Re: Re: Notes on a talk I will give on Wed.

["Charles Brown" <CharlesB@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

>>> Michael Perelman <michael@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> 04/02/00 09:34PM >>>
Xxxx Xxxxx Xxxxxx wrote:

> michael, i thought intellectual property rights were central to the
> principles of the free market.

Not really.  People, such as Hayek, were against intellectual property rights,
since they granted a monopoly to the supposed owner.  Although here is Ayn Rand

125: "Patents and copyrights are the legal implementation of the
   base of all property rights: a man's right to the product of his
   mind."?
128: "Today, patents are the special target of the collectivists'
   attacks -- directly and indirectly, through such issues as the
   proposed abolition of trademarks, brand names, etc.  While the so-
   called "conservatives" look at those attacks indifferently or, at
   times, approvingly, the collectivists seem to realize that patents
   are the heart and core of property rights, and that once they are
   destroyed, the destruction of all ocher rights will follow
   automatically, as a brief postscript."?


__________

CB: Seems to me that these quotes from Rand make clear how bourgeois ideology is necessarily idealist ( and working class ideology materialist).  By making predominantly mental labor which result in designs, ideas, the "heart and core of (private) property rights, and impliedly the main source of value, as opposed to predominantly physical labor , the bourgeoisie ideologist Rand has prepared the ground for claiming that the capitalist, the CEO, the Lee Iacocca or Bill Gates' work is infinitely more valuable than that of the mass of individual workers, thus justifying the gargantuan differential in pays,. This is the diametrical opposite of Marx's theory , which does differentiate between the rate of value produced by different levels of skill, but makes no special differentiation between mental and physical labor. In general , an hour's worth of thinking is worth the same as an hour's worth of hammering in Marx's scheme.

Also, the products of mental labor are dependent upon the mental labors of many going before.  All mental laborers are dwarfs standing on the shoulders of giants from previous generations. And the products of mental labors of past generations ,upon which any intellectual discovery of today made by Bill Gates or anyone else depend critically, are not private , but public property.  So, most of the value in a new intellectual product should not go to the private gain of the individual who discovers it, but should be shared collectively with society.

CB