Marx K - Michigan 2024 KLAB

Capitalism K---K Lab 2024
Notes
Capitalism K from the Marx 1AC evidence K Lab (we) put out in Wave 1, plus some backfiles. Yay!
Thanks to Lab Leader Sydney Pasquinelli for most of the topic-specific cards in this file!
For links:
CFMP put out a supplement with some---“K - Updates - CFMP”
K Lab (us) also put out a supplement with links to hopefully most of the aff scenarios in the dropbox---“Racial Capitalism Links Supplement”
Organized by yours truly (Max) (again)
Topshelf vs. Policy Affs---1NC
ToP---IP Contradiction---1NC
Intellectual Property is founded upon an Inherent Contradiction between Social Production and Private Appropriation, Solidifying Capitalism in the 21st Century and Exposing its Inequalities
Hermeto, 2024 (João Romeiro Hermeto, Department of Humanistic Studies, University of Pavia, Italy. The Paradox of Intellectual Property in Capitalism (book), accessed through libgen / spp)
According to the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), a not inconsiderable portion of the US-American economy revolves around intellectual property(private), representing 7.8 trillion dollars of the 2019 GDP (Toole et al., 2022, p. 3). According to the study, US-American industries accounted for 41% of the economic endeavours and comprised 63 million or 44% labour positions. “Output in the IP-intensive industries grew at roughly the same rate as the entire domestic economy during the previous five years, with the exception of the copyright-intensive industries, where output grew at a faster rate than the domestic economy” (Toole et al., 2022, p. iii). The report also shows a distribution of industrial sectors which are intellectual property(private)-intensive: manufacturing; wholesale and retail trade; information; finance, insurance, real estate, and leasing; technical, management and administrative professional services; education and health care services; and arts, entertainment and recreation (Toole et al., 2022, p. 6). Still from the USPTO, a 2022 economic note states: “In 2019, of the 103 industries identified as commodity-exporting industries, 76 were IP-intensive. These 76 industries accounted for $1.31 trillion or 79% of all U.S. commodity exports in 2019. In fact, 18 “of the 20 top exporting industries were found to intensively use intellectual property” (‘Exports and Imports by U.S. IP-Intensive Industries’, 2022). Therefore, it is fundamental to recognise that societies are undergoing at least a phenomenological change in social property relations. However, how much and in which ways does this transformation impact social relations? Which existential conditions remain the same, which are metamorphosing, and which are being dissolved?”
The ongoing artificial intelligence (AI) “revolution” is catalysing this process, and these questions can no longer be avoided. With AI making many wage labour positions redundant, with science being generally applied to production, social relations based on private property attain a qualitative new paradoxical paradigm.1 Private appropriation constantly denotes an anachronic social condition, and power relations lose their ontological determinations. The contradiction between social production and private appropriation becomes so accentuated that complementary power and coercion systems must be implemented to sustain the capitalist mode of production. Going beyond such social arrangements based on domination is hence not only a utopia but also a necessary condition. Forcing old structures with no ontological basis upon collective social life produces enormous social tensions, which emerge in different forms. While knowledge and material productions in the twenty-first century epitomise previously unimaginable degrees of development, which could render starvation, poverty, most diseases, conflicts and wars over resources, economic competition, and social control all things of the past, capitalism not only sustains but intensifies the plethora of existing tensions.
To name a few phenomena: a significant portion of the world’s population is becoming surplus humanity and managed by the logic of slums which are no longer a by-product, but produced and reproduced by design (Davis, 2006); precarity and inequality have invaded the core “of capitalism and countries like the Unites States and Germany are increasingly suffering its consequences (Alvaredo et al., 2018; Chancel et al., 2022; Nachtway, 2018; Pfeffer, 2018); the most powerful capitalist society is falling apart not only economically but also socially, as its social values are obliterated behind mass problems of opioid and gambling addictions, sadism, hate, suicide, corruption, evictions, and the debacle of social bonds (Hedges, 2018); besides vast amount of social and economic resources being redirected towards bottomless military outwards expansion, militarism is also expanding inwards to be part not only of culture but also whole police apparatuses (Robinson, 2020; Vitale, 2018), while the economic crisis of 2008 has unveiled the outstretches of financialisation in the world economy, its grips are even broader than most people imagined, for financialisation has become so intertwined with the real capitalist economy, that currently one cannot be decoupled from the other without their mutual ruin (Hudson, 2015); and finally, a phenomenon that has become part of every person who owns a computer, tablet, or smartphone with Internet connection is the overarching surveillance being imposed to guarantee social control and economic profits (Zuboff, 2019).
Being one of the most crucial tools for contemporary social control, as it should become clear throughout the analysis of this book, intellectual property(private) is commonly regarded as something abstract. Sharing this perception, Peter Drahos sees it as “a fragile form of power, for it relies on the acceptance of legal norms and on the efficacy of the enforcement mechanisms that support those norms” (Drahos, 2016, p. 195). He conceives this power as a form of threat power because it relies on the law. “Threat power which is so inextricably linked to law is perhaps the most dangerous kind of power for a society to contemplate creating and facilitating because it derives legitimacy from the law itself” (Drahos, 2016, p. 195). Moreover, this danger often goes unnoticed because the cult of private property in liberal ideologies primarily conceives it as a form of liberty and a prerequisite for freedom. However, describing this does not suffice; it is crucial to explain its existence from the point of its determinations; that is, why has intellectual property(private) been needed in reality?
Intellectual property theorists have thus far broadly failed to relate intellectual property(private) to capitalism. Mistaking cause and effect across the board, these thinkers assume the legal system as if it were the originator of intellectual property(private). This analytical failure is the product of not only limitations imposed by ideological constraints but also theoretical shortcomings that play a major role in limiting the apprehension of social property relations. For example, the lack of differentiation between personal and production property; property and private property; social from privatised appropriation; and the list goes on, as briefly presented below still in this introductory section, before it can be thoroughly discussed along the broader discussion of this book. All this hinders a critical assessment of intellectual appropriation which is merely assumed as a feature established by legal relations, that is, when the legal system is not itself hypostasised and presented as a thing-in-itself, also deprived of ontological dimensions. In most cases, not only intellectual property but also any legal dimension are presented as something merely abstract.
This book neither merely repeats the theoretical assessments of intellectual property theories nor is it constricted within the walls of a singular school of thought. It is evident that the present book is based on immanent critique; however, it seeks to learn from multiple theories and approaches, presenting a rich and multifaceted understanding of the production, appropriation and reproduction of knowledge. Knowledge is consequently not regarded as merely the phenomenological forms of copyright, patent, and trademark. Instead, it gains a twofold representation: a general condition in which humanity has made use of knowledge throughout history to guarantee and assert its own existence, and a particular condition under the capitalist mode of production. The latter, however, is neither homogenous nor fixed. As capitalist relations mutate and evolve, so do property relations and, accordingly, intellectual appropriation.Contemporary intellectual property will only be thoroughly understood when it achieves full maturity, or rather, only after it has been superseded by a distinguished new form of intellectual property. Leaning on Marx and Marxism to apprehend capitalist legalities neither exhausts the understanding of capitalism nor capitalist categories. Nevertheless, they certainly provide a crucial methodological basis for analysing capitalist relations. On the other hand, the existing literature seems colossal, yet hardly any contains a critique basis of capitalism. Needless to say, critique here means revealing the hidden essence behind the phenomena; furthermore, it means unveiling the limits of the theory and the possibilities of a concrete reality or determined social relations. The choice of being receptive to interdisciplinarity encompasses both merits and demerits. On the one hand, its virtue lies in the fact that it brings more connections, more nuances, more perspectives, and more complexity to the analytical body; therefore, it fosters the establishment of the notion of totality; on the other, it has the disadvantage of not addressing “each point thoroughly, leaving flanks opened to critique and even criticism. Nonetheless, it cannot be accused of lacking depth.This book does not aim to perform a moral critique. If the reader understands the ongoing analysis in moral terms, either I have failed in my task of representing the immanent critique, or the reader is limitedly interpreting the coming lines through his or her own moral lenses. By the same token, it is essential to distinguish between critique and criticism. While the latter has a negative connotation, or at least the intention of passing judgement, the former intends to provide an examination, an analysis from the standpoint of a dialectical relationship between the dynamic of internal contradictions presented by the object “under investigation as well as between the object of analysis and its relationship with its external spheres of mutual influence. For instance, the immanent critique of intellectual property is not based on a juxtaposition of several theories of law or, conversely, economic theories on the topic. On the contrary, it demands the investigation of its existential conditions. Insofar as the concept of intellectual property does not exhaust an understanding of the matter, intellectual property must be investigated as a social relation that not only emerges historically but also constantly changes its essence, for here, essence is not understood as an intrinsic metaphysical quality but rather as the expression of real social movements. Accordingly, the present immanent critique of intellectual property depicts the existing action of intellectual property in its complexity, nonetheless maintaining the awareness of the limitation, better still, of the ontological impossibility of providing a complete and exhaustive understanding of intellectual property. The reason is twofold: first, intellectual property as a movement, a social relation, is constantly changing; therefore, the current effort is to reveal its tendency within contemporary reality; and second, any theoretical analysis can never exhaust or obtain a comprehensive understanding of objective reality; “if reality and its grasp were to collapse into a single synthesis, then theory would become obsolete, for theory would become reality, and reality would be identical to theory.As mentioned, intellectual property theories have thus far neglected differentiating between property and appropriation; private and non-private property; property and intellectual property; the totality and isolated parts of property; the tangible and intangible; first and second paradox; general human and capitalist particular dimensions; science before and after capitalism; the abstract right as originator and legitimator; appreciation and destruction of the value of knowledge; premise and result; among other elements. Some of these elements are analysed in isolation in some intellectual property theories; nevertheless, “the necessary scrutiny that understands these elements and their contradictions as interdependent parts of a totality is nowhere to be found.This book concretises one general and another particular research. On the one hand, it is part of broad research on capitalist relations, which entails multiple interdependent dimensions; on the other, it gives representation to one particular aspect of social relations, namely, intellectual appropriation. Gaining an understanding of something is always simultaneously an individual and social endeavour. One cannot occur without the other. Isolated individuals, if not embedded in the scope of social knowledge, would merely react by means of genetic response to the environment, but even this is too abstract. This because many living beings are not simply conditioned by genetic reactions but also learn from their peers through a process of proto-mimesis. Therefore, assuming isolated, abstract individuals as creators of knowledge is necessarily an ahistorical undertaking. On the other hand, it is equally absurd to consider social knowledge as deprived of individual inputs, transformative actions, and transmission acts. Knowledge arises when individuals, relating to each other, find common ground and establish mutual recognitions of specific things and relations, which consequently become facts or simply objective knowledge.
The capitalist drive to privately appropriate everything in order to extract surplus-value by subjecting each particular privately appropriated thing to economic imperatives creates an immanent conflicting existence between the capitalist mode of production and the production and reproduction of human knowledge. The more complex capitalism becomes, the greater this contradiction. Most intellectual property theorists have thus far tried to address this problem, which I call the first paradox of intellectual property, by advocating for a balanced relationship between them through regulation. It goes without saying that this is an illusion that must ignore capitalist legalities. As I claim, when capitalist relations reached a certain degree of development, in which the most advanced capitalist nations had to physically divest their mass of capital, then the contradictory relationship between intellectual appropriation and capitalist production underwent a crucial change. The subsumption of knowledge by capital suffers a profound metamorphosis. It went from a condition of real subsumption to one of formal subsumption only to reach an even greater degree of real subsumption from the 1990s onwards. Detailed below, this process is what I call the second paradox of intellectual property. For now, it is sufficient to understand that a vital transformation took place, mirroring the changes in social property relations, in which property of the means of production that had already been split into two, marking the advent of capitalism when private property became a dominant social relation, underwent a new fissure, bestowing intellectual property(private) actuality as a dominant relation in-itself.
Link---IPR---1NC
IPR sustains the productivity of capitalism and increasingly exploits unpaid labor
Hermeto, 2024 (João Romeiro Hermeto, Department of Humanistic Studies, University of Pavia, Italy. The Paradox of Intellectual Property in Capitalism (book), accessed through libgen / spp)
If wage labour was a condition for productive labour during the nineteenth century, in the twenty-first century, wage-less-labour has become an increasingly important source of the production of surplus labour (see infra). As in contemporary capitalism, reproduction of living labour depends not only on the aggregate value of rent, water, and food (as a gross simplification of nineteenth-century conditions) but also on a greater level of social relations among economic and extra-economic activities, resulting in a more heterogeneous labour-value to be reproduced. Examples of this are the consumption level of mass-consumer goods, entertainment, and drugs, the constant replacement of planned-obsolescent goods, the necessary access to social digital relations with friends, family, work, and the state, etc., by means of combined hardware-software commodities. Therefore, as social subsistence becomes more complex, many vital activities which are imposed occur outside wage labour relations; nevertheless, they remain subsumed under the economic imperatives of capitalism. The socially necessary labour-time, which is essential for the reproduction of the labour-force, is now divided among many contractual relationships. While the first appears to be the one imposed by wage labour, all access to the digital world entails contractual relations that the user—now a prosumer, a creator of surplus-value in the digital realm (see infra)—must subdue to participate in the digital social life.
While the notion of the social contract represents an idealist theoretical notion, in the digital sphere, one-sided contracts are imposed as an existential condition for the individual’s digital actualisation. “And the development of this material wealth therefore in opposition to, and at the expense of, the human individual. Productivity of labour in general = maximum of product with minimum of labour, therefore as much as possible the improvement of commodities” (Marx, 1988, p. 107). Digital commodification and productive labour thus appear as the summit of productive labour, namely, labour which produces surplus-value. The purpose of the capitalist mode of production is that “the individual product, etc., contain as much unpaid labour as possible, and that this is only achieved by production for the sake of production” (Marx, 1988, p. 107). Marx leaves no room for doubt. The capitalist mode of production presupposes the production of surplus-value because it is its primary and highest goal; productive labour is subordinated to the production of surplus-value, “thus only the labour which is directly consumed in the process of production for the utilisation of capital” (Marx, 1988, p. 108).
It is therefore also absurd to attest to what productive labour ought to be in-itself. Thus, not only prosumers but also knowledge production by intellectual labourers, when subordinated to the economic imperative, become productive labourers. Amazingly, already in the 1860s, Marx realised this, removing from isolated individuals the character of being productive or not. “Productive labour is only an abbreviated expression for the whole relation and manner in which the labour assets and labour figure in the capitalist process of production”, that is, it is its social character that endows it with legality, “productive labour” is “socially determined labour, labour which involves a quite definite relation between the buyer and seller of labour” (Marx, 1988, p. 111). And even when labour cannot be regarded as productive labour, under capitalist relations, it is still subdued and exploited. “The capitalist process of production is not merely the production of commodities. It is a process which absorbs unpaid labour

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