A recent dispatch from Cancun on reason.com by WTO supporter, Ronald Bailey, highlights an important point of disagreement inside the social justice movement. At the same time, the passage helps explain how capitalist ideologues purposefully obscure the word "property" - one reason why dissent against capitalist property relations is not more widespread.
Bailey states; "Before considering the objections being raised by anti-globalization activists to intellectual property rights, a short lesson in intellectual property rights: Property rights over things like land, houses and cars are easily understood by everyone. Fences protect land and locks protect houses and cars from being stolen or misused by others. But intellectual property by its nature cannot be protected by fences and locks.That means that the inventor, who spent the time, effort and money, to bring the benefit of a new cure to humanity would not be compensated for his labor." Bailey is saying that if the global social justice movement could only conceptualize intellectual property rights the same way we understand capitalist property relations, corporate monopolization over indigenous plants or life saving drugs wouldn't seem unreasonable. And he's right. The ownership of intellectual property isn't more dubious than a small group of wealth-holding minorities ownership over the economy and people's labour. (...) Contrary to capital's claim, which neoliberal ideology has strengthened, capital doesn't create wealth, human labour does. In fact, that labour is the source of value was accepted by Adam Smith, David Ricardo and most other supporters of capitalism up until the Paris Commune of 1871 when workers took over the city, scaring the supporters of capitalism. In his yet to be published book Economic Democracy: The Alternative to Capitalism Allan Engler writes: "[after the Paris Commune] new mathematical equations were formulated to prove that exchange values could just as logically be attributed to natural resources, to machinery, or to capital. Source: http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=10&ItemID=4228
