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

[Michael Perelman <michael@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:

>
> Perhaps this may be, besides being a political dialectic between
> competition & monopoly, an example of contradiction between the impulse to
> privatize anything & everything and the need to sustain the conditions for
> systemic reproduction of capitalism.

Absolutely.  I have a section that I call, Eating Our Seed Corn to discuss the
privatization of science.

> On one hand, a capitalist dream may
> be to wholly privatize the products of intellectual labor through patent;
> on the other hand, wholly patented knowledge production is not just
> inefficient but impossible.

yup.

> Capitalists benefit from the existence of
> spheres of non-capitalist production of knowledge (e.g. research at
> universities, working-class cultural innovations like music, indigenous
> peoples' knowledge of medicinal plants, working-class learning by doing on
> the job, etc.); if most products of knowledge production got privatized,
> there would be less commonly available means for further innovations.

yup.

With regard to cinema -- I am far from an expert -- the best cinema usually
comes from countries that have government sponsorship.  Where is the Australian
cinema now that the government does not support it?  Even the Soviets under
Stalin produced some excellent films.
--

Michael Perelman
Economics Department
California State University
michael@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Chico, CA 95929
530-898-5321
fax 530-898-5901