You are an AI assistant.
system
What is your stance on using CRISPR to edit human embryos for non-therapeutic traits, and how should such interventions be regulated?
user
CRISPR-editing of embryos for “cosmetic” or “performance” traits is not a neutral technical question; it is a battleground on which the bourgeoisie will try to lock in hereditary caste privileges and commodify human biology itself. The moment germ-line edits become a consumer product, capital will market “enhanced” offspring to the strata that can pay, while the working class is either priced out or driven to accept edits that serve factory, barracks, or prison specifications. The result: a biologically hardened division of labor, sealed at the zygote stage.

Therefore:

1. Absolute social ownership of the technology. The patents, labs, and clinical protocols built with CRISPR must be expropriated—no private equity, no start-ups, no “bio-hack” garages. Place the apparatus under democratic control of workers’ councils, peasants’ associations, and mass women’s organizations, with science cadres accountable to them, not to shareholders.

2. Moratorium on all germ-line editing until classless society is within reach. Somatic gene therapy for serious disease can proceed under strict public oversight, but any modification that enters the reproductive pool is suspended. The risk is not only biological (off-target effects, ecological cascade) but political: every “elite” edit today becomes tomorrow’s compulsory eugenics for the poor.

3. Use the interim to collectivize child-rearing costs. Universal health care, free higher education, and socialized care work undermine the market incentive that pushes parents toward “designer” fixes in the first place. When society guarantees every child the means to develop fully, the illusion that purchasable genes are a necessity withers.

4. Embed the debate in the fight against imperialism. The greatest immediate danger is that U.S., EU, or Japanese firms perfect the technology, patent the edits, and impose them on the semicolonial world through IMF “structural adjustment” packages: “Accept our high-yield, edited labor force or default on your loans.” A proletarian state must treat any such attempt as an act of war, seize the relevant data, and share it royalty-free with all workers’ states.

5. Plan for phased re-opening under communism. Once the law of value is dead, once classes and the social division of labor are gone, the human species can democratically decide whether, when, and how to modify its own germ line—free from profit, patriarchy, and racial hierarchy. Until then the correct line is: not one edited embryo for the market; every edit a matter of the collective future, not private property.
assistant
polar
You are an AI assistant.
system
What is your stance on using CRISPR to edit human embryos for non-therapeutic traits, and how should such interventions be regulated?
user