The proliferation of patents is a tool of cognitive capitalism that necessitates the privatization of social services, resulting in the subjugation of those in the Global South

Enclosures makes reference to a decisive moment in the social and economic history of England: the final eradication in the eighteenth century of customary rights that bore on the use of communal land, the “commons.” These lands were “enclosed”—that is to say, appropriated in an exclusive manner by their legal owners—and that with tragic consequences, because use of the commons was essential to the life of peasant communities. A frightening number of people were stripped of all means of subsistence. “The Tragedy of the Commons” is, moreover, the title of a widely read essay that was published in 1968, but its author, Garrett Hardin, misappropriates the association between the destruction of the commons and tragedy. The tragedy is in fact supposed to be the overexploitation (postulated by Harding) of the communal lands themselves, linked to the fact that each user pursued his self-interest without taking into account the fact that the outcome of this self-interest would be the impoverishment of everyone. This fable evidently met with great success, as it allowed not only the enclosures to be legitimated as “unfortunately necessary” but with them the ensemble of privatizations of what had been of the order of collective management: the interest of private property owners is also selfish but it pushes them to turn a profit on their capital, to improve their returns, the increase productivity. Another classic narrative—that of [Karl] Marx—associates the expropriation of the commons with what he calls the “primitive accumulation” of capital.3 The great mass of the poor, now stripped of any attachment, will be mercilessly exploited by the nascent industries, because there is no need to take into account the reproduction of labor power: the poor can collapse on the job as there will always be others. In this sense, the enclosures prepare the capitalist appropriation of the labor of those who, deprived of their means of life, will be reduced to being nothing but their labor power. However, Marx did not celebrate this expropriation in the manner in which he celebrates the destruction of the guilds and of the ensemble of what attaches humans to traditions and ways of life: like the elimination of an old order, an elimination which the future socialism will be indebted to capitalism for. Perhaps it is because of the pitiless brutality of the operation, or because what was destroyed was a form of “primitive communism,” bringing resources and means into common use, the fact remains that he saw in it a “theft,” or the destruction of the right of the poor to ensure their subsistence. If, today, the reference to enclosures matters, it is because the contemporary mode of extension of capitalism has given it all its actuality. The privatization of resources that are simply essential to survival, such as water, is the order of the day, as well as that of those institutions which, in our countries, had been considered as ensuring a human right, like education. Not that the management of water has not been a source of profit, and that capitalism hasn’t largely profited from the production of well-trained and disciplined workers. What has changed is that henceforth it is a matter of direct appropriation, under the sign of the privatization of what were public services. And privatization doesn’t stop there. The reference to enclosures is very directly activated by this “knowledge economy” to which I have already alluded, because what the latter promotes is nothing other than the disappearance of the line separating public and private research and the direct appropriation of what had, until now, benefited from a (relative) autonomy. The production of knowledge today is considered as a stake that is too important to allow this minimal autonomy to researchers, who are now subjected to the imperative to establish partnerships with industry, to define acquiring a patent as the desirable success par excellent, and the creation of “spin-offs” as the glorious dream. All that with public money, which gets sucked up into multiple spin-offs that fail, while those that succeed will be purchased, without too much risk, together with their patents, by one or another consortium. In short, the distribution between what the state lets capitalism do and what capitalism gets the state to do has changed. The state lets capitalism appropriate what was defined as falling within from the public domain, and capitalism gets the state to endorse the sacred task of having to hunt down those who infringe the now sacrosanct right to intellectual property—a right that extends over practically everything, from the living thing to knowledges previously defined as freely accessible to all their users. A right to which WTO [World Trade Organization] intends to subject the entire planet, in the name of the defense of innovation. From the conceptual point of view, the fact that in the name of competition workers are exploited today with a rare intensity, without even talking about the sweatshops reserved for poor countries, or about the appearance in our countries of “poor workers” who aren’t capable of making ends meet on their salaries, doesn’t count for much. But above all, as in every theater of concepts, we are functioning here in the long, even the indefinite, term.