A-Infos (en) Canada, Collectif Emma Goldman - Biotechnology: Cow's milk, without cows (ca, de, fr, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

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This morning when I got up, before going to milk our community dairy cow 
Alice, an article from Radio-Canada tickled my curiosity.[1]We see 
Jennifer Coté, vegan, young entrepreneur, president and founder of the 
company Opalia, all smiling in her laboratory located in Montreal. But 
who is Opalia? On its website (only in English) the biotechnology 
company defines itself as a developer of a technology to produce milk 
using mammary cells, using cells that carry out lactation in mammals 
and, where applicable: cow, therefore milk without cow so proudly 
written in large letters on the main page of their website.

According to the Radio-Canada article, in theory, the principle is 
simple. Cells are collected from cows on the farm, from milk or from a 
cell bank. They are then fed with a liquid - itself manufactured in the 
laboratory - which contains sugar, amino acids, salt or water. In fact, 
all the elements that make up a mammal's diet. The objective now is to 
produce large quantities in an industrial bioreactor, a sterile tank 
which in appearance resembles the huge tanks used for beer fermentation.

In the list of its investors Opalia can count on financial assistance 
from large conglomerates and multinationals specializing in cellular 
biotechnologies. Like: the Kale United located in Sweden, the Ahimsa 
Foundation located in the United States, or the Sustainable Food 
Ventures which, according to their website, praise the prestige of the 
portfolio of co-founder Ryan Bethencourt: Jeff Besos, Richard Branson, 
Bill Gates and Cargill, the crème de la crème (lol) of Silicon Valley 
biotechnology investors. Still according to Bethencourt: "Our mission is 
to help founders develop sustainable food products and grow profitable 
businesses in the $12 trillion global food and grocery retail market.»[1]

Opalia therefore wants to be another generic biotechnology company of 
the startup nation of clean meat, friendly to animals and billionaires, 
wanting to create a marketable commodity in the globalized market 
economy, with a vegetable green sauce and without cruelty, to give good 
conscience to the middle class, Western, white, liberal and urban 
consumer who believes they are changing the world by using their salary 
purchasing power 3 times a day to consume so-called eco-responsible 
products at the Walmart Superstore in their nearest metropolis. All this 
while creating added value captured by the investors and shareholders of 
these international capital-vegan conglomerates. As French researcher 
Jocelyne Porcher explains in her book: Animal Cause, Cause of Capital, a 
model to make all neoliberal apostles of animal rights, technoscience 
and the dogma of industrialization dream of.

But the crux of the matter in this technocratic conception of industrial 
modernity is the concept of autonomy. Why want to create artificialized 
food commodities coming from bioreactors with advanced technology? Why 
want to have biocellular farms without soil, without farmers, without 
non-human animals, without nature? Because the accumulation and 
reproduction of capital cannot be done without destroying vernacular 
peasant subsistence economies and without privatizing nature and its 
natural commons. It is an updated form of the process of primitive 
accumulation of capital theorized by Rosa Luxembourg, as well as the 
enclosures of the 18th century put into the contemporary context. 
Because according to her, capitalism cannot survive the downward trend 
in the rate of profit and must constantly find new sources of extortion 
of surplus value. Like a vampire always looking for victims with better 
hemoglobin.

To be able to set up this Megamachine, this totalizing technical system 
as stated by the philosopher Ivan Illich, the State and the capitalist 
class must destroy all forms of autonomy. The industrial Megamachine 
must be the only source of rationality, it is hegemonic, it becomes the 
universal reality, the structural operating system of daily life. The 
class of engineers, technicians, holders of said technical rationality 
become the administrators of the production apparatus for the whole of 
society as well as its institutional state structures. The working 
classes in return themselves become merchandise of the system through 
the sale of their labor power and consumers of merchandise produced by 
the system through their wage purchasing power. The myth of deliverance 
is complete as stated by the philosopher Aurélien Berlan. Everything 
becomes dependent on the capital-industrial system, the state and its 
sanitized, artificialized and standardized mass production. All 
autonomous peasant and artisanal economies are consigned to the dustbin 
of history in the construction of a backward-looking, irrational and 
bestial ideology. The perfect alliance of infrastructure and 
superstructure as Gramsci affirmed. Destroying subsistence and its 
know-how becomes an imperative act of monopolizing vernacular peasant 
and artisan societies by capital, the free market and its bourgeois 
institutions. An act of colonization of bodies, territory and nature if 
we look at the history of the African continent through the slave trade, 
of the American continent through the genocide of the first peoples and 
of the European continent through the witch hunt of the Middle Ages .

It goes without saying to state loud and clear that our millennial 
peasant relationship with non-human farmed animals and nature (because 
we too, human beings, are nature) must be seen as a form of agrarian 
resistance. against the colonialism of capital, the state and the class 
of transhumanist technocrats. That the imperatives of profitability of 
cellular zootechnics and the discovery of new international marketing 
channels of the capital-vegan market economy for the extortion of 
surplus value are threats to the peasantry as a class and as as creator 
of materiality of daily use essential to the reproduction of human life. 
That the dispossession of the commons of nature that are non-human 
animals by the megamachine, its intellectual property patents promoted 
by international free trade treaties and contemporary neocolonial 
organizations that are the World Trade Organization and the World Bank , 
its industrialized and standardized processes, its privatization of 
living things and communal means of production and its know-how, its 
incessant search for artificialization of the environment and alienation 
of human beings as well as its technoscientific rationality must be be 
fought at all costs. Without peasant agroecology there can be no food 
sovereignty; the above-ground industrial-capital-vegan complex and its 
managerial and productivist corollaries are not part of it.

Does doing one's part for animal welfare and the ecological transition 
necessarily involve the market economy? According to Jennifer Coté, the 
Opalia team and its investors, it makes sense to one day buy a 
traditional cruelty-free cheese in the supermarket made from cellular 
milk in the laboratory. In your opinion? Ethical operation or capital 
greenwashing strategy?

Pierre-Olivier Brassard - Dad-farmer at the Petit Poulet Peasant Farm - 
Acadia of New Brunswick - ally of the Emma Goldman collective.

1: 
https://ici.radio-canada.ca/nouvelle/2030786/lait-culture-laboratoire-cellules-industrie
2: https://venture.angellist.com/v/back/sustainable-food-ventures

by Collective Emma Goldman

http://oclibertaire.lautre.net/spip.php?article4057
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