Intellectual Monopoly Capitalism
* Book: Capitalism, Power and Innovation: Intellectual Monopoly Capitalism Uncovered. By Cecilia Rikap. Routledge, 2021
Description
"In contemporary global capitalism, the most powerful corporations are innovation or intellectual monopolies. The book’s unique perspective focuses on how private ownership and control of knowledge and data have become a major source of rent and power. The author explains how at the one pole, these corporations concentrate income, property and power in the United States, China, and in a handful of intellectual monopolies, particularly from digital and pharmaceutical industries, while at the other pole developing countries are left further behind.
The book includes detailed empirical mappings of how intellectual monopolies develop and transform knowledge from universities and open-source collaborations into intangible assets. The result is a strategy that combines undermining the commons through privatization with harvesting from the same commons. The book ends with provoking reflections to tilt the scale against intellectual monopoly capitalism and arguing that desired changes require democratic mobilization of workers and citizens at large.
This book represents one of the first attempts to capture the contours of an emerging new era where old perspectives lead us astray, and the old policy toolbox is hopelessly inadequate. This is true for the idea that the best, or only, way to promote innovation is to transform knowledge into private property. It is also true for anti-trust policies focusing exclusively on consumer prices. The formation of global infrastructures that lead to natural monopolies calls for public rather than private ownership.
Scholars and professionals from the social sciences and humanities (in particular economics, sociology, political science, geography, educational science and science and technology studies) will enjoy a clear and all-embracing depiction of innovation dynamics in contemporary capitalism, with a particular focus on asymmetries between actors, regions and topics. In fact, its topical issue broadens the book’s scope to those curious about how innovation networks shape our world."
Contents
Section 1. Intellectual Monopoly Capitalism
2 The emergence of Intellectual Monopoly Capitalism
3 Knowledge privatization and power relations in the knowledge commons
4 The interplays of US, China and their intellectual monopolies
5 Research universities: between subordination and intellectual monopoly.
Section 2. Global intellectual monopolies. Illustrative cases
6 Technological cooperation and competition among big pharmaceuticals
7 Apple: from legal towards data-driven intellectual rentiership.
8 Amazon’s data-driven intellectual monopoly.
9 State Grid Corp: an intellectual monopoly relying on China's innovation system.
10 Rentiership, predation, and their implications for workers.
Section 3. Effects of intellectual monopoly capitalism on the peripheries
11 Why we need new development policies under intellectual monopoly capitalism
12 Singapore’s innovation hub. A source of rents for intellectual monopolies.
13 Pharmaceutical knowledge extractivism from a semi-peripheral university.
14 Tilting the scale against intellectual monopoly capitalism
Author Bio
"Cecilia Rikap is a tenure researcher at the Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas (CONICET) and associate researcher at the Centre de Population et Développement (CEPED), IRD/Université de Paris and COSTECH, Université de Technologie de Compiègne. She is also an undergraduate lecturer at the Universidad de Buenos Aires and postgraduate lecturer at the Universidad Nacional de Quilmes in Argentina."