The Intellectual Commons vs Intellectual Property: Marxian and Polanyian Perspectives on Intellectual Capital, including Remarks on Primitive Accumulation

This paper explores the increasing significance of intellectual property rights for the appropriation of surplus value in capitalism. Building on Marx's analysis of the value form and extending it to the commodification of knowledge, it develops a Marxian critique of informational capitalism based on the basic categories of value theory; inter alia, this looks at the commodification of knowledge from the viewpoint of commodity fetishism, the enclosure of traditional knowledge, the formal subsumption of intellectual labour, the real subsumption of intellectual labour, and the role of intellectual property rights as a contradictory means to support the average rate of profit for firms specializing in immaterial production (whilst enabling them to appropriate monopoly profits). The second part of the paper inquires whether these arguments lend support to a Polanyian interpretation of knowledge as a fictitious commodity. On the basis of the arguments already deployed, plus further arguments, it is suggested that knowledge can function as a non-commodity, a quasi-commodity, a fictitious commodity, a real commodity, and as fictive capital. This has interesting implications for the concepts of primitive accumulation and accumulation through dispossession. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript