International competition under capitalism emphasizes reducing production time and prioritizing market-mediated monetary value over the material and usefulness of commodities. This system, driven by IP laws, strengthens monopolies, imposes scarcity, and benefits the financial and informational capital sectors, exacerbating inequalities and undermining genuine innovation and public good.

https://cpim.org/intellectual-property-knowledge-capital-and-labour/]//ETang

[…] Several justifications are provided for the need for intellectual property. Advocates argue that incentive is needed to encourage further effort; inventors deserve property in the fruits of their labour and intellectual property is important to ensure both natural right and efficiency. But for Marxists, there is nothing ‘natural’ about property. Property formation is an ideological and material process and there is always an attempt to obscure the political acts that produce property norms and property regimes. The power relations that organize property form(s) of public, private and commons in knowledge production are hidden in the legal details, which capital accesses from the nation state(s) through the efforts of lawyers and lobbyists. More recently the capitalist character of the contemporary narrative is under use for the justification of intellectual property. These claims include the benefits of introduction of markets into knowledge production; the requirement of private property in knowledge for efficient use of knowledge and information; ensuring more and better innovation through markets in knowledge and information; little stimulus would exist for innovation without intellectual property; innovators must be incentivized and rewarded to commercialize knowledge; innovators require private monopolies to obtain the return on investment; and that progress in science and technology depends on the existence of markets in knowledge supported by stronger IP. […] Thus, for Marxists there lies hidden the story of the commodification of knowledge and information in the intellectual property laws.[2] Historically, the production of knowledge has not taken place in the market, but rather in guilds, universities, religious bodies and state institutions. The production of knowledge was rewarded through patronage, prestige, prizes, or income tied to rank or status rather than to economic performance. In the Medieval world, knowledge was often interpreted as a gift from God, and for this reason ideas were seen as inappropriate objects of property. This changed through the rise of capitalism and possessive individualism. Patents and other forms of intellectual property rights are seen as legal devices in the service of the process of commodification of knowledge; in this case, royalties that can be defined as the market price for the right to use patented knowledge. Universities can sell and license their patents to corporations and establish external sources of revenue in the form of royalty payments. Knowledge as commodity can exist and acquire different commodity forms; Jessop (2007: 122-125) has argued that knowledge can circulate in various ways. Knowledge can circulate as intellectual commons. In this case knowledge has a non-commodity status especially if it is produced and distributed through a non-market mechanism (e.g. patronage). Knowledge is a fictitious commodity when it is enclosed through non-market mechanisms and circulated as private property within the market. Knowledge becomes a quasi-commodity when knowledge production (intellectual labour) is formally subsumed under capitalist control and competition. Knowledge becomes a real capitalist commodity when the real subsumption of intellectual labour takes place, i.e., when knowledge is subsumed under the capitalist labour process. Knowledge may also become a form of fictitious or fictive capital when revenue streams to knowledge producers (e.g. universities) are guaranteed by intellectual property rights. Marx himself foresaw under capitalism the advancement of enclosure of knowledge accelerating through the processes of primitive accumulation of capital as well as the dynamic of capital accumulation. Knowledge can circulate in various ways within and between social systems. Ample evidence exists of how through the processes of primitive accumulation of capital and the dynamic of capital accumulation, commodification of knowledge proceeded first in a slow and gradual way, and then rapidly under 20th-century capitalism. Personal and technological forms of surveillance in the production process are necessary elements of the capitalist economy (Fuchs 2012: 14). Commodification of knowledge is a process that is contributing to the increased surveillance of academic labour since this process is able to enhance corporations’ accumulation of capital in knowledge capitalism. Commodification of knowledge and the related integration between universities and market forces requires the direct as well as ideological control of employee behaviour within higher education institutions. Academic labour is increasingly getting subjected to the discipline and logic of accumulation in which monopoly, finance and informational capital are important actors. Evidence also exists of how even under capitalism progress in science and technology could occur without the creation of private property in knowledge and information. There exist mechanisms of government patronage, prizes and procurement to continue with the progress in production of knowledge (Mazzucato, 2014). Societies need not depend upon the introduction of markets in knowledge production. The markets for knowledge have been organized and provided social legitimacy in the capitalist society through the narrative that ‘knowledge produced for sale’ is efficient. The truth is that the fiction of ‘knowledge has to be produced as commodity’ allows monopoly capital to gain a foothold in the knowledge production and distribution process. […] The increasingly global reach of intellectual property law and the neo-liberal assumptions embedded in it raise many important issues that need to be analysed. The first issue is the skewed distributive effects of the TRIPs Agreement on ‘have’ and ‘have not’ nations. The TRIPs Agreement permits intellectual property exporting nations to erode their rights extraterritorially. The Agreement erodes historic notions of territoriality and sovereignty, and disadvantages those developing nations which have very little proprietorship in knowledge resources and few resources to pay for essential intellectual property-protected goods. The increasing global reach of intellectual property laws requires greater engagement with the challenge of formulation of strategies to protect a public domain that cannot be fully owned as intellectual property. The inequalities relating to the exploitation of intellectual property as a form of bio-colonialism or bio-piracy allow the developed nations to remove natural resources and discoveries out of developing nations as raw materials that can be manipulated and transformed into intellectual property with no recognition or economic benefit (see Keith Aoki 1998). Drahos and Braithwaite (2002) point out how the redistribution of intellectual property rights involves a transfer of knowledge assets from the intellectual commons into private interests, like media conglomerates and integrated life sciences corporations, rather than individual scientists and authors. The effect of this is to raise levels of private monopolistic power to dangerous global heights, at a time when states, which have been weakened by the forces of globalization, have a lesser capacity to protect their citizens from the consequences of the exercise of such power. These concerns are closely connected to the issue of the changing balance between protecting knowledge, innovation and creativity as private property versus disseminating it widely in for public use. The tension between these two can be captured in the concept of the ‘public domain’, or sometimes, the ‘intellectual commons’ or ‘knowledge commons’, which denotes areas of social life where public access is privileged over intellectual property rights. Because the expanded global reach of intellectual property protection threatens access to knowledge commons, free speech and democratic participation in the process of intellectual labour is being made to appear as capital’s own process, and the capitalist is being designated as the ‘legitimate’ owner of knowledge and information. As the owner of means of production used within the production of knowledge and the purchaser of labour power, capital is effectively becoming the manager of the processes of knowledge production. ‘Capital’ for Marxists refers to a social relation, namely that of waged labour employed in the production of commodities to be sold for a profit. With the ever-increasing penetration of the capital relation into knowledge production, intellectual property is actually creating a social possibility space for capital’s expansion. Intellectual property has a central role in the neo-liberal project. A capitalist economy must expand continually if it is not to collapse, a consequence of the dynamics of self-interested investment upon which it depends. The dynamics of a capitalist economy and the production of profit are now far more dependent upon the spread and intensity of capital in the field of production of knowledge. Today, IP is an important instrument of primitive accumulation in the hands of capital as it has allowed formal and real subsumption of all types of knowledge production throughout the world. Capital is excluding and displacing its costs to spaces such as the universities of both North and South. In the field of knowledge production, the process of formal subsumption of intellectual labour to capital includes the establishment of the wage labour relation. Universities are a terrain of contested development. In the publicly funded higher education institutions, academics are beginning to oppose the introduction of principles of new public management-intellectual technology of primitive accumulation. Academics are opposing the introduction of stronger intellectual property rights. […] Knowledge is a public good not only in terms of economic benefit but also in terms of the moral sense. Scientific knowledge is not only a public good which has characteristics of a non-rivalrous and non-exclusionary nature, but it is also an inexhaustible resource. Scientific knowledge can be put to infinite uses. Generic knowledge, be it scientific or technological knowledge, is not an asset that has limited specific use but is an asset with the characteristics of fungibility. Generic artefacts of knowledge have the potential of multiple meanings. New meanings of generic knowledge are possible. Science is the activity of manipulating nature with the use of conceptual machines, the study of technology and machinery can reveal facts of science just as the study of commodity reveals the nature of value and abstract labour. Capital is trying to separate head and hand. Intellectual property widens the separation of head and hand. Technology reveals the active relation of man to nature, the direct process of the production of his life, and thereby also lays bare the process of the production of the social relations of his life, and of the mental conceptions that flow from those relations. The dynamics of rent generation in global value chains lays bare this separation. Today, trans-national capital originating from the United States, Europe and Japan controls intellectual property and uses it for surplus extraction from all over the world. Science and technology give capital a power of expansion which is independent of the given magnitude of the capital actually functioning. There is a clear parallel between scientific abstractions, concepts and conceptual systems on the one side and value as the manifestation of abstract labour on the other. The intellectual property system is imposing on science the rule of capital. Science is the cognition of necessity. For Marxists, socialism is recognition of necessity. Knowledge is liberation. Capital envisages for knowledge commons a role in the process of capital accumulation. Socialism envisages knowledge commons for transformation. Science is for transformation. Science is not for domination. Capital is trying to dominate humanity as well as nature. Monopoly over knowledge is a threat to democracy, public interest and progress – scientific, technological and economic. Even under capitalism, intellectual property monopolies are undermining social and scientific progress. For Marxists, class struggle starts with the resistance against immediate threats arising out of the strengthening of the property form and the imposition of the value form of knowledge production for market-based exchange. Struggles being undertaken to save and protect the space for social, scientific and technological progress need to be given importance. Production of knowledge for use towards the advancement of public interest, social progress and democracy is the integral goal of socialism. When science is in the process of being subsumed to capital the challenge of protection of public interest in science requires struggle against the regressive trend of strengthening of intellectual property. For the achievement of counter-hegemony for social transformation Marxists must actively contribute to the struggle for transformative science which promotes the value form in which reflexivity, broadening of space for socially responsible innovations, participation, self-organization and public scrutiny and change in class correlation to alter the balance in favour of public interest, social progress and democracy are equally well counted. Ambiguity in the definitions of ‘knowledge’ and ‘information’ may cause misunderstanding if the meanings of these terms are not distinguished. The term ‘knowledge’ implies the satisfaction of three conditions: a belief, a truth and a justification condition. Information understood ‘as data transmitted from a sender to a receiver’ does not have to satisfy these three conditions. Thus, information refers to such objects as databases (lists and statistics) and downloadable files (e.g. songs in mp3 format). Information can be treated as a sub-category of knowledge. Both information and knowledge can be commodified. It can be added that objects such as ‘datasets’, have to be activated and used by those who are able, partly due to their knowledge, to interpret and process. When understood this way, knowledge refers to something people possess, i.e., a cognitive capacity, and information refers to something passive that needs to be interpreted by those who have a cognitive capacity. However, it would not be incorrect to suggest that information matters. Cognitive capacity involves access to information. [2] In Marxian terms, knowledge becomes a commodity only under certain relations, i.e., what counts as a commodity is socially determined. Commodification of knowledge in itself is a complex process. The capitalist commodification process consists of the following elements: privatization (exclusive right to control an object), alienability (an object can be detached from its seller), individuation (separating an object from its context via legal/material boundaries), abstraction (assimilation of a specificity of an object to a broader type), valuation (monetization), displacement (concealing involved social relations). Under capitalism the labour process is subjected to competition that implies that there is pressure to reduce the time during which commodities are produced and how long it takes to realize the surplus value that commodities imply; commodities’ market-mediated monetary value for the seller gains more importance in relation to commodities’ use value than their material and/or symbolic usefulness to the purchaser. In a capitalist market economy, only those commodities are produced for markets that have exchange value.