In the 20th century, public universities and technical institutions were established, while technology development was focused in the R&D labs of large corporations. The era of lone inventors had ended and corporations gathered leading scientists and technologists to create future technologies. Capital was still expanding production during this time.

In the past, finance capital was dominant over productive capital, but major capitalist countries still had a strong manufacturing base. Science was seen as a public good and was mainly developed in universities or publicly funded research institutions. Technology development was considered a private enterprise, with the role of innovation being to turn ideas into artifacts. Patents were created to protect useful ideas and also had a public purpose of ensuring eventual public disclosure of the invention.

The traditional university system of knowledge production has been transformed into a profit-making commercial enterprise under the neoliberal order. The distinction between science and technology has blurred, leading to innovations that are both patentable and marketable. This has driven many disciplines of science and research output in universities closer to commercial production systems. The university system now produces knowledge directly for commercial purposes, while R&D laboratories have been destroyed. Finance capital controls university science through investment in R&D and the purchase of patents, allowing it to dominate over industrial capital.

The end of the twentieth century revealed the rupture of finance capital and productive capital. Today, global capital operates far more as disembodied finance capital, controlling production at one end with its control over technology and markets at the other. In this phase, where capital increasingly lives off speculation and rent, there is also a marked separation of knowledge as capital from productive or physical capital—plant and machinery. Foxconn/Hon Hai Precision Industries manufactures Apple products but cannot claim a major share in the profits from their sale, since Apple holds the intellectual knowledge and property rights. Roughly, Apple gets 31 percent of the profits from an iPhone sale, Foxconn less than two percent.

The transformation of capital to rent seeking, by using its monopoly over knowledge—patents, copyrights, industrial designs, etc.—characterizes the current phase of capital. With this, the advanced capitalist countries have increasingly become rentier and “service” economies. In essence, they dominate the world by virtue of controlling the global financial structure, new knowledge required for production, and distribution through retail and global brands.

Despite universities being influenced by capitalism and becoming more like businesses, the knowledge they produce is still funded by the public. Private capital dictates the direction of scientific research and takes over successful outcomes, but this transformation did not come about through private funding. The state covers the high cost of fundamental research, while private capital receives the patents. This reflects the neoliberal system's socialization of risk and privatization of rewards.

The understanding that science needs to be restored as an open and collaborative exercise has given birth to the commons movement. By a curious sleight of hand, capitalism sees the finite commons—the atmosphere and large water bodies such as lakes, rivers and oceans—as infinite, and demands the right to dump waste in these commons. Yet it regards knowledge, capable of being copied infinite number of times without loss, as finite and demands monopoly rights over it!

Never before has society had the ability it does today to bring together different communities and resources in order to produce new knowledge. It is social, universal labor, and its private appropriation as intellectual property under capitalism stands in the way of liberating the enormous power of the collective to generate new knowledge and benefit people.