The Commodification of Academic Research: Science and the Modern University

12. Capitalism and Knowledge: The University between Commodification and Entrepreneurship

277 Chapter 12 Capitalism and Knowledge The University between Commodification and Entrepreneurship Steve Fuller Critiques of capitalism come in two kinds. I shall begin by presenting them in the spirit in which they are normally discussed. One kind attacks capitalism in practice. It is associated with Joseph Schumpeter, who targeted the monopolization of capital for stifling the entrepreneurial spirit, capitalism’s very soul. The other critique is older and goes deeper, attacking capitalism in principle. It is associated with Karl Marx, who targeted the commodification of labor for alienating us from our common humanity. Whereas Schumpeter was worried about capitalism’s practical tendency to concentrate wealth and thereby arrest the economy ’s natural dynamism, Marx objected to capitalism’s principled tendency to evaporate the solid core of our “species being” through the dynamics of the price mechanism. I believe that both critiques continue to have merit, though to a large extent they cut against each other: after all, Schumpeter’s entrepreneurs and Marx’s commodifiers are equally interested in the fact that people will pay for things they had not paid for before. The difference lies simply in the positive and the negative spin, respectively, that is given to this moment. Here Marx appears clearly as the 278 Steve Fuller secular heir of natural law theory, with his rather strict, metaphysically inspired ideas about what is and is not properly bought and sold. For him, our freedom lies in our capacity to remain unchanged despite changing circumstances, such as fluctuating prices. This also captures Kant’s sense of autonomy as principled resistance to external pressure. In contrast, Schumpeterian liberty is the freedom to change our minds—and even ourselves. (I shall return to this attitude as characteristic of the relatively relaxed attitude that Austrian economics has had toward commodification.) If Marx worried about our regressing to animals, Schumpeter was concerned that we might instead turn into robots: the one too sensitive, the other too oblivious to what happens outside oneself. In this respect, the entrepreneur thus regularly reminds us of the other sorts of lives we might lead, especially the one she would like to sell us now. The permanent openness to change is also the feature of the Austrian stance that Popper imported into his critique of irreversible social engineering (Hacohen 2000, chaps. 3, 10). At the ontological level, the difference between Marx and Schumpeter can be understood as capturing the economic dimension of both sides of the “carbonsilicon divide” that increasingly draws human identity in countervailing directions (Fuller 2006b, 202–5; Fuller 2007a, 44–52): are we “moral animals” who should rejoin our fellow carbon-based creatures in promoting a common sustainable ecology, à la Peter Singer (1999), or “spiritual machines” who should create as much distance as possible from our animal past, à la Ray Kurzweil (1999)? On the one hand, like Marx, though on different grounds, Singer wants to establish a nonnegotiable source of value. On the other, like Schumpeter, though again on different grounds, Kurzweil wants to maximize our capacity for “shapeshifting,” to use the preferred term for transformations that one’s identity can undergo in virtual reality. My own considered view is that in today’s knowledge economy, a dose of Schumpeter’s original concern to maintain capitalism’s entrepreneurial spirit is needed to prevent Marx’s critique of commodification from turning into a defense of an unholy alliance of the labor theory of value and a strong proprietary sense of intellectual life that I call “epistemic racism,” whereby identity comes to be associated with a nonnegotiable, indeed, hereditary sense of knowledge, understood in the broad nineteenth century sense of “inheritance” in which genetic and cultural modes of transfer are blended into an economic conception of property, in this case “intellectual property.” At the same time, as Schumpeter came to realize later in his career, entrepreneurship is not an unmitigated good, especially as it puts increasing numbers of 279 Capitalism and Knowledge people and resources at risk. In that case, something is needed to contain these destabilizing effects—the so-called boom and bust phases of the business cycle. Schumpeter (1942/1950) famously predicted that socialism would fill this need but only by strangling entrepreneurship altogether in its determination to bring the economy to a state of general equilibrium. However, as I shall argue, the university provides an alternative model of an institution capable of not only containing entrepreneurship...