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Property, Power, Law Archive

Patent as credit

When intellectual property becomes speculative
 by / RP 194 (Nov/Dec 2015) / Article, Dossier, Property, Power, Law

Intellectual properties, the various kinds of which are known as patents, copyright and trademarks, could be regarded as central techniques of accumulation in contemporary capitalism, if immaterial knowledge is indeed what now crucially drives accumulation in a ‘knowledge economy’ or ‘creative industries’. [1] In such a process of value generation and …


Disaggregating primitive accumulation

by / RP 194 (Nov/Dec 2015) / Article, Dossier, Property, Power, Law

For nearly 150 years now, critical theorists of various stripes have attempted to explicate, correct and complement Marx’s discussion of the ‘so-called’ primitive accumulation of capital provided in Part Eight of the first volume of Capital. [1] This is perhaps especially true of Marxism in the English-speaking world. Whereas French and …


Race, real estate and real abstraction

by and / RP 194 (Nov/Dec 2015) / Article, Dossier, Property, Power, Law

The crises and mutations of contemporary capitalism have rendered palpable Marx’s observation according to which in bourgeois modernity human beings are ‘ruled by abstractions’. [1] The processes of financialization animating the dynamics of the 2007–8 crisis involved the violent irruption into the everyday lives of millions of a panoply of ominous …