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

Introduction

Academic institutions all over the world are, today, experiencing profound and lasting transformations (Szadkowski, 2023). Their dynamics are manifold and not infrequently contradictory, turning universities into ‘hybrid institutions’ fraught with tensions as they pursue multiple goals at once (Oliver and Sapir, 2017). Yet most of these changes can be ultimately traced back to the equally contradictory dynamics of capitalist production and capital accumulation (Hall and Bowles, 2016; Szadkowski, 2023). In connection to research activities carried out in academic institutions, the commodification of academic research is one of such transformations and one of the most outstanding features of present-day academia – along with the ‘marketisation’ or ‘commercialisation’ of teaching activities.

The commodification of academic research is a complex phenomenon on its own terms. It is premised on the commodification of science (namely, the transformation of research results, methods and materials into marketable commodities that are produced/patented by both large and small companies), of which it is both a moment and a presupposition – after all, a sizeable proportion of R&D activities are conducted in academic settings by academic researchers. But this is a process distinctive in that it is more than just the fact that research results produced in academia are traded as commodities, or that ‘economic efficiency’ predominates as a criterion when it comes to funding academic research (Radder, 2010). In fact, at a more substantial and decisive level, the commodification of academia and academic research entails the subversion of the prevailing relations of production in academia and their substitution by capitalist ones. Academic institutions cannot become ‘sites of surplus value production’ (Hall and Bowles, 2016) without this epoch-making transformation of social relations of production within academia.

Capitalist relations of production have made their entry into academia in various ways. We can represent them figuratively as different layers of the commodification of academic research, each with its distinctive mark but all present in simultaneity. One such layer concerns the collaboration between academic institutions and private companies, which takes the form of contract research, joint research and technology centres, and so forth. Insofar as universities increasingly rely on these linkages to generate income, university–industry relations (UIRs, hereinafter) are certainly an instance of the commodification of academic research (Kleinman, 2010; Radder, 2010). Another layer is formed by the rise of the so-called ‘entrepreneurial university’: Universities take a proactive stance towards the commercialisation of research results generated by their own academic employees, be it in the form of patents and licensing, the investment of seed capital in university-based spin-off companies, and so on. Ironically, these initiatives are mostly funded by public institutions, when their aim is first and foremost to make universities less dependent on public funds (Slaughter and Cantwell, 2012). Along with academic entrepreneurship, universities also resort to other low-profile, revenue-generating activities, including promoting in-house sports teams, managing their real state, merchandising and so on (this trend has developed in US academy in particular; see Cantwell and Kauppinen, 2014).

In the multilayered dynamics of the commodification of academic science, there is a third dimension that requires attention. There cannot be a comprehensive account of subversion of the social relations of production taking place in academia without considering this this particular aspect. However, unlike the other two, it has been overlooked by most scholars. We are concerned here with the productive relations that once seemed to be the main bulwark against the commodification of academic research, namely, those established between academic institutions and the capitalist state. Their material exchanges, indispensable for the continuity of knowledge production in academia, are increasingly taking on a commodity-mediated character. Putting it otherwise, they are based on commodity production and exchange. This transformation in the (social) form of the productive relations between the capitalist state and academic institutions when it comes to knowledge production has been prompted above all by competitive project-based funding (CPBF). CPBF is an instrument for the allocation and distribution of public funds to R&D activities. It first emerged in the United States and the United Kingdom around the 1980s, and soon spread worldwide (Geuna, 2001; Lepori et al., 2007). Today, almost all Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries use CPBF-based funding schemes in varying degrees to channel public funds to academic science (OECD, 2018). Most notably, the volume of public funds allocated through CPBF has grown as a proportion of total government R&D spending since the beginning of the 21st century (Lepori et al., 2007; Reale, 2017) – that is, in a context of declining public budgets. Given that academic research still relies heavily on public funding, the importance of CPBF as a funding arrangement for academic institutions cannot be overstated. Worse still, the volume of third-party funds raised through competitive calls (i.e. through CPBF) represents now an index of universities’ research performance. Part of the so-called ‘block funding’ granted to academic institutions (structural funds to cover overhead costs) is increasingly conditioned to how successful universities are in competitive calls for projects. It means that universities are doubly dependent on ‘grant funding’ (another name for CPBF).

The emergence and development of CPBF as a funding instrument is not incidental. Nor is the fact that it has grown at the expense of the traditional system of public funding of academic institutions and R&D activities. The current prominence of CPBF encapsulates a historical reality relative to the commodification of academic science. Uncovering such a reality may constitute an important step forward in understanding the complex, diverse and contradictory dynamics of knowledge commodification in contemporary capitalist societies, and may also help to develop a more sober assessment of the potentialities and limits of the capitalist state in relation to the commodification of academic science. To grasp the economic foundations of CPBF is the purpose of this paper.

Focusing, in particular, on the formal aspect of the productive relations between academic institutions and the capitalist state that are established in and through CPBF, this paper proposes to examine the latter in the light of the determinations of the capitalist relations of production captured by the Marxian notion of ‘formal subsumption of academic labour under capital’. In doing so, it will be elucidated how CPBF acts as a vector of the unfolding of capitalist relations of production in academia – a process that encompasses the generalisation of the commodity-form; the one-sided development of academic labour towards exchange-value; and, by the same token, the formal subsumption of academic labour under the rule of capital. This analysis builds upon previous research on CPBF and the formal subsumption of academic labour under capital, which was considered above all in connection to the spreading of project-based science communication (see Arboledas-Lérida, 2023).

The paper is structured as follows: the following section maps the current debate on the commodification of academic research and outlines the main approaches to this issue, showing how they have failed to address CPBF. Section ‘Competitive project-based funding as an instrument for the allocation of public funds to R&D’ analyses CPBF as a funding mechanism and compares it to the more traditional system of block funding. Section ‘The “formal subsumption of labour under capital”’ reconstructs the main features of the capitalist mode of production that are captured by the Marxist notion of ‘formal subsumption of labour under capital’. On these bases, Section ‘CPBF as a process of formal subsumption of labour under capital ’ re-examines CPBF in order to determine whether a process of formal subsumption of labour under capital is at work as research funds are increasingly funnelled to academic science through CPBF. Section ‘Conclusion’ summarises the main findings and elaborates on the most important political implication that, by the author’s point of view, arises from the examination of CPBF as a mechanism of formal subsumption of labour under capital.

CPBF in the Debate on the Commodification of Academic Research

Over the past decade, there has been a steady increase in the number of publications dealing with the commodification of academia and academic research (Tight, 2019). However, the debate has remained for the most part focused on the aforementioned collaborations between academic institutions and private companies, the UIRs. This is understandable in so far that UIRs were chronologically prior – already in the 1970s, academic professors began to set up biotechnology companies (Eagleton, 2017) – and ‘ontologically’ more prominent, for it is easier to blame the development of commodification on the entanglement of universities with private companies. Moreover, UIRs have also had a greater impact in organisational and epistemic terms so far. Scholars have warned against the spread of secrecy and malpractices of all kinds that too close an acquaintance with private companies could lead the academy to (see Brown (2010) and Lave et al. (2010) for an overview of the problems for academic research that private companies may cause).

Important as UIRs are in terms of the commodification of academic research (and they are to a large extent), some authors have rightly argued that they cannot account for the commodification of academic science to its full extent (Kleinman, 2010). After all, sources of revenue from collaborations with industry represent a meagre share of universities’ total budget, even in contexts that seem more prone to such partnerships, such as the US academy, or in research fields with a marked market orientation, as the case of Biotechnology (Kleinman, 2010). And it goes without saying that the influence of capital on the academic enterprise extends well beyond monetary flows taking place through UIRs (Kleinman and Suryanarayanan, 2013; Lave et al., 2010).

In the attempt to somewhat complicate the picture of the global restructuring of Higher Education occurring these days, ‘Academic Capitalism’ has examined the function(s) played by the capitalist state (without characterising it as ‘capitalist’) and public funding in all of this, touching also on the issue of the commodification of academic research. It is beyond the scope of this paper to develop a substantial engagement with Academic Capitalism as a tradition of thought, given its richness and the diversity of perspectives converging in it. Only the following can be said: Because of its overemphasis on power relations and political agencies, Academic Capitalism has tended to conceive of public funding in terms of the ‘governance’ of academic institutions and the ‘discipline’ imparted to them by national governments. CPBF is thus treated as one of those ‘quasi-market mechanisms’ that allegedly allow governments to steer academic institutions, as it were, ‘at a distance’ (Marginson, 2013). In the view of Academic Capitalism theorists, political agency far outweighs economic necessity. This can be clearly seen in some contributions that trace the transformations of the global system of Higher Education back to the deployment of New Public Management (NPM) principles in academic institutions (see, above all, Marginson, 2013; Münch, 2014). The prevalence of political agency leads some scholars to interpret the commodification of academic science as a contingent phenomenon, which cannot be fully developed (e.g. Marginson, 2013), or which can be reversed provided that other political wills take office (Kauppinen, 2014).

None of this is much of help in the examination of CPBF intended here, namely, in relation to the economic nature of the social relations of production established through CPBF. Nor is it possible to properly grasp, in the author’s view, how CPBF is situated within the broader dynamics of the commodification of academic science.

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. Above all, it has established once and for all that the commodification of academic science can only be comprehended in its essence if one keeps in sight (and delves into) the determinations of capitalist production and the patterns of capital accumulation. Putting it otherwise: The commodification of academic research must be understood as the unfolding of the capitalist relations of production in academia (Szadkowski, 2023). This is the methodological premise of this paper. Another important theoretical advance with respect to Academic Capitalism and other schools of thought is that Marxism has addressed mechanisms other than UIRs through which the capital–labour relations of production penetrate the core of the academic enterprise. ¹

For all that, however, Marxism has generally skipped over the question of the role played by the capitalist state in the commodification of academic research or how public funding fuels the global restructuring of Higher Education. More properly speaking, Marxist authors have not addressed this matter in any systematic form, often assuming, perhaps inadvertently, the point of view of Academic Capitalism. Following Szadkowski (2023), we can hypothesise that this may be due to the fact that academic enterprise is approached as already constituted by capitalist relations of production, thus foreclosing any enquiry into its ‘becoming’.

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). Such understanding still remains within the framework of the ‘public/private dichotomy’. It also overlooks what is truly critical in CPBF, namely, the transformation in the productive relations between the capitalist state and academic institutions. In turn, CPBF does not fit well with traditional conceptualisations of the commodification of academic research, as it neither amounts to the ‘pursuit of profits by academic institutions’, nor does it solely mean that ‘scientific activities and their results are predominantly interpreted and assessed on the basis of economic criteria’ (respectively, the ‘narrow’ and ‘expanded’ definitions of commodification in Radder (2010: 4)). CPBF stands as the more concrete shape taken by a deeper process involving the dependence of the academic community on commodity production and exchange for its own reproduction – a dependence which is in turn premised on the separation of the academic community from the objective conditions of knowledge production.

Competitive Project-Based Funding as an Instrument for the Allocation of Public Funds to R&D

However ‘natural’ it may appear today for academics to submit research proposals to competitive calls for projects and to compete for funding that way, this is by no means the only funding arrangement that has ever existed. Nor is it ‘natural’ that academic institutions are so heavily dependent on funding agencies and the money raised through CPBF.

Back in time, in both Europe and in the United States ‘block funding’ was the main instrument for the allocation and distribution of public funds to universities and thus to academic research. Universities received funding on the basis of the number of faculty and/or students (Hicks, 2012), so there were no competitive criteria in place. Only in this sense alone it can be affirmed that block funding came with ‘no strings attached’ (Hallonsten, 2021). But even in this narrower sense, the discretionary nature of funding and the absence of conditioning clauses were of paramount importance. For one thing, ‘no-strings-attached funds’ allowed researchers to conduct their research without worrying about deadlines, draft proposals, budgets, deliverables and all that comes with grant funding. Moreover, block funding gave academics leeway to distribute resources internally – funds were managed by the academic community itself. This made the allocation of funds between chairs and departments, disciplines and so on, utterly dependent on political relations, personal ties and contacts in the ‘upper spheres’ of the academic hierarchy – a situation which is by no means ideal, but which left some room for open-ended research and for a certain degree of control over one’s own research agenda. ³ At any rate, the reproduction of the academic community did not depend on commodity-mediated relations of production nor on exchange with funding agencies (De Oliveira, 2013). ⁴

Funding schemes deployed nowadays by governments and national states bear only little semblance to that previous situation. This is because CPBF has won the day as a funding arrangement for the allocation of public money into R&D activities. Once it started to unfold in both the United States and the United Kingdom around 1980s (Lepori et al., 2007; Wang et al., 2018), it soon spread and was taken up by most countries (Geuna, 2001). In fact, the switch to CPBF is considered as one of the essential components of the transformation in R&D funding that took place by the time CPBF started to be rolled out (Lepori et al., 2007), the rise in private investment and the shrinking of public budgets overall being the other two critical elements.

Competition is the most outstanding feature of CPBF as a funding mechanism. It introduces a distinctive feature vis-à-vis block funding, which was not reliant on competition, as it has been seen above. Grant funding is always based on a ‘competitive bid’ (Reale, 2017). Competition permeates CPBF through and through. It functions as follows: Funding agencies organise competitive calls for projects in which academics (usually organised as research teams) participate with their project proposals. A specifically appointed committee evaluates the competing research proposals, assessing them in relation to the requisites that are established beforehand by funding agencies themselves, and decide which project(s) deserve(s) funding (Franssen and De Rijcke, 2019). Several aspects are taken into account when projects are evaluated, including not only the plan of research as such, but also the budget, that is to say, the estimation of costs to be incurred. This latter aspect has an important bearing on the final decision: When two competing projects get similar marks in other criteria, the research team that can produce research results in the most cost-efficient way will be the winner (Geuna, 2001). Putting it sharply: CPBF spurs a competition of ‘all-against-all’, involving researchers and research teams, and, standing behind them, universities and research centres. It shall be seen below how important its competitive nature is to understand the economic foundations of CPBF as a funding instrument.

Alongside its competitive nature, another relevant feature of CPBF is that it shifts the locus of funding from the academic institution as such to the research project (Franssen et al., 2018). Funding agencies do not fund academic institutions, but only research projects. Universities are only indirectly funded through CPBF: Grant money offsets the direct costs that each university incurs when their researchers conduct research, and they also received an additional fixed proportion (~20%) over the total budget to cover indirect expenses – not subjected to fiscal accountability (Raudla et al., 2015). In this sense, universities are funded if their researchers take part in research projects with third party funding, and depending on the degree of the involvement of the latter. CPBF creates a great stimulus for universities to ‘encourage’ their employees to apply for funding in competitive calls. CPBF represents today an ‘entry point’ for academics who want to develop a solid research career – there is hardly any other way to obtain money for research (Ylijoki, 2016). Of course, as the locus of funding shifts, the decision-making capacity of academics is severely undermined: Funding agencies set the requirements of competitive calls for projects; the academic community has no say in this matter. CPBF thus bypasses its internal mechanisms of distribution and allocation of funds.

While CPBF has not fully replaced institutional funding in the allocation of public funds, it has definitely eclipsed it. This is already implied in the fact that block funding does not allow research to be conducted to any significant degree. But there are countries where CPBF prevails over institutional funding in both absolute and relative terms when it comes to allotting public funds to R&D activities. In Chile or Australia, CPBF represents more than 75% of public spending in science (OECD, 2018). In the United States, it amounts to roughly two-thirds of federal spending (OECD, 2018; Reale, 2017). The average across the OECD is one third. Europe has its ‘extreme’ cases as well. In Estonia, CPBF represents 80% of total funding for universities (Raudla et al., 2015; Reale, 2017). But in countries such as Belgium, Portugal, Ireland or Czech Republic, CPBF also predominates (Reale, 2017). We must recall here something that has been indicated earlier: the volume of public investment channelled through CPBF as a percentage of total governmental spending in R&D has grown in most countries since the beginning of the 21st century (Lepori et al., 2007; Reale, 2017: 41–42), that is, in a context of declining public budgets. CPBF has not expanded hand in hand with block funding. It has grown as a funding mechanism at the expense of the latter.

And, yet, the influence and pervasiveness of CPBF as a funding arrangement is not wholly reflected by these figures. For CPBF has developed alongside other transformations in institutional or block funding, changes that have led to the emergence of Performance-based Research Funding Systems (PRFS) (Hicks, 2012). PRFS means that part of the institutional funding is conditioned to universities meeting pre-defined thresholds of performance. Multiple targets are considered in each case, covering an ample range of academic activities, including teaching, research or even administration. The crux of the matter is that the volume of money raised through CPBF features prominently among those thresholds of performance that universities must meet (Hicks, 2012; Wang et al., 2020). In a rather perverse manner, PRFS funding schemes reward with extra institutional funding for those universities that have been more successful in raising third-party funding through CPBF, which is also public funding. This may explain that the OECD no longer regards block and grant funding as opposites, but in a ‘continuum’ (OECD, 2018).

That CPBF has established itself as an instrument for research policy, and for the allocation of public funds to R&D does not mean that it does not come without significant problems. In a brief outline, it can be said that it is a highly time-consuming and inefficient funding instrument (Franssen et al., 2018; Ioannidis, 2011); it stifles innovation, creativity and risk-taking in research (Franssen et al., 2018; Wang et al., 2018); it reinforces the ‘Matthew effect’ in science, as CPBF diverts funding towards researchers with a strong record in previous competitive calls for projects (Bol et al., 2018). Even more importantly, CPBF is a vector of precariousness, especially for early-stage researchers – who are doomed to research-only, fixed-term contracts associated to research projects (Franssen and De Rijcke, 2019). For universities as institutions, CPBF creates greater financial volatility and instability (Raudla et al., 2015), making financial planning more difficult and exposing them to what Slaughter and Cantwell (2012) in another context term ‘market failure’: Universities’ budgets will be severely strained if their employees fail to win competitive calls for projects over a relatively short period of time.

Against such a backdrop, some experts find striking that science policymakers continue to promote CPBF as a funding arrangement, particularly in countries that have become late adopters, such as Japan (Wang et al., 2018). But there is nothing surprising in this; not, at least, if one examines the rise and development of CPBF within the broader context of the commodification of academic research and enquires into its economic foundations. CPBF is not a funding arrangement for the allocation of public money to R&D activities as any other. (In fact, not even block funding should be regarded as so, for the historical reality that it encapsulates points towards social relations of production prevailing in academia that do not correspond to capitalist production – but that is the topic of a different paper). As it shall be seen below, CPBF is one of the most important mechanisms through which the bulk of research results/outcomes are transformed into commodities, as it turns the productive relations between academic institutions and the state into a commodity relationship; academic knowledge production is geared towards exchange-value (instead of use-value); and, by the same token, academic labour is formally subsumed under the rule of capital.

Given the foregoing, the remainder of this paper is devoted to exploring in depth the connection between CPBF and the subsumption of academic labour under capital. The following section reconstructs the main features of capitalist production that are captured by the Marxist notion of ‘formal subsumption of labour under capital’.

The ‘Formal Subsumption of Labour Under Capital’

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).

But the thing is that the occurrence of the commodity-form (i.e. the transformation of the products of labour into commodities) and the development of capitalist relations of production are not different phenomena – they are instead two moments of the very same historical process. Marx is clear about this when he says that the capital–labour relation is the ‘ultimate development’ of the value-relation and of production resting on value (i.e. commodity production) (Marx, 1986: 90). Elsewhere, he also notes that the whole system of capitalist production must be presupposed for the commodity-form to emerge as the general mediator of social production (Marx, 1986). Finally, in case anyone still harbours doubts, Marx never tires of stressing that the capital–labour relation only develops in conditions of fully fledged commodity production, and that the latter, and this is the crux of the matter, does not emerge unless labour itself is turned into a commodity. Or putting it otherwise: Commodity production develops on the basis of the separation of labour from the objective conditions of production, so that reproduction without exchange with capital is totally precluded for the workers.

As we understand the commodification of academic research as the process of unfolding of capitalist relations of production within academia (see Section ‘Introduction’), the foregoing compels us to examine CPBF in relation to the formal subsumption of labour under capital. Marx calls formal subsumption the separation of direct producers from the objective conditions of production; that is to say, the most general or simplest determination of capitalist production (Marx, 1994: 94). But Marx regards the formal subsumption of labour under capital dialectically, that is, both as the process and as the result of that separation of labour from the objective conditions of production. To him, the presupposition of the formal subsumption is that the means of production stand as an alien property to producers themselves ‘at least in part’ (Marx, 1994: 95). Turning the presupposition into its own result, the formal subsumption appears as the movement that completes the separation: ‘[T]he more completely these conditions of labour confront him as alien property, the more completely does the relation of capital and wage labour occur formally, hence the formal subsumption of labour under capital’ (Marx, 1994: 430; emphasis added). The formal subsumption appears thus as a process whose distinctiveness lies in that it produces and reproduces its own premises (i.e. the separation between labour and the conditions of production) in an ever-expanding scale.

In its simplicity, the formal subsumption of labour under capital is just a different shape taken on by the compulsion to perform surplus labour (Marx, 1994: 95). This compulsion is a common feature of any mode of production based on class divisions. But capitalism carries it out ‘in a manner more favourable to production’ (Marx, 1994: 122), insofar as it heightens the continuity and intensity of labour (Marx, 1994: 102).

The difference of the formal subsumption as a form of enforcing surplus labour on producers is two-fold. In comparison to the real subsumption of labour under capital, ‘the labour process continues exactly as it did before – from the technological point of view’ (Marx, 1994: 95). Capital subordinates already existing labour processes ‘formed on the basis of various earlier processes of production’ (Marx, 1994: 425). Real subsumption, on the contrary, ‘creates a change in the shape of material production’ (Marx, 1994: 106), bringing about a constant revolution in the mode of production itself, in the productivity of labour, and in the relation between capitalist and worker (Marx, 1994: 439). This is not to imply that changes in the materiality of production do not take place when labour is formally subsumed under capital. It only means that these changes are ‘gradual consequences’ of the process of subsumption (Marx, 1994: 436) – a side effect, rather than a conscious transformation of labour processes. In turn, the formal and the real subsumption of labour under capital are, respectively, connected to the forms of absolute and relative surplus value (Marx, 1994: 426).

The process of formal subsumption is not only distinctive with respect to real subsumption but also, and critically for the purpose of the analysis presented below, in relation to all previous modes of production based on the exploitation of surplus labour. Formal subsumption lays bare the economic dependence of the labourer on the non-labourer, since it removes ‘all patriarchal and political admixtures from the relation of exploitation’ (Marx, 1994: 102). From now on, that dependence is asserted in and through commodity production and exchange (Marx, 1994: 95). The labourer is fully dependent on capital and on exchange in general, but not on the exchange with any particular capitalist. She or he is independent in this formal sense because he or she is a commodity owner – and so long as he or she is a commodity owner and can step into the market as such (Marx, 1994: 430). This has an important bearing on the characterisation of CPBF as a funding mechanism in the context of the commodification of academia. Incidentally, it must also be noted that these insights provide additional evidence for the inner connection set out above between the generalisation of commodity production and the development of the capital–labour relationship.

Summing up, the Marxist notion of ‘formal subsumption of labour under capital’ designates the economic process through which labour is separated from the objective conditions of production, so that commodity production and exchange become the only means (the form) through which the direct producers can reproduce themselves. The separation is partial at first, but it attains its completion on the basis of the inner dynamics of formal subsumption – the latter reproduces its own premises on an ever-expanding scale. Crucially, through the process of formal subsumption, commodity production and exchange are developed at its fullest. This is because the economic dependence of the labourers from the non-labourers is realised, as it were, through the production and exchange of commodities. Both subjects find each other in the market as commodity owners, that is, formally autonomous and independent. The direct producer is dependent on exchange in general, but not on particular non-labourers. The last important feature to be considered is that the formal subsumption does not bring about a significant transformation of labour processes – they remain as they were from the technical point of view.

Having before us the most important features of the formal subsumption of labour under capital, we can finally re-examine CPBF under this light in order to assess whether a process of formal subsumption of academic labour under capital operates here.

CPBF as a Process of Formal Subsumption of Labour Under Capital

The methodological premise of this paper is that the productive relations established between funding agencies and academic institutions through CPBF can be better elucidated by drawing on the Marxian notion of formal subsumption of labour under capital. From the author’s point of view, this methodological premise clears the way for a proper grasp of the economic nature of CPBF and how such funding arrangement locates itself within the broader dynamics of the commodification of academic research. But it also sets an important methodological restriction. It means that we are concerned above all with the formal side of the productive relations between the state (through funding agencies) and academic institutions that are established in and through CPBF. The content of the science being produced under the auspices of funding agencies necessarily takes secondary importance – for this research in particular; this issue is highly relevant on its own. CPBF does not alter the fact that academic research is broadly shaped by the interests and needs of the capitalist state. What is substantially modified is that the productive relations between universities and the state (through funding agencies) become now commodity-mediated. And given that the state remains the main funder of academic science, this circumstance is of no little consequence. ⁵

Relatedly, it is also important to consider the extent to which the conceptualisation of CPBF in terms of formal subsumption, that is to say, as the separation of academic labour from the objective conditions of production, presupposes that there may have been a sort of unity back in time. Exploring this question in depth is a matter for another paper. Yet it can be concluded that block funding produced certain social conditions of production in academia that can be interpreted that way. At the very least, the reproduction of the academic community was not dependent on commodity production nor on exchange with funding agencies; nor was exchange-value the main purpose of academic production, so that the only ‘use-value’ of research results is that they will be purchased by funding agencies. In a sense, the academic community could behave towards the conditions of production as if they were their property because academics themselves were left to manage and distribute the resources flowing from the state – the academic community thus was granted the capacity to regulate its own reproduction (De Oliveira, 2013; Hallonsten, 2021). This being said, when it is claimed that CPBF deepens the separation of academic labour from the objective conditions of production, it should not be understood in terms of individual academic producers, but in terms of the academic community – which is the real productive community – as a whole.

The distinction between ‘funding agency’ and ‘performing agency’ enacted by contemporary science policymaking contains, so to speak, the alpha and the omega of the economic foundations of CPBF. This separation assumes that both entities are formally autonomous and independent. As CPBF presupposes that there are no productive relations between the two, their material exchanges must perforce assume the economic form of commodity production and exchange. As seen above, the formal subsumption of labour under capital implies that the productive relations between the labourer and the non-labourer is not blended with ‘admixtures’ not belonging in commodity production, that is, relations of political dependence of any kind. The separation between funding and performing agencies presupposes that the two entities are not connected to one another by relations of production different from the economic ones that are realised in the production and exchange of commodities.

Looking closer at this relationship, we find that funding agencies represent money, the ‘universal equivalent’, hence the particular commodity that represents material wealth in capitalist societies. That money, in turn, represents those conditions of production of knowledge that academic institutions can no longer avail by themselves, that is, without entering in exchange with funding agencies through competitive calls for projects. Such conditions of production are owned by funding agencies. On the contrary, academic institutions represent labour and the remaining conditions of production that funding agencies have not yet taken possession of. Accordingly, funding agencies assume the role of buyers of research results/outcomes, whereas universities act in their capacity of sellers of the outcomes of their employees’ labouring activity – in the form of research projects in which the latter take part.

As CPBF articulates the sale of research results produced in research projects, ‘getting funded’ reads here as ‘sale’. Grant money is not subsidies; funding agencies are buying the outcomes of universities’ productive activities, whatever their material embodiment might be (technological innovation, technical intervention, evidence-based policy papers, etc.). When research projects are sold, universities can at last get the money necessary to renew their research-related productive activities and keep them running. Academic institutions must therefore participate in competitive calls for projects because they are economically dependent on the sale of their research results, hence on exchange with funding agencies. (An unheard-of situation when block funding prevailed). That academic producers are increasingly obliged to compete for funding in competitive calls for projects is the most concrete shape that that economic dependence adopts. All of this is in full accordance with the features of the formal subsumption of labour set out above.

As representatives of money, funding agencies have purchasing power. This is a ‘power’ vis-à-vis academic institutions that entirely depend on funding agencies’ budget for R&D activities. In this capacity, funding agencies can and do define the use-values they want to buy, as it would correspond to any other buyer in any other commodity transaction. Funding agencies let researchers know what research outcomes they are interested in by establishing more or less specific requisites in their competitive calls for projects. Researchers must comply with them if they want to stand a chance in the competition. In addition, when they obtain the funds, they are contractually obliged to provide what they committed to in the first place. This circumstance provides additional evidence that CPBF articulates a material exchange between funding agencies and academic institutions that is commodity-mediated in every respect. ⁶

For all that, however, funding agencies do not usually introduce any particular clause in relation to how research activities are to be performed. This is left to the discretion of researchers themselves. Accordingly, funding agencies take a stance towards the research process similar to that adopted by the capitalists towards production processes only formally subsumed under their rule: They take them as given and do not try to revolutionise them. Of course, knowledge production is constantly (albeit slowly) evolving from a technological and organisational point of view, yet these changes should be considered as side-effects of the cost-efficient behaviours (Geuna, 2001) that research teams must adopt if they want to have their projects funded. They are thus ‘gradual consequences’, as Marx (1994: 436) puts it, of the process of formal subsumption of academic labour under capital which is mediated by CPBF.

Now, how can funding agencies enforce that ‘cost-efficient behaviour’ on academics and research teams? By putting them to compete against other applicants for funding. As it was commented above, competition is ingrained in CPBF (Lepori et al., 2007; OECD, 2018; Reale, 2017). In fact, competition is the cornerstone of CPBF as a funding instrument. With the competition between project proposals (thus, research teams and the universities that support them), funding agencies ensure that the use-values they buy (i.e. research results/outcomes) embody only socially necessary labour time. One illustration of this is that funding agencies establish which direct costs are eligible for funding – any other expense will not be offset. That socially necessary labour time is established in a roundabout way and, in such a condition, enforced upon direct producers, confirms once again that CPBF operates at the level of the formal subsumption of labour under capital (see, on this, Marx, 1994: 429–430).

But competition in CPBF is all-encompassing. It must be recalled that academic institutions, in their determination as commodity owners, are formally autonomous and independent subjects. Therefore, they have leeway when it comes to choosing which competitive calls for projects they want to apply for; or, in other words, with which funding agency they want to exchange. Universities will logically look for those funding agencies whose budget is bigger, because the chances of success are correspondingly higher. Competition thus operates at both ends of the exchange relationship. The power of funding agencies vis-à-vis academic institutions entirely depends on their purchasing capacity, that is, on the money they can spend. As a result, funding agencies can maintain their control over academic knowledge production if they can continue to act as commodity owners, and according to the size of their budget. Funding agencies compete with one another to attract as many performing agencies as possible. And the form that this competition takes is the expenditure of greater amounts of money – in other words, by the growing volume of R&D funding managed by funding agencies. From the author’s point of view, this circumstance helps to understand why governments have favoured CPBF as a funding mechanism lately. National states and governments have been pushed to allocate more money for R&D activities through funding agencies and through competitive calls for projects – even at the expense of block funding – because otherwise they run the risk that their own national academic institutions (partly supported through institutional funding) would conduct research in the benefit of foreign constellations of capital accumulation – or, at any rate, in the pursuit of national interests that are not their own. ⁷ In a sense, CPBF translates inter-imperialistic rivalries to the terrain of research funding. ⁸

Putting it somewhat provocatively: CPBF immanently begets CPBF. Owing to its own internal economic dynamics (its competitive nature), the volume of public funds allocated on the basis of CPBF increases. This reminds us once again of the formal subsumption of labour under capital: It was seen above that the latter is a process which does not only create its own premises, but that it does so in an ever-growing scale. Correspondingly, what was at first as a partial separation of labour from the objective conditions of production eventually gets at its completion. Of course, even if CPBF is in the last instance self-activating, its growth is politically mediated. But it could not be otherwise, given that CPBF is chiefly used for the allocation of public funds and the majority of funding agencies are public institutions.

The upshot of the foregoing is that CPBF does not only reproduce the economic dependence of academic institutions on CPBF, on commodity production and exchange – it also deepens it. After the exchange between academic institutions and funding agencies through CPBF is completed, the former find themselves in the same economic dependence upon the latter in which they were in the first place. Grant money thus obtained does not allow them in the slightest to escape from their dependence on funding agencies, exchange-value and commodity production. On the contrary, they are compelled to ‘go to the market’ (i.e. participate in new calls for projects) once again and sell the products of their productive activities (which take on the form of projects) if they want to stay afloat and avoid the ‘market failure’. But the growth of R&D funding allocated via CPBF represents another twist to academic institutions’ economic dependence. More money funnelled through CPBF implies more objective conditions of production falling now on the side of funding agencies. The independent reproduction of academic institutions (i.e. reproduction without exchange with funding agencies) is subsequently narrowed down.

Abstractly speaking, CPBF may grow alongside institutional funding in a context of general expansion of public budgets for R&D, so that the economic dependence referred above may not be sharpened. If block funding remains as yet not totally eclipsed by grant funding and allows some research to be carried out, the separation of the academic community from the objective conditions of production remains partial; there are mechanisms by which the academic community can reproduce itself without exchange with funding agencies. But this is an illusory scenario. The historical reality is that CPBF has grown since the beginning of the 21st century at the expense of institutional funding (Lepori et al., 2007; OECD, 2018; Reale, 2017). As CPBF grows, so does the economic dependence of academic institutions on commodity production and exchange-value; and the separation of academic labour from the objective conditions of production deepens. Spurred by its own inner economic dynamics, CPBF has reproduced its own premises in an expanding scale, leading to the more complete estrangement of academic producers from their own objective conditions of production. CPBF is one of the most important mechanisms that mediates the formal subsumption of labour under capital in contemporary academia.

Conclusion

This paper has examined CPBF in the context of the commodification of academia and academic research. Traditionally, CPBF has been overlooked by the extant literature, treating it as unimportant or, at best, as a mechanism for political control of academic institutions (e.g. Marginson, 2013). This paper has demonstrated that CPBF deserves closer study and conceptualisation, since it opens the door for the unfolding of capitalist relations of production in academia, further reinforcing, but also substantially modifying and overdetermining, other dynamics of the commodification of academic science –for example, some funding agencies actively encourage partnerships between academia and business at the level of research projects’ membership. Crucially, CPBF mediates the development of commodity-based relations of production in that domain of the academic enterprise that has traditionally been regarded as free (or freer) from commodification.

To shed light on the commodity-mediated nature of the material relations between funding agencies (capitalist state’s representatives) and academic institutions, this paper has examined CPBF in the light of the determinations of capitalist relations of production that are captured by the Marxian notion of ‘formal subsumption of labour under capital’. It has thus been shown that CPBF is one the most important mechanisms through which academic institutions are made dependent on commodity production; academic activities are one-sidedly oriented towards exchange-value; and, by the same token, academic labour is formally subsumed under capital.

The first step in this examination has consisted in establishing the distinctiveness of CPBF vis-à-vis block or institutional funding. It has been seen that CPBF can be considered as ‘epoch-making’ in that it turns competition into the decisive criterion for the distribution of public funds to R&D, thus undermining the degree of control that the academic community could still exercise over its own reproduction. A circumstance which is further compounded by the fact that CPBF funds projects, not institutions as a whole. Institutional funding, the part of public funding still covering overhead costs, does not allow to carry out research at all.

Afterwards, the paper has examined the main features of the capitalist relations of production captured by the Marxian notion of ‘formal subsumption of labour under capital’. It has been concluded that the occurrence of the commodity-form cannot be understood as external to the development of the capital–labour relations of production – or vice versa. That material exchanges between funding agencies and academic institutions take the form of commodity production and exchange is nothing else but the more concrete shape that the formal subsumption of academic labour under capital adopts. It has also been concluded that, for Marx, the formal subsumption is as much the process of stripping labour from the objective conditions of production as it is the result of such separation. The formal subsumption reproduces its own presuppositions. And the deepening of the separation of labour from the objective conditions of production is fully mediated by commodity-based relations of production, since the latter are wholly premised on the economic dependence of labourers upon the non-labourers. The more the commodity exchange between the two is repeated, the more the former confront the objective conditions of production as an alien property – that is, the more complete the separation of labour from the conditions of production becomes.

On these bases, Section ‘CPBF as a process of formal subsumption of labour under capital ’ has re-examined CPBF in order to ascertain whether it truly corresponds to a process of formal subsumption of academic labour under capital. The analysis has shown that all the features corresponding to the formal subsumption are present in the productive relations between academic institutions and funding agencies that CPBF mediates. While CPBF is premised on the partial separation of academic labour from the objective conditions of production, it both reproduces and deepens that split. As more public money is funnelled through CPBF, a larger share of the objective conditions of academic production are owned by funding agencies in the form of money. It increases the economic dependence of academic institutions on commodity production and exchange, hence on CPBF. The critical point is that the share of public funding distributed through CPBF grows as a result of CPBF’s own inner economic dynamics, that is to say, its competitive nature. As a funding arrangement, CPBF is both the expression of the formal subsumption of academic labour under capital – for it has as a presupposition a partial separation of academic labour from the objective conditions of production – and one of the mechanisms through which such separation gets at its completion – it reproduces in an ever-expanding scale the separation. The more CPBF grows, the more the objective conditions of academic knowledge production appear as an alien property vis-à-vis the academic community, so that the more complete becomes the formal subsumption of academic labour under the capitalist relations of production.

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). It is true that more public funding may make UIRs redundant for universities, but it cannot halt the commodification of academic research, that is to say, the transformation of the products of academic labour into commodities and the subversion of the traditional relations of production in academia. As a matter of fact, CPBF attests that public funding has been and continues to be a catalyst and accelerator for the development of capitalist relations of production in academia. Through CPBF, the commodity-form has been raised to the level of the general mediator of academic knowledge production, even in those fields that have usually been of less interest to private capitals (not only the social sciences or the humanities, but also some approaches to certain issues that are seen by business as less profitable; national states have replaced private capitals as the purchasing power in all those cases). The supersession of the commodification of academia and academic research (not its mere ‘reversal’, if such a thing could be achievable at all) obliges us to think of a political strategy against the commodification of academic science whose horizon goes beyond, and whose potentialities transcend the confines of, the capitalist state.