ABSTRACT
This chapter describes and critically examines a number of remarkable features of the dynamics of knowledge societies as they have evolved into the Gestalt of knowledge capitalism, in particular some of the central policy fields of knowledge societies that all appear to defy Marx's restrictive observation. The overall enlargement of the capacity to act is uneven as are the capacities to act itself and they therefore sustain and cement one of the elementary facets of human society, their essential inequality. The new reality of politics is pluralism and diversity; the body politics is that “of the new ‘mass movements’: small, highly organized minorities, single cause or single interest in their focus, and totally political”. The legal system, that is, the state defines, creates, and enforces excludability. It follows that the development of patent law is of central importance for the evolution of the economy and the social structure of knowledge societies, for example, the inequality formation in these societies.
