Marx and Rousseau on Intellectual Property

• In Event: 4447 - Open Topic on Marxist Sociology

Abstract

In this working paper, I argue that legal doctrines of intellect property are normative interpretations that are generally used to justify intellectual property protection. Therefore, they have limited explanatory value concerning the actual implementation of the norms that protect the intellectual property. To overcome this difficulty, I offer to analyze intellectual property as a social institution through the lenses of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Karl Marx. Rousseau explains what normative legal doctrines do. Property needs social acknowledgment to be functional. Legal doctrines justify the intellectual property and in effect contribute to its making. Marx accounts for how legal doctrines justify property. He argues that legal doctrines obscure the distinction between individual and capitalist private property. Accordingly, intellectual property finds widespread social recognition because it is justified on the basis of hard-earned individual private property whereas it is actually capitalist private property.
Bringing together Rousseau and Marx to understand the contemporary sociology of intellectual property is important because the global politics of intellectual property protection has become a battleground for how information rent should be generated through the protection of intellectual property. Knowledge has always been a central element in capitalist production’s history and the increase in the number of the intellectual property products does not bring about a qualitative transformation of the contemporary world economy in terms of the way the surplus value is produced. Therefore, the knowledge-producing labor does not supplant the commodity-producing labor and the price of information does not by itself represent a value: it simply illustrates the amount of rent, which is a particular form of surplus appropriation. As global corporate powers and most of their host countries such as the United States and Europe push for stricter protection of intellectual property worldwide, this creation of rent at the global scale needs to be legitimized through every stage power is exercised. Reading this transformation through Marx and Rousseau has explanatory power as intellectual property protection has been pervasive and ubiquitous, penetrating into everyday lives all around the world.

Author

• Nazan Bedirhanoglu, Wellesley College