Jonathan Nitzan on Innovation

I'm writing an essay on Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler's 'Capital as Power' at the minute. In a 1998 paper, which lays the groundwork for their theory of capital, Nitzan writes this wonderful paragraph on innovation that I just have to share here.

"Any invention, even the most revolutionary, is only one step at the end of a long 'historical thought process' which is largely unprotected by property rights. Microsoft's software, for instance, could not have been developed without computer languages, the 'chip', the discovery of semiconductivity, binary logic, mathematical functions or, for that matter, human language. Such knowledge owes its existence to society at large, and was available to Microsoft free of charge."

Something to think about next time someone you know lauds capitalism's capacity to innovate.