1015377

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ORG0010.1177/13505084211015377OrganizationWalsh

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Marx, subsumption and the critique © The Author(s) 2021
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DOI: 10.1177/13505084211015377
https://doi.org/10.1177/13505084211015377
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Shannon Walsh
University of Auckland, New Zealand

Abstract
This paper advances a Marxist approach to the critical study of innovation. Such an approach
offers alternative analytical tools for understanding the social and political aspects of innovation
that are increasingly coming into focus within academic and practitioner fields. After outlining
the emerging field of critical innovation studies and its key concerns, I turn to the question of
how a Marxist critique differs from other forms of critical scholarship. I then introduce Marx’s
application of the concept of subsumption to account for the relation between innovation and
capital and to demonstrate the strength of a Marxist approach to the critical study of innovation.

Keywords
Capital, critical innovation studies, formal and real subsumption, innovation policy

As a distinct form of inquiry, the academic study of innovation developed from around the mid
twentieth century (Godin, 2015). By 2009 this had reached a level of activity such that Fagerberg
and Verspagen (2009) were able to verify its character as an ‘emerging scientific field’ (p. 218). For
their study, Fagerberg and Verspagen conducted a survey of almost 900 scholars who self-identi-
fied as belonging to the area of ‘innovation studies’. In addition, they identified institutional
resources, such as research units and conferences, in order to determine the general ‘structure’ of
this emerging scientific field. At the time they offered a conservative estimate of around 4,000
scholars worldwide whose work they considered to fit within innovation studies. In the decade
since the article was published, the field of innovation studies seems only to have grown. Today, as
Godin and Vinck (2017) reflect, ‘the study of innovation has become an industry’ (p. 1).
Fagerberg and Verspagen’s (2009) study asked survey respondents to list their main ‘sources of
scholarly inspiration’ for the study of innovation (p. 224). They include a list of the most statisti-
cally significant names offered by the survey respondents (those that were named by above 5% of

Corresponding author:
Shannon Walsh, Sociology, School of Social Sciences, University of Auckland, PO Box 92019, Level 9 Human Sciences
Building, Auckland 1042, New Zealand.
Email: s.walsh@auckland.ac.nz
2 Organization 00(0)

respondents). In this a person appears that, they admit, ‘may perhaps come as a surprise to some’:
the figure of Marx (2009: 224). They do not offer much by way of an explanation beyond mention-
ing Marx’s influence on Joseph Schumpeter, who holds the top position as a source of scholarly
inspiration for innovation studies. This appearance of Marx is likely to remain surprising to those
whose work falls within the broad remit of innovation studies because of the continued paucity of
published works within the field that cite, let alone seriously engage, the work of Marx or the
Marxist canon. Indeed, aside from Schumpeter’s contributions, the author of Capital seems to be
almost entirely excluded from not only the mainstream of innovation studies but, as we shall see,
from its emerging ‘critical’ strand as well.1
Some studies trace themes in innovation back to historical figures such as Xenophon (Blok,
2019; Godin, 2008, 2015) or Machiavelli (Bontems, 2014; Godin, 2008, 2015; Pocock, 1972). Yet
despite being an intellectual source with far more historical relevance, Marx and Marxism have
not received the same treatment. This is even more surprising given the influence of Marx on
Schumpeter (1939, 1943), who remains the main scholarly influence for mainstream innovation
studies after giving the question of innovation one of its first systematic theoretical developments
in the early twentieth century. Schumpeter himself expressed surprise at the failure of his contem-
poraries to recognise the destructive side of innovation, an idea captured in his much extolled
concept of ‘creative destruction’, writing that, ‘it may seem strange that anyone can fail to see so
obvious a fact which moreover was long ago emphasized by Karl Marx’ (Schumpeter, 1943: 82).
This being said, a small but growing number of studies are beginning to shed critical light on
the innovation process, its contradictions, and the often spurious assumptions that accompany
mainstream innovation scholarship. There is also a growing recognition of the disconnect between
ambitions for innovative change stated by businesses and governments and the possibilities
afforded by the organisational and conceptual frameworks that presently structure innovative
activities. Over the past 20 years innovation has captured the policy space. The European Union,
for example, has been criticised for placing an ‘increasingly singular emphasis on “innovation” as
the solution to Europe’s economic and social problems’ (de Saille, 2015: 155). Penetrating critical
accounts of innovation are therefore needed to balance the influence of an uncritical and academi-
cally dubious pro-innovation lobby.
What is lacking from the growing body of work of critical innovation studies, and what I hope
to add with this paper, is an explicit discussion of the relation between capital and innovation, and
an explicitly Marxist approach to key concerns within the discourse of innovation studies. More
generally, I offer the fairly simple suggestion that innovation today is best understood as innova-
tion under capital. Taking this as a starting point opens the rich resources of the Marxist critique of
political economy to the study of innovation. Many of the paradoxes of innovation are perfectly
comprehensible and indeed predicted by a Marxist analysis. Moreover, a Marxist analysis offers an
account of innovation that situates technological and economic development within a broader
account of economy and society. In particular, Marx’s work on the formal and real subsumption of
labour under capital offers novel ways to understand the key political imperatives that drive much
economic and technological development.
This paper offers an initial attempt at recovering the work of Marx and the Marxist tradition for
the study of innovation. I use the word ‘recover’ here, rather than ‘introