Towards an Ontology of Capitalist Knowledge Production: Beyond the Metaphysical Epistemic

Knowledge cannot be simply discussed from a metaphysical perspective. In a time in which many authors push forward and normalise the term knowledge-based economy (KBE), it is imperative to investigate its concrete sides of knowledge production and distribution. While knowledge is being unceasingly privatised, intellectual property theory takes this fact for granted and proposes multiple forms to accommodate the paradoxical situation between social knowledge production and private appropriation of knowledge. This paradoxical condition deriving from intellectual private property relations within the capitalist mode of production also has the crucial function of enabling and justifying contemporary capitalist power relations. Hitherto, virtually all theories of intellectual property have assumed what they need to explain; thus, a Marxist critical assessment of it in which capitalist relations are exposed from a historical materialist perspective has been neglected. Researching this topic unveils the possibility of a very multidimensional scope, which presents not only a broad range of mainstream analyses of intellectual property but also some historical examinations, the critique of political economy, the political economy of media, some indigenous and African perspectives, different studies on the development of thought, ideas, and cognition, and much more. Insofar as it contains such multiple perspectives, it strives to present the totality of intellectual property within the capitalist mode of production instead of focusing on the phenomenological moments of copyright, trademark, patents, etc. Thus, it unveils the dialectics of capitalist relations and power that enforces and necessitates intellectual property as the privatisation of knowledge, while the production of knowledge presupposes a constant collective and social development which cannot be reduced to privatisation.