Institutional Parasitism on Intellectual Labor

The Church benefited immensely from Sor Juana's intellectual productivity—her theological writing, her organizational brilliance, her cultural prestige—while she retained no property in her work and received no financial or civic reward. This concept names a specific injustice: institutional parasitism. It occurs when a power structure demands intellectual labor while denying the laborer property rights in the product. For libertarian justice, this is a form of theft: uncompensated extraction of intellectual property. The framework applies to academia, where universities profit from scholar research they do not fund or own; to corporate contexts, where employee innovation benefits shareholders; to colonial and enslaved contexts, where intellectual and creative production is appropriated without consent. Sor Juana's case demonstrates that justice requires compensation, credit, and ownership transfer to those whose intellectual labor institutions consume.