Conceptualizing capitalist transformations of universities: Marx’s relevance for higher education research

The Role of Competitive Project-Based Funding in the Commodification of Academic Research: A Marxist Analysis

“…This Marxian-informed analysis of the economic foundations of CPBF has an important bearing on political terms. For one thing, it dispels (as is the author’s purpose) the false illusion that more public funding will arrest the commodification of academic research – an idea that largely permeates critical scholarship on the contemporary realities of academia and academic research, as the permanence of the ‘private/public dichotomy’ shows (Szadkowski and Krzeski, 2022). More public funding, so the argument runs, will make it unnecessary for academic institutions to chase after private funding and contract research (Hallonsten, 2021; Radder, 2010).…”

“…Given that CPBF is a mechanism for the allocation of public funding, and that funding agencies are for their most part public funding agencies, CPBF poses a challenge for researchers addressing the commodification of academic research, for it pushes us to think beyond the traditional 'public/ private dichotomy' that still informs most critical research in Higher Education, as Szadkowski and Krzeski (2022) argue. 2 Properly understood, CPBF reveals that the role of the capitalist state in the commodification of academic science cannot be reduced to acting as a 'midwife' between academic institutions and the market (as De Oliveira (2013) would have it).…”

“…It may appear striking at first that we turn to the Marxist notion of formal subsumption of labour under capital to explain the commodity-mediated nature of the productive relations between academic institutions and the state arranged through CPBF. In fact, most researchers tend either to disregard the capital–labour relation that underlies the commodification of academic science, (as Szadkowski and Krzeski (2022) rightly argue in relation to non-Marxist critical research in Higher Education), or to counterpose the occurrence of commodity-mediated relations of production to the development of capitalist relations of production proper in academia, as there were no inner connection between the two (as Szadkowski and Krzeski (2022) themselves do).…”

“…In Marxist research, the commodification of science, overall, and of academic research, more specifically, remains a peripheral issue – but, fortunately, the number of scholars working on this problem is growing (to cite just a few contributions: Hall and Bowles, 2016; Harvie, 2006; Harvie and De Angelis, 2009; Rikap and Harari-Kermadec, 2020; Rotta and Teixeira, 2019; Szadkowski, 2023; Szadkowski and Krzeski, 2019, 2022). Marxism has enriched the analysis of the commodification of academic research, bringing more clarity and density in conceptual terms.…”

“…Given that CPBF is a mechanism for the allocation of public funding , and that funding agencies are for their most part public funding agencies , CPBF poses a challenge for researchers addressing the commodification of academic research, for it pushes us to think beyond the traditional ‘public/private dichotomy’ that still informs most critical research in Higher Education, as Szadkowski and Krzeski (2022) argue. 2…”