Community Bio Labs as the Foundation of the Solidarity Bioeconomy
Solidarity Bioeconomy: Part 2
The foreword of the book, No More Police: A Case for Abolition was written by Black Visions. They featured a quote by Ruth Wilson Gilmore that really stuck out to me.
“Abolition is about presence, not absence. It’s about building life-affirming institutions.”
Black Visions included that in the foreword in the context of the time they spent freedom-dreaming a plan for a new Department of Public Safety. The Yes 4 Minneapolis campaign operationalized the plan, which didn’t succeed. This effort to radically reimagine safety in our society is radical and rooted in the lived experience of Black people who have been survivors of state-sanctioned and interpersonal violence. These efforts are the canaries in the coal mine for climate change. The brutality brought upon Black and other marginalized peoples will become more inclusive in nature as the climate crisis worsens. This state of affairs is why abolition is so appealing to me.
Truthout published an excerpt from No More Police, titled Reimagining the Commons Is One Step Toward a Future Without Police. According to the authors Mariame Kaba and Andrea J. Ritchie:
“Commoning” is about affirming humanity, eliminating inequality and social hierarchies, and promoting shared well-being and greater safety. Police are the antithesis of the commons: their original and continuing role is to police who gets what and when, all towards the purpose of enabling wealth accumulation.”
They posit that the abolition of policing is about building a new world centered around “the commons”. They go on to describe the commons as “the concept of collective resources for the collective good, while “commoning” has come to describe the process and practice of coming together to cultivate and manage common resources”. I’ve been thinking a lot about commoning ever since. In terms of commoning, the community bio community has done a lot of work towards this goal.
Many of us in the synthetic biology community are already acquainted with community biology labs. I’ll give a brief description for those unaware. Just like the name says, these are community laboratories seeking to make the means of biological knowledge production accessible to the public. These labs aren’t fully distributed yet. Let's advocate for these institutions to be in every city, like a public library. Depending on your city, articulating community labs as a life-affirming institution and aligning ourselves with abolitionists is a concrete step forward—another quote from the Truthout article.
“Defunding police and refunding the commons would generate resources and create space for community programs to grow and practice nonpolice and non-carceral responses to crisis. It will also allow for investment in an ecosystem of preventive and respite care to stop crises from happening in the first place. Reimagining and rebuilding the commons is thus a critical step toward creating futures without policing.”
Even as a step in the right direction, community labs (at least in the US) are limited by the 501(c)3 structure. In his extensive article, Building Resilient Organizations: Toward Joy and Durable Power in a Time of Crisis, for Non-profit Quarterly, Maurice Mitchell, the national director for the Working Families Party, described the 501(c)3 non-profits as follows:
“The structural and ideological limitations of 501(c)3 non-profits in terms of their subservience to funding sources and resulting incompatibility with power building”
Mitchell’s mention of this was not unfounded. Community labs generally don’t label themselves as professional social justice organizations but face the same issue quoted above. They are, in general, unfunded. Unfunded despite the outsized potential good they could have on the populace (The unfunded framing come from Rolando Perez). Genspace, an early community bio lab, has produced several successful corporations from projects started at their labs. These corporations that originate in community labs can form corporate partnerships with the labs, providing a source of funding. Translating community lab projects into enterprises is a viable way to provide funding to community labs. Rather than the standard corporate models, projects should be formed into multi-stakeholder cooperatives. These cooperatives should have the community labs as stakeholders and dividend recipients. This would anchor the cooperatives to their communities and provide a funding source for community labs.
Making cooperatives a viable method to develop technology will require an ecosystem like the robust ecosystem for unicorn companies. If you are starting a would-be unicorn company, you have many options, to begin with. Depending on your age, you could apply for a Fellowship with a 21st-century Usian fascist. If you are fortunate enough to have validated technology in an academic setting, your university likely has resources to help you. There is also a whole founder-led biotech movement to make this process easier. If you want to start a company launched from Ginkgo’s platform, there is Ferment. Overall, the synthetic biology community IS building an ecosystem where only one solution thrives: unicorn companies. Individuals and organizations should step up and demand more. It need not be either/or. Many institutions in the existing ecosystem could step up and become anchor institutions for a cooperative ecosystem.
To make cooperatives (and employee ownership more broadly) more viable, we must start experimenting with these structures. For this, we need ecosystem builders in every city working on this. Particularly those with community labs; if you are a member of one with some free time, we can link on this. I need those in positions of influence and/or resources to seriously and critically reevaluate your expectations for how synthetic biology should be developed. How can you see, acknowledge, and value the diverse solutions that evolved in the greater non-human world yet believe they can all be developed and implemented with the same pathway? You are welcome in this movement, but you’ve got to step up! Ginkgo is already working on implementing worker-ownership, and more companies should follow their lead. Lastly, community labs need to begin discussing these ideas and seeing how their communities feel about them. See if there would be any projects you think a cooperative model would be a desirable path for, and let's get to work.
The next post will discuss cooperatives, limited cooperative associations, and employee-ownership.