Tyfield 10

Neoliberalism emerged as the dominant political force in the Global North around 1980, in the context of the crisis of the Keynesian welfare/warfare state model of capitalism (see Birch and Mykhnenko; Jessop, this volume). Two points must be noted in order to understand the central role of IPRs in the neoliberal project, relating to the two aspects of neoliberalism as both a political project to restructure the global economy and a political ideology providing a unifying vision for disparate political interests. First, regarding the global economic restructuring, we must first consider the nature of the political economic crisis from which neoliberalism emerged triumphant. 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 must both be understood as being dependent upon the spread and intensity of capital in any given society. Only in this way can we explain how the apparent exchange of equivalents can produce a profit – a surplus of monetary value at the level of the economy as a whole (Fine and Saad-Filho 2004). ‘Capital’ here refers to a social relation, namely that of waged labour employed in the production of commodities to be sold for a profit. The ever-increasing penetration of the capital relation into a society is only possible given political economic settlements (established through political struggle) that create a social possibility space for capital’s expansion by excluding and displacing its costs to other spaces (such as the Global South) and times (that is, the future) (Jessop 2000). Periods of ‘normal’ growth are merely those in which political acceptance for a given round of capital penetration into society has already been broadly established through prior struggle. Yet, conversely, the inexorable growth of a capitalist economy entails that it must, in time, come to push at these very political boundaries that have protected it, with a crisis of profitability that elicits capitalist political efforts to expand these boundaries yet deeper into social life. This includes the private appropriation of resources previously held in common so that these can be exploited for profit, a process called ‘primitive accumulation’ (Marx 1999; Arrighi 1994; Harvey 2003) that Lohmann illustrates in relation to carbon trading in the next chapter. Finance plays a crucial role in this process (see Shaoul, this volume). For example, since the 1970s crisis of industrial profitability, investment has been redirected increasingly to the financial sector, which promised higher profits. The resultant ‘financialization’ of the economy concentrates both economic and political power in the hands of finance, allowing it both to enforce the radical restructuring of the economy in order to return industries to profitability (in the face of labour unrest) and to change economic regulation in order to incubate new industries and opportunities for profit. Which social spheres are targeted for the further expansion of capital is clearly a contingent matter of what seems most promising at the time, particularly to this newly dominant financial sector (see Lohmann, this volume). It is also a matter of political power as regards what sectors of the society could be forced to accept marketization, conditioned by the existing penetration of capital. In the case of the neoliberal project, the opportunities for expansion of capital were two-fold (cf. Jessop, this volume, on time-space distantiation and compression). First, and most obviously, capitalist relations of production could spread extensively to societies as yet not fully integrated into the global capitalist market, as per globalization. Second, however, the intensity of the capital relation in societies whose economic relations were already dominated by capital could also increase through subsuming further social practices. It is this latter process in particular that may be summarized under the heading of the KBE regarding the marketization of knowledge production. This can be seen in two different ways. First, with the maturity of existing technologically advanced industries, capital tends to search out new investment possibilities, as revealed by the contemporaneous progress of both science and technology. These new technologies afford manipulation of material reality in novel ways in order to create profitable commodities and thus open up an entirely new sphere of social reality into which capital can expand (Arrighi 2005: 35–7). The two novel technologies of greatest significance in the neoliberal age have clearly been information and communication technologies (ICTs) and biotechnology. ICTs are obviously related to a knowledge economy, allowing for the significant growth of labour that is dependent on information manipulation and technical knowledge, as well as facilitating global production networks and ‘flexible’ production processes. Biotech has yet to penetrate the economy to the same extent, but it is also implicated because it is exceptional in the level of scientific sophistication it presupposes as a factor directly involved in the innovation of new products. Second, the Keynesian period had already also seen the expansion of capital relations not only into industry but also into the ‘culture industries’ (Adorno 2000), with oligopolies controlling all major cultural outputs. The intensification of capital in these societies thus had to extend into spheres of social life, held in common to date, even more removed from the daily material reproduction of society. Expansion into the relations of production of knowledge has obvious complementarities with other tendencies of the growth of the economy. The connection between neoliberalism and the KBE, however, goes beyond this. For, third, neoliberalism as an ideology also has particular conceptual resonance with the drive to privatize and marketize the creation of scientific knowledge (Mirowski 2008). Neoliberal ideology, following Hayek, is based on the analysis of the market not merely as the most efficient coordination mechanism for economic activity. Rather it is this because it is also the best mechanism for the optimal societal aggregation of the limited information of individual market participants, while maximizing human (negative) liberty. The market is thus not merely an economic phenomenon but also, and primarily, an epistemic one, necessarily trumping the decisionmaking capabilities of government, that is, decisions based on the (similarly) limited information available to the individuals in positions of authority. A central concept of neoliberal political ideology is thus the ‘marketplace of ideas’ as Miller and Birch and Tickell demonstrate in the preceding chapters. The phrase has two interrelated connotations. On the one hand, it signifies that the primary virtues of the market are epistemic and that the knowledgeable governance of society should be left to the market. On the other, it also privileges a conception of science, and indeed society, in which ideas should compete with each other in a proper market. In these two respects, then, neoliberalism has been centrally concerned with the marketization of the production of knowledge on a global (or ‘universal’) scale. For functioning capitalist commodity markets to be possible, however, private property rights must first be instituted in that resource – that is, IPRs for markets of knowledge. In the present case, all these various trends converged in the ‘globalized construction of knowledge scarcity’ (May 2006: 53) that is the TRIPs agreement.