Who Owns Knowledge?

Science Under Capitalism and Socialism

By Alice Malone

Volume 27, no. 2, Political Economy of Science

“The founder of civil society, and consequently the grave-digger of primitive equality, was the man who first fenced off a piece of land and said: ‘It belongs to me.’” — G.V. Plekhanov¹

“The question ‘Who owns knowledge?’ seems absurd at first glance. . . . If anything is entirely a social product, it is knowledge…”— Agustín Lage Dávila²

In the last half of the 20th century, the economies of wealthier countries became increasingly dominated by the production and distribution of knowledge, transforming into knowledge economies.³ At the same time, the commodities we buy to satisfy our wants and needs increasingly became the products of complex science and technology. For companies in the knowledge industries—software, biotechnology, and other high technology sectors—competitiveness in the market is determined by their ability to rapidly generate new knowledge and incorporate it into a commodity they can sell. To maintain their competitive edge, companies rely on the privatization of knowledge: discoveries are kept secret, workers are made to sign non-compete or non-disclosure agreements, and patents are granted to guarantee a monopoly on the application of this knowledge.

The social costs of knowledge privatization and of profit-driven scientific research are steep. Hundreds of millions of people suffer diseases too unprofitable to attract capital investment, while data scientists are tasked with maximizing ad clicks.⁴ Access to the fruits of biomedical research depends on who can pay. Within the United States, one in five people who require insulin to manage their diabetes ration their use of this life-saving medication due to cost.⁵ Patent monopolies and royalties, which are overwhelmingly held by wealthy Western countries, keep vaccines and other drugs out of the reach of people in the Global South, a phenomenon referred to as “vaccine imperialism” and “medical apartheid.”⁶ This inequality is all the more exploitative since clinical trials often draw participants from poorer countries but withhold treatments from these same populations due to their inability to pay.⁷

Beyond these more direct human costs, scientific development is stifled. Private companies keep their research secret, lest their competitors learn something useful. This clandestine production of knowledge needlessly duplicates experiments, wasting potentially millions of dollars. Results that conflict with the company’s bottom line might never see the light of day, like Shell’s 1988 study, made public only in 2018, that identified the link between burning fossil fuels and climate change and predicted that “by the time the global warming becomes detectable it could be too late to take effective countermeasures to reduce the effects or even to stabilize the situation.”⁸

The shortcomings of how society currently organizes science are plain to see. The solution is more elusive. To chart our way forward, we must first understand how knowledge is produced under capitalism.

In capitalist society, knowledge production is generally either publicly-funded or funded by for-profit companies (Figure 1). The archetypical model of publicly-funded research takes the form of an academic lab in which PhD students, post-docs, technicians, and other researchers are directed by an experienced scientist who is often also a professor. Despite qualitative differences in the labor performed, the academic lab’s hierarchy resembles that of a medieval workshop where a master oversees a team of apprentices and journeymen.⁹ This craft labor mode of production has been largely relegated to the pages of history, supplanted by factories that can make the same products more cheaply.

Figure 1. Research expenditure by sector. Source: National Science Board.¹⁰

To understand the relationship between capitalist and academic modes of knowledge production, it’s helpful to see how the capitalist mode of production came to replace craft labor. In Capital, Marx identifies four reasons for capitalism’s unprecedented productive capacity:

1. Cooperation: Concentrating many workers into one operation allows more efficient use of fixed capital resources. A forge operating over one shift idles for the rest of the day but requires the same capital investment as one operating around the clock. A confocal microscope requires the same capital investment whether it is shared between five researchers or a hundred researchers. Large numbers of workers can also achieve tasks impossible for small numbers of workers, like harvesting a field or rapidly responding to a novel virus.
2. Division of labor: Dividing different tasks between workers makes more efficient use of their time by reducing time spent changing between tools or rooms. One worker takes responsibility for making pulp, another for spreading it into sheets, and another for cutting the paper to size. Scientists might divide up assay responsibility since setting up an experiment takes time, while the time for an extra sample is marginal.
3. Specialization: The division of labor causes workers to specialize. One worker learns the tricks of furnace management, and another hones glass-blowing. A scientist that analyzes bioinformatics data daily is more efficient at this task than one who does so once a year.
4. Machinery: Expensive tools, like the steam engine or automated pipettors, reduce the need for labor, while others, like particle accelerators, enable work that otherwise could not be done.

Together, these factors mean that production becomes increasingly capital-intensive. It requires a high up-front cost to buy machinery and bring together a large group of workers to allow for the cooperation, division of labor, and specialization necessary to remain competitive. Because of these efficiency gains, the amount of labor required to make a particular commodity decreases. At the same time, labor becomes increasingly socialized because creating a given commodity requires the efforts of a greater number of workers and individuals can no longer produce things on their own. Workers rely on each other’s labor for food, clothing, and other commodities rather than growing or making what they need themselves. Within knowledge production, socialized labor manifests in the near-extinction of the single-authored paper as research teams grow larger.¹¹

The precondition for capitalism was the privatization of the commons. Between the 15th and 17th centuries in Europe, people were violently thrown off the land they had worked for generations and left with no choice but to work for wages.¹² Only with this violently acquired start-up capital and the resulting dispossessed workers could capitalists begin their limitless accumulation of wealth. The precondition for the knowledge economy similarly required the privatization of knowledge. While patents have existed for as long as capitalism itself, the need to guard knowledge became ever more pressing with the onset of the knowledge economy around 1960 when the number of patents exploded (Figure 2). In 1980, the US Congress passed the Bayh-Dole Act, allowing universities to patent (and profit from) government-funded research.¹³ Funding agencies and university incentives increasingly emphasize the need to commercialize academic research, with 47 percent of scientists reporting the pressure to produce marketable products unduly influences their research.¹⁴

Figure 2. Patents granted per year. Source: National Science Board.¹⁵

Advocates for intellectual property argue that it spurs innovation and addresses a market failure by compensating inventors for the costs of creating a new technology. However, privatized knowledge can also create market failures by “imposing transaction costs on future inventions,” incentivizing “patent stockpiling,” and possibly “stifling rather than promoting innovation.”¹⁶ Empirical verification of the benefits of patents is challenging due to the difficulty in quantifying innovation and the variability across sectors and between wealthy and developing countries. An increase in patent count does not necessarily indicate rising innovation. A 2002 review of the effect of strengthening patent protections found that “these policy changes did not spur innovation” after adjusting for confounders.¹⁷ Instead, patent laws may direct research activity towards patentable research or alter how research and production tasks are distributed among enterprises.¹⁸ While links between patent strengths and innovation are tenuous, it is unquestionable that patents are used to prevent the open sharing of knowledge and allow for private accumulation of wealth.

Academia, Industry, and Scientific Productivity

Strategies like the division of labor and mechanization, long used to speed up production, are now reshaping academic knowledge production. Over the last thirty years, the governments of the G7 countries and European Union have placed growing emphasis on centers of excellence, institutions funded by large grants that bring together many scientists from a variety of disciplines.¹⁹ Policymakers often point toward improvements in efficiency and productivity as a result of “economies of scale,” the “optimal use of resources,” and “critical mass in terms of pooling of intellectual capacity, equipment and research structure.”²⁰

To an even greater degree, these strategies have reshaped science in for-profit companies. Automation in industrial research is widespread, improving reproducibility and output per worker.²¹ Labor is further coordinated between highly specialized divisions of workers. Because of these strategies, which require great sums of capital to harness, private production of knowledge can proceed at breakneck speed. Just like the artisan shoemakers of centuries past put out of business by factory production, academic labs struggle to compete head-to-head with industrialized, for-profit science.²² Artificial intelligence research is a dramatic example of this, since advances in basic research in this field typically require expensive computation and massive amounts of data, giving corporations a clear upper hand. In a frank paper questioning the path forward for AI research in academia, two scientists asked, “How could we possibly keep up?”²³

Corporations have another advantage over small academic labs: close ties between the production of knowledge and the production of commodities. New research ideas emerge both from translating science from the lab into useful products and from feedback provided by those who use those products. For example, the 19th century German engineer Wilhelm Albert saw that the metal chains used in the mine in which he worked often failed, even under relatively light loads. His studies kicked off a new field of materials research on metal fatigue and advanced industrial technology.²⁴ Knowledge production is best modeled as a feedback loop between theory and practice, and institutions that are able to couple scientific activity and production are better equipped to develop the products that satisfy our societal needs and desires.²⁵

