Joao Hermeto

The fact that intellectual property theory overlooks the materiality of intellectual appropriation, production, and reproduction relegates it to a metaphysical dimension. This is particularly dangerous because the private appropriation of intellectual practice and its results directly impact the lives of virtually all people worldwide. On the one hand, intellectual property(private) regulates social behaviour and limits its expediency within very rigid borders and scope of action; on the other, the control capitalist corporations exert over it severely limits social and individual possibilities to actively and consciously intervene in the transformation and organisation of society, which is relegated to the same corporations within a negative feedback loop. Capitalist neoliberal tactics have been paramount to the acceleration of this process.

While the third chapter addresses Hegel’s notion of intellectual property, the appendix deepens the analysis of the Philosophy of Right. The aim of this endeavour is to provide a more thorough exegesis of vital categories developed by Hegel, which are crucial to understanding Hegel’s concepts of property and intellectual property. Not only are the categories of right, free will, property, and contract elucidated, but the notion of private property appears fundamental to Hegel’s idea of freedom. While Chap. 3 revealed the paradoxical character of intellectual property, the appendix’s investigation of alienation as a Hegelian necessary and positive moment of freedom provides concrete contour to this issue that, until today, is paramount to the capitalist notion of private property and freedom.

The social “tectonic plates” are moving at unparalleled speed, causing worldwide political-economic rearrangements. Chapter 1 gives an overview of these seismic events to situate the transformations of social knowledge production within a broader historical context. Bearing this in mind, it navigates with a bird’s eye perspective the main contents of the book. First, it critically analyses contemporary intellectual property theory and how it reflects influential epistemological considerations. Then, it develops a historical blueprint of how knowledge became the object of disputes over privatisation. Additionally, it examines three philosophical perspectives to explore scopes of legitimacy beyond the immediacy of the present. Finally, it unpacks how the privatisation of knowledge, catalysed by neoliberal tactics, ubiquitously impacts present-day social relations at all levels.

The privatisation of knowledge is the culmination of a long and treacherous path. Its twists and turns were already present in Italian City-States and British monarchical rule. As capitalism developed, the control over exclusive private property of the means of production presupposed restricting and subsuming knowledge under the capitalist economic imperatives. Diverse efforts to establish complete control were attempted, but only in the 1990s did intellectual appropriation achieve a comprehensive private character. This historical development often attains philosophical validity. However, those frameworks are not indisputable in-themselves. For this reason, notions of intellectual property under Locke, Kant, and Hegel are examined to provide some more depth to discussions and rationalisations of intellectual property and its privatisation.

Across the board, intellectual property theory considers intellectual appropriation [to be] a metaphysical endeavour. The underlying religious character of this assumption is remarkable, for it relegates objective social relations of and for power to transcendental activities. The private power obtained by capitalist companies is downplayed. A belief that regulations and reforms would transform such a private system of power and control to suit the needs of societies circularly arises from theological expectations, mystifying social reality. The justifications that permeate this mystical practice are grounded in a metaphysical epistemological commitment. However, this is not the monopoly of intellectual property theory but, as shown, is also an integral part of renowned and scientifically accepted epistemological models.

The extraordinary transformation that the human intellect has been enduring due to privatisation is complemented by a remarkable mutation of collective memory. Social practices that have, through most part of human history, been part of collective efforts are now subdued under the shackles of capital. Because knowledge is not something metaphysical but a material living aspect of the social being, its retraction from the social into a private sphere simultaneously means its (at least partial) amputation. As intellectual property(private) is presented as the pinnacle of social development, its concrete socio-material dimensions are blurred, and intellectual activity is reduced to metaphysics. Although knowledge that is always social has been taken hostage by capitalist power, theoretical discourse idealistically misrepresents this process.

This book argues that the private appropriation of human knowledge through intellectual property gives rise to power relations, which colonise the collective mind as well as individual minds. In so doing these power relations destroy the social fabric necessary for producing and reproducing knowledge. Besides the direct impact on political-economic relations, the privatisation of knowledge distresses collective memory. The book concludes that although individual, social, and collective memories can only exist in tandem, the atrophy of the social and collective dimensions of the mind results in a sort of social dementia. The Privatisation of Knowledge is essential reading for all scholars and researchers of economic philosophy. It is also ideal for researchers of Marxian social science.

Knowledge cannot be simply discussed from a metaphysical perspective. In a time in which many authors push forward and normalise the term knowledge-based economy (KBE), it is imperative to investigate its concrete sides of knowledge production and distribution. While knowledge is being unceasingly privatised, intellectual property theory takes this fact for granted and proposes multiple forms to accommodate the paradoxical situation between social knowledge production and private appropriation of knowledge. This paradoxical condition deriving from intellectual private property relations within the capitalist mode of production also has the crucial function of enabling and justifying contemporary capitalist power relations. Hitherto, virtually all theories of intellectual property have assumed what they need to explain; thus, a Marxist critical assessment of it in which capitalist relations are exposed from a historical materialist perspective has been neglected. Researching this topic unveils the possibility of a very multidimensional scope, which presents not only a broad range of mainstream analyses of intellectual property but also some historical examinations, the critique of political economy, the political economy of media, some indigenous and African perspectives, different studies on the development of thought, ideas, and cognition, and much more. Insofar as it contains such multiple perspectives, it strives to present the totality of intellectual property within the capitalist mode of production instead of focusing on the phenomenological moments of copyright, trademark, patents, etc. Thus, it unveils the dialectics of capitalist relations and power that enforces and necessitates intellectual property as the privatisation of knowledge, while the production of knowledge presupposes a constant collective and social development which cannot be reduced to privatisation.

The intellectual property system has become universal, imposing homogenisation pressure on knowledge production, subordinated to capitalist dominance. The existing contradictions become more accentuated, and further antagonisms emerge as capital concentration reaches new heights. Social rule increasingly depends on a sphere of appearances to sustain its legitimacy. With digitalisation, imperialist capitalism, characterised by the fusion of productive and banking capital with the capitalist state, engulfs the existing propaganda apparatus of marketing and surveillance into capitalist rule. From its original function to render capitalism exploitation amenable by shaping perception, it becomes a locus of surplus-value extraction. This industry depends on a blurred structure of vast private control over knowledge and the means of knowledge, privately appropriating human intellect and data.

This final chapter establishes a point of contact with the book’s findings connecting multiple dimensions, thus creating a single thread. The developed notion of totality does not have the pretension to exhaust the topic but simply to forego any claim imposing one-dimensionality into intellectual property as a sufficient condition for its understanding. While intellectual property theory has operated on the realm of metaphysics; in reality, knowledge is not something abstract, independent and metaphysical but a crucial dimension of material life and simultaneously a vital condition for its transformation. While metaphysical fetishism acritically endows validity to private appropriation of knowledge, the high stakes of knowledge production impose the need for an understanding beyond this simplistic worldview.

The third chapter deals with a question that is usually considered philosophical; however, it is crucial for everyday life and the social determinations involving economics and politics. Among most schools of thought, the study of the being—ontology—has been widely regarded as a branch of metaphysics. Both the critique of political economy and the study of the social being have revealed that existence must not be considered from a metaphysical standpoint—thus rigid, abstract, eternal—but as a movement, a process, a constant transformation. Following this method, knowledge production must be understood as a product of two interchangeable movements. The first unveils the historical emergence of knowledge; the second exposes the existing contemporary conditions for its production and reproduction.

Chapter 1 provides a roadmap to the book’s central ideas and an overview of the main topics discussed. Moreover, it also situates intellectual property within a contemporary dimension. For instance, the material conditions of knowledge production endure a transformation as digitalisation distresses existing social property relations. However, the effects of intellectual property do not remain confined within the digital economy. Instead, the privatisation of knowledge by means of intellectual property comprises multiple industrial sectors. This process accentuates an existing antagonistic contradiction of the capitalist mode of production, namely, the social character of production and its private appropriation. Additionally, this chapter brings awareness to the qualitative difference between the method of investigation based on dialectical materialism and intellectual property theories.

In Chap. 2, the common association of intellectual property and the abstract right is challenged. When considered from the material perspective of knowledge production, metaphysics no longer appears to be a suitable means to understand intellectual appropriation. Unlike mainstream theory based on neoclassical economics, the dialectical materialist method contextualises the heterogeneous existences of intellectual property in different and antagonistic social property relations. What is at stake is the control over the appropriation of social surplus labour, which in capitalism gains the specific form of surplus-value. While for most part of history control of intellectual means occurred simultaneously with the control of material production, the destruction of the value of knowledge production created a new compulsion to control intellectual appropriation directly.

The Paradox of Intellectual Property in Capitalism is an innovative book that comprehensively discusses and analyses intellectual property under capitalistic social conditions and relations. It not only addresses some historical developments of intellectual property but also brings to the fore the very notion of what knowledge is, knowledge creation, and knowledge production and appropriation within a Marxist framework. Nonetheless, the adopted approach pays heed to multiple fields of knowledge, providing rich discussions that facilitate the understanding of actual social totality in which capitalism, knowledge production and appropriation, and the struggles of appropriation mutually reinforce each other, although not devoid of antagonisms and contradictions. In light of contemporary capitalism, the transformations that social property relations are undergoing must be scrutinised – such as those brought about by the development of digitalisation and the convergence between big pharma and tech giants. What are the conditions of intellectual property creation today? What theoretical assumptions does it make? Under what social relations is intellectual property produced? Throughout, the emphasis is not on individual cases or symptoms but on the overarching logic: the logic of capitalism as revealed in intellectual property.