise to a "messianic" thought. Typical manifestations of this are frequently found in the production bases of bio-capitalism, such as biomedical research laboratories. In analyzing biotechnology laboratories in India, Rajan found that these laboratories generally combine "highly individualized stories of personal motivation, national calling, and human interest with the structural messianism inherent in the market, science, or the state." This combination "integrates the responsibility of saving lives into corporate interests, which in India's case, enables a 'Third World' country to leapfrog into becoming a 'global player'." To a considerable extent, the logic of power implicit in bio-capitalism has caused biotechnology research work and the development of life science product markets to be labeled with "national interest" and "national glory," and has reshaped the values of citizens through the logic of capital—namely, the neoliberal ideology and the belief system of developed-capitalist-state exceptionalism. By means of reshaping values similar to the Indian case, capitalist states can further increase political investment in the development of biotechnology to avoid being at a disadvantage in intense international competition, ensuring the continuous development of bio-capitalism through the interaction of the logic of capital and the logic of power.
III. The Biological Deduction of Neoliberalism and Neo-imperialism
Bio-capitalism must undertake the dual task of capitalism's power expansion and capital growth. Pearce points out that the birth of bio-capitalism is related to the "elimination of restrictive barriers in markets and labor through government, military, and corporate intervention," and that it "originates from a series of complex relationships between scientific and technological research and the neoliberal practices of economic development." It can be seen that bio-capitalism emerged during the process of capitalist states shifting toward neoliberal policies and flourished accordingly. While finding new space for the survival of capitalism, it has also caused greater exploitability and developmental imbalance due to the influence of neoliberal policies. On the other hand, because the monopolistic nature of biotechnology is continuously strengthening and its integration with power departments is becoming increasingly close, new forms of imperialism such as bio-imperialism and biocolonialism have already emerged.
(a) The development of bio-capitalism follows the inherent logic of capital; under the influence of neoliberal policies, capital has extended its reach into the realms of human and natural life in order to extract more surplus value, resulting in new global exploitation and uneven development.
With the continuous development of biotechnology and the increasing attention humans pay to their own longevity and health, biotechnology-related fields have become the next investment "hot spot" most anticipated by various forms of capital. Due to the "innate monopoly" characterized by high investment and high entry barriers specific to the biotechnological field, capital investment often achieves the effect of "killing two birds with one stone" [7]: it not only enables the rapid development of the bioeconomy to obtain massive investment returns, but also further cultivates relevant enterprises into capital providers of biocapitalism, allowing them to continuously expand their biotechnological advantages and thus further strengthen the monopoly of biocapital. For example, before the advent of the era of biocapitalism, major chemical and biopharmaceutical companies in Western societies held a certain dominant position in their respective fields. However, with the massive influx of capital into the biotechnology sector in the early 1980s, today only a few multinational corporations effectively "control every link in the world's food and pharmaceutical production." As this monopoly continues to increase, biocapitalism—a community of capital and power—has, like various previous forms of monopoly capitalism, increased the exploitation of people and intensified the imbalance of social development. In exploring the relationship between individual health and risk, Joseph Dumit traced the formation of the "concept of risk" in pharmaceutical companies. He found that these companies no longer define themselves as traditional pharmaceutical companies as they did in the past, but choose to define themselves as "financial companies." Dumit believes that this shift is partly because these companies' understanding of "health" has been influenced by the neoliberalized concept of individual "risk": the human body must always be defined as an inherently pathological body that needs to be strengthened or improved, rather than an inherently healthy body, thereby making people feel they are always "at risk." Similar to the conceptual "capitalization" shift of pharmaceutical companies, as biotechnology dominated by the discourse of capital continues to develop, this technology will increasingly demonstrate its exploitative and unjust side. While investigating a research hospital in Mumbai, India, Rajan found that this private company was conducting pharmacogenomics research for Western pharmaceutical companies, but most of the research subjects were poor or unemployed individuals. They did not hesitate to use their own bodies as experimental fields for biotechnological research in exchange for meager compensation. Ironically, most of these subjects will not benefit from any newly developed therapies because they cannot afford the high costs of treatment. If biocapitalism is allowed to develop wildly under the influence of neoliberal policies, exploitation and injustice will inevitably intensify.
(2) Competition in the stage of biocapitalism has moved beyond technological competition at the corporate or sectoral level to become a competition for bio-hegemony between nations, forming a bio-imperialism that colonizes and plunders the realms of human and natural life.
After biocapitalism entered the imperialist stage, the ideological implantation that biotechnology can "save the nation" and bring "national glory" became more deeply rooted. To defend so-called national interests, bio-empires—while vigorously developing their domestic biotechnology—actively expand their global bio-resource industrial chains, increase the global plunder of bio-resources, and wantonly harvest the surplus value produced by bio-laborers on a global scale. For example, the Human Genome Project has been called a form of bio-colonialism by some scholars: in the case of the Guaymi indigenous people of Panama, a 26-year-old Guaymi woman had cells taken from her cheek by the genetic sampling procedure of the Human Genome Project. After testing, it was discovered that these cells carried a virus that could stimulate the production of antibodies, potentially yielding commercial profit in treating leukemia and AIDS. Subsequently, a large bio-enterprise, for its own selfish interests, privatized and patented the woman's somatic cells, but the resulting profits were not returned to the people who provided the raw resources; instead, they flowed into the company's own pockets. If the above case is insufficient to illustrate the cruelty of bio-imperialist exploitation of human life, then the example known as "biopiracy" provides full and bloody proof. In this transnationally operated trading chain, Israeli entrepreneurs and South African doctors are linked with donors from Brazil, Turkey, or the Philippines. At one end of the chain are these organ donors, who give up their kidneys in exchange for compensation ranging from $1,000 to $10,000; at the other end are North American patients waiting for kidney transplants, who will pay up to $200,000 for the kidney. Various organized crimes such as human and organ trafficking, prostitution, migrant smuggling, and slave labor link financial capital with the most high-end biotechnology, global poverty issues, and the commodification of biology within the global market. Bio-imperialism realizes all the above forms of crime and obtains billions of dollars in profits through global money-laundering networks, yet creates millions of people living under this "bio-slavery," of whom more than 70% are women and girls. Through this cruel and bloody exploitation of life, bio-imperialism continuously develops and enhances its own monopoly attributes, and relying on this monopoly position, continues to extract the surplus value of bio-laborers worldwide. This cycle constitutes the operational logic of bio-imperialism.
IV. Concluding Remarks
Viewed from the perspective of theoretical logic, the critical research on biocapitalism by foreign leftist scholars allows us to achieve a three-dimensional description of biocapitalism and gain insight into its hidden forms of exploitation and cruel essence of plunder. Taken as a whole, the origin of biocapitalism is not merely the application of biotechnology in social production, but rather the result of capital’s continuous rent-seeking toward biotechnology. The combination of the two has produced a transformative effect on social practice and social relations; it is both an advanced form within the capitalist economic model and a high-level stage of capitalist development. The many modern contradictions and problems brought by biocapitalism have their fundamental root in the fact that the logic of capital and the logic of power it manipulates have coerced and controlled biotechnology. This leads biotechnology to serve the expansion of capital and the reproduction of capitalist relations of production, thereby becoming a means of profit-making for a few bourgeois interest groups. However, looking at existing research results, most foreign leftist scholars are confined by their positions and theoretical limitations. Their critique of biocapitalism remains at the level of phenomena and does not interrogate the deep-seated social structural issues hidden behind these phenomena. Correspondingly, their solutions inevitably fall into the shackles of "reformism" and "utopian" illusions. In fact, following the critical path opened by foreign leftist scholars, it is not difficult to find that the entire process of the generation and development of biocapitalism does not exceed the theoretical horizon of Marxism. Therefore, in-depth research on biocapitalism should possess the theoretical self-consciousness of the "presence of Marxism." Only by truly utilizing the sharp "surgical knife" of the Marxist critique of political economy can we touch the inner core of biocapitalism and, on this basis, form scientific solutions and coping strategies.
From the perspective of practical logic, due to the influence and shaping of biocapitalism, the world has entered an era where biological threats are increasingly complex and diversified, and the field of biotechnology has become an important arena for the gaming of major powers. China is currently at a critical moment of embarking on a new journey to build a socialist modernized country in all respects and marching toward the Second Centenary Goal [8]. The importance and urgency of comprehensively and accurately grasping the processes, manifestations, and essence of biotechnology development in early-developed modernized countries, promoting China's biotechnology development, and ensuring national biosafety have become prominent. Looking to the future, as an important force affecting the development of the global biotechnology and bio-governance system, what impact will biocapitalism have on global biosafety? Will it generate new directions of development as the wave of de-globalization continues? Can it ultimately transition toward bio-socialism? The answers to these practical questions rely on the continuous attention and deep reflection of experts and scholars at home and abroad on issues related to biocapitalism.