The transformative effect of large-scale collective labor renders the desire to combat capitalist knowledge production via small, craft-style workshops utopian and sentimental.²⁶ But what about public funding for large research centers? This proposal is also futile. The sums of money that for-profit companies invest in research and development have grown astronomically, surpassing $600 billion USD in 2022 in the United States (Figure 1). Even if the political appetite to increase government funding for science were there—and this whim presently runs in the opposite direction—this form of funding could not keep up with industry funding.²⁷

By the numbers, the vast majority of research is performed for the sake of profit optimization. In 2022, 78 percent of research expenditure occurred in businesses (Figure 1).²⁸ Certain sectors are particularly research-intensive. The pharmaceutical, semiconductor, and software industries spend $1 on research and development per $5–8 in sales, compared to $1 out of every $20 on average across all industries (Figure 3). As a result, a huge proportion of the knowledge our society generates is kept private.

Figure 3. R&D expenditure per sector for select sectors National Science Board²⁹

Once a discovery has been made, translating it into something that can improve people’s lives—like a new drug, for example—generally requires privatizing the knowledge.³⁰ For example, between 2010 and 2019, the United States approved 356 new drugs, all of which were based on research funded by the US National Institutes of Health.³¹ The revenue from the sale of these drugs mostly goes to for-profit companies who own or license the intellectual property guarding these drugs. The many scientific workers who made these discoveries possible and the public who funded the research are rewarded with high drug prices. Without a transformation of who owns knowledge, government-funded science succumbs to the same maladies of for-profit knowledge production.

Socialism and the Knowledge Economy

We’ve seen that efficient production and application of knowledge requires large institutions, organizing skilled specialists to work together and benefit from economies of scale and automation, and integration between discovery and production. Together, these two factors explain why increasing funding for academic research will not solve the problems of for-profit science. However, both these factors together are not enough to identify a solution either. After all, the Western knowledge economy already operates according to these principles. The issue is inherent to capitalism: the profit imperative.

In capitalist society, capitalists direct production to optimize profits. Any product that cannot be made at a profit will not be produced, and a capitalist who operates otherwise will not remain in business very long. In this system, we produce things not because we decide we need them, but because we find ourselves “commanded” by market forces.³² Deciding what we produce is left to the anarchy of the market—an undemocratic institution incapable of rational planning. And so fossil fuel consumption destroys our planet while pharmaceutical research targets diseases of the wealthy. Instead, we need a system where we decide what we make. That is, we need social ownership of the means of production.

As an example of the strength of socially-owned scientific production, we shall turn to Cuba. Cuba’s biotechnology sector is an “outstanding achievement,” particularly considering its status as a country of just eleven million people in the Global South facing an illegal blockade imposed by the United States.³³ Despite its limited resources, it manufactures more than 140 biotechnology products, which it exports to more than 50 countries in trade worth hundreds of millions of US dollars.³⁴ Cuba’s Scientific Pole brings together over ten thousand workers, organized in state-owned entities built to integrate production and research, and has close ties to the health system. This integration “creates the habit of permanently looking at the whole cycle of research-product-process-market,” according to Cuban Center of Molecular Immunology director Agustín Lage Dávila. Lage Dávila emphasizes the importance of economies of scale, and, in contrast to the competitive nature of for-profit production, the acceleration of research arising from cooperation.³⁵ Because Cuba’s biotechnology sector is owned collectively, it can direct its research towards its citizens’ needs rather than bowing to market forces. In response to a 1980 outbreak of meningitis, Cuban scientists created the world’s first vaccine against meningococcal B and C.³⁶ More first-in-class drugs quickly followed, like its vaccine against lung cancer.³⁷ These products are provided to any Cuban citizen who needs them.

The Path Forward

Capitalism has transformed the way we produce things. By bringing together large numbers of workers and machinery, our labor has become ever more efficient, benefiting from the effects of economies of scale, the division of labor, specialization, and automation. But while our labor is increasingly socialized, the fruits of our labor are increasingly privatized—even knowledge is jealously safeguarded. The way forward cannot be to rely on small, scattered laboratories to produce open knowledge: collective labor is more productive. Nor is the solution to let capitalist forces manage production while government-funded research institutions produce open knowledge: under capitalism, the transformation of this knowledge into products we can use requires privatization, relinquishing control over what we make to the profit motive.

Cuba’s biotechnology sector provides an example of an alternative path. When workers own the means of production, we can coordinate our collective labor toward common goals, providing medicines and all the other rewards of our scientific efforts to those in need. The capitalist model stands in stark contrast: publicly-funded research creates knowledge that is privatized and then directed toward optimizing profits. To meet our needs and wants, we need an economy based on the rationally coordinated, socially-owned production of knowledge.

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Alice Malone received her PhD in biology and works as a scientist in the biotechnology industry. She lives in Toronto, with her partner and cat. Her experience working in research and development in for-profit companies grounds her belief that there is a better socioeconomic system than capitalism for addressing the needs and scientific curiosities of mankind.

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Notes

1. G. V. Plekhanov, “The Development of the Monist View of History” in Selected Philosophical Works, vol. 1 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1974), 565.
2. Agustín Lage Dávila, The Knowledge Economy and Socialism: Science and Society in Cuba, trans. Mauricio Betancourt García. (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2024), 30.
3. Peter F. Drucker, “The Knowledge Economy,” in The Age of Discontinuity: Guidelines to Our Changing Society (London: William Heinemann Ltd, 1969), 247–268.
4. Rare diseases are conservatively estimated to affect 263–446 million people globally. For 95 percent of rare diseases, there are no approved treatments. Off-label drug use and heavy state subsidies and incentives have attempted to close this gap. Stéphanie Nguengang Wakap et al., “Estimating Cumulative Point Prevalence of Rare Diseases: Analysis of the Orphanet Database,” European Journal of Human Genetics 28, no. 2 (2020): 165–73, doi.org/10.1038/s41431-019-0508-0; Annemieke Aartsma-Rus et al., “Orphan Medicine Incentives: How to Address the Unmet Needs of Rare Disease Patients by Optimizing the European Orphan Medicinal Product Landscape Guiding Principles and Policy Proposals by the European Expert Group for Orphan Drug Incentives (OD Expert Group),” Frontiers in Pharmacology 12 (December 2021): 744532, doi.org/10.3389/fphar.2021.744532.
5. Michael Fang and Elizabeth Selvin, “Cost-Related Insulin Rationing in US Adults Younger Than 65 Years With Diabetes,” JAMA329, no. 19 (2023): 1700, doi.org/10.1001/jama.2023.5747.
6. Stergios A. Seretis et al., “COVID-19 Pandemic and Vaccine Imperialism,” Review of Radical Political Economics 57, no. 1 (2025): 9–29, doi.org/10.1177/04866134241282107; Harriet A. Washington, Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present (New York: Anchor Books, 2008). See in particular the epilogue.
7. One group estimated that 40 percent of trials with test centers in India and 60 percent of those in South Africa led to a drug approval in the US or EU but did not lead to a new drug approval in the developing country in which the trial was partially run. Dnyanesh Limaye et al., “A Critical Appraisal of Clinical Trials Conducted and Subsequent Drug Approvals in India and South Africa,” BMJ Open 5, no. 8 (2015): e007304, doi.org/10.1136/bmjopen-2014-007304.
8. Steven Mufson and Chris Mooney, “Shell Foresaw Climate Dangers in 1988 and Understood Big Oil’s Big Role,” Washington Post,April 5, 2018.
9. Calvin Wu, “Socialize the Lab,” Science for the People, September 15, 2021.
10. National Science Board, Research and Development: U.S. Trends and International Comparisons, NSB-2024-6, Science and Engineering Indicators 2024 (Alexandria, VA: National Science Foundation, 2024), ncses.nsf.gov/pubs/nsb20246/.
11. For less capital-intensive research, it is more common to find papers published by only one or two authors. João Carlos Nabout et al., “Publish (in a Group) or Perish (Alone): The Trend from Single- to Multi-Authorship in Biological Papers,” Scientometrics 102, no. 1 (2015): 357–64, doi.org/10.1007/s11192-014-1385-5.
12. This process has been referred to as original accumulation, primitive accumulation, and original expropriation. See, for example, Karl Marx, “Chapter Twenty-Six: The Secret of Primitive Accumulation,” in Capital, vol. 1 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1887).
13. Drucker, The Age of Discontinuity.
14. Paul R. Sanberg et al., “Changing the Academic Culture: Valuing Patents and Commercialization toward Tenure and Career Advancement,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 111, no. 18 (2014): 6542–47, doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1404094111; Timothy Caulfield and Ubaka Ogbogu, “The Commercialization of University-Based Research: Balancing Risks and Benefits,” BMC Medical Ethics 16, no. 1 (2015): 70, doi.org/10.1186/s12910-015-0064-2.
15. “Table of Annual U.S. Patent Activity Since 1790,” U.S. Patent Activity Calendar Years 1790 to the Present, United States Patent and Trademark Office, last modified September 26, 2025.
16. CJ Ryan and Brian L. Frye, “An Empirical Study of University Patent Activity,” New York University Journal of Intellectual Property and Entertainment Law 7, no. 1, (Fall 2017): 51–84, doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2915243.

17. Josh Lerner, Patent Protection and Innovation Over 150 Years, NBER Working Paper No. 8977 (Cambridge, MA: National Bureau of Economic Research, June 2002), doi.org/10.3386/w8977.
18. Bronwyn H. Hall, “Patents, Innovation, and Development,” in Edith Penrose’s Legacy, 1st ed., ed. Jonathan Michie and Christine Oughton (London: Routledge, 2024), doi.org/10.4324/9781003587132-3.
19. Carter Bloch and Mads P. Sorensen, “The Size of Research Funding: Trends and Implications,” Science and Public Policy 42, no. 1 (2015): 30–43, doi.org/10.1093/scipol/scu019.
20. Carter Bloch, Alexander Kladakis, and Mads P. Sørensen, “Size Matters! On the Implications of Increasing the Size of Research Grants,” in Handbook of Public Funding of Research, ed. Benedetto Lepori, Ben Jongbloed, and Diana Hicks (Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2023): 123–138, doi.org/10.4337/9781800883086.
21. Ian Holland and Jamie A. Davies, “Automation in the Life Science Research Laboratory,” Frontiers in Bioengineering and Biotechnology 8 (November 2020): 571777, doi.org/10.3389/fbioe.2020.571777.
22. J. V. Stalin, “The Materialist Theory” in Anarchism or Socialism? (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1954).
23. Julian Togelius and Georgios N. Yannakakis, Choose Your Weapon: Survival Strategies for Depressed AI Academics, version 2, arXiv, (2023), doi.org/10.48550/ARXIV.2304.06035.
24. Tatsuo Sakai, “Historical Review and Future Prospect for Researches on Very High Cycle Fatigue of Metallic Materials,” Fatigue & Fracture of Engineering Materials & Structures 46, no. 4 (2023): 1217–55, doi.org/10.1111/ffe.13885.
25. Mao Zedong, “On Practice: On the Relation Between Knowledge and Practice, Between Knowing and Doing,” in Selected Works of Mao Tse-Tung, vol. 1 (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, July 1937); Lage Dávila, Knowledge Economy, 171–196.
26. V. I. Lenin, “The Character of the Romanticists’ Criticism of Capitalism,” in A Characterisation of Economic Romanticism, in Lenin Collected Works, vol. 2 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1897).
27. Nina Lakhani, “‘A Disaster for All of Us’: US Scientists Describe Impact of Trump Cuts,” The Guardian, July 20th, 2025,.
28. National Science Board (NSB), Research and Development: U.S. Trends and International Comparisons.
29. NSB, Research and Development.
30. There are some important exceptions, like open source software and government-run weather services.
31. Ekaterina Galkina Cleary, Matthew J. Jackson, and Fred D. Ledley, “Government as the First Investor in Biopharmaceutical Innovation: Evidence From New Drug Approvals 2010–2019,” Institute for New Economic Thinking Working Paper Series No. 133 (September 1, 2020): 1–72, doi.org/10.36687/inetwp133.
32. Karl Marx, “Chapter One: Commodities,” in Capital, vol. 1 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1887).
33. Angelo Baracca and Rosella Franconi, “Comparative Considerations and Conclusions,” in Subalternity vs. Hegemony, Cuba’s Outstanding Achievements in Science and Biotechnology, 1959-2014, SpringerBriefs in History of Science and Technology (Cham: Springer, 2016): 93–103, doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-40609-1_7.
34. Lage Dávila, Knowledge Economy, 171–196.
35. Lage Dávila, Knowledge Economy, 73–97.
36. V. Gustavo Sierra-González, “Cuban Meningococcal Vaccine VA-MENGOC-BC: 30 Years of Use and Future Potential,” MEDICC Review 21, no. 4 (2019): 19–27, doi.org/10.37757/MR2019.V21.N4.4.
37. Ernesto Lopez et al., “Taking Stock of Cuban Biotech,” Nature Biotechnology 25, no. 11 (2007): 1215–16,doi.org/10.1038/nbt1107-1215.