IPR’s foundational to capitalism---it’s mutually exclusive.

In an introductory note to the Results of the Immediate Process of Production, Ernst Mandel highlights Marx’s insight that “under capitalism, labour should not be seen as manual labour only, but as the combined or collective labour potential […] of all those whose labour is indispensable to produce the final product” (Mandel, 1976, p. 945); this reinforces both the social character of production and the metabolic dimension of its parts, which also implies that intellectual labour is embedded in this process. Understanding this basis seems crucial to an adequate treatment of intellectual property—because knowledge and information are always embedded in social relations of production as both an input and output (as also Kenneth Arrow noticed, see infra). When its formal subsumption gives way to real subsumption, then its character changes because its universal character within social property relations entails a drastically more significant pressure of universal capitalist legality of commodification. Economic laws are not set in stone because they merely represent the tendency (legality), δύναμις, and logic of a given existing mode of production; thus, “economic categories belonging to earlier epochs of production acquire a specifically different, historical character on the basis of the capitalist mode of production” (Marx, 1988, p. 27). Knowledge is not simply an economic category, but its genesis, development, and constant transformation are the product of ontological relations of production and, as such, attain particular concrete characters. Concrete knowledge dialectically becomes an imperative means for shaping, forming, and transforming social material relations. It is in this sense that one must understand Marx’s assertion: “The mode of production of material life determines the social, political and intellectual process of life in general. It is not the consciousness of people that determines their being, but quite the opposite, it is their social being that determines their consciousness” (Marx, 1961, p. 8f).

When knowledge becomes commodified, then its particular relations coincide with the universal capitalist commodification. It goes without saying that knowledge is neither intrinsically a commodity nor that all knowledge relations are subjected to real subsumption by capital. It is those social relations of knowledge that, when subjected to capitalist imperatives, underwent (and conversely are still undergoing) a transformation from formal to real subsumption. Real subsumption imposes the necessity of privatisation of intellectual appropriation (property). It is not the division of labour in-itself that affords knowledge its private character; on the contrary, this process of socialisation presupposes and results in an accentuation of the social development and exchange of knowledge. The dependency and interdependency of knowledge corresponding to the unfolding of social relations appear as its general ontological condition. It is thus the process of privatisation itself, the imposition of privatisation as a social-ontological necessity, that metamorphoses intellectual property into a private existence, providing a particular and contradictory existence to the production and appropriation of knowledge.