Chapter 46. Skilled migration, productive forces and the development question in the era of generalized monopolies

Contemporary capitalism is characterized by the predominance of monopoly capital over practically all spheres of the world economy and society. This predominance is related to the emergence of a new international division of labor on the North-South or centre-periphery horizon: the export of labor power. In this context, skilled migration is gaining increasing importance and dynamism, not only because it is the most buoyant segment of contemporary international migration, but also because it marks the beginning of a new cycle in North-South relations in the 21st century. This phenomenon is closely related to the new dynamics of development of the productive forces and, more specifically, to the way in which innovation systems have been upheaved nowadays, where the skilled labor force from peripheral and emerging countries plays an increasingly significant role. In this regard, it is crucial to dig deeper into the analysis of the new architecture that characterizes innovation systems, with Silicon Valley at the forefront, where open innovation modalities prevail, involving a wide and varied constellation of agents that are articulated among each other through complex relationships (direct and indirect, local and transnational) regulated by a legal-institutional framework that governs intellectual property rights in favor of the interests of large corporate capital and the main imperialist powers. It is worth noting that the new ways of organizing scientific and technological work or the general intellect - using the concept coined by Marx to emphasize the social character of accumulated knowledge - have made possible an acceleration in the pace of patenting and, simultaneously, an unprecedented concentration of patents in the hands of a handful of large monopolistic corporations. The main purpose of this paper is to analyze this phenomenon from a critical perspective based on the Latin American development school of thought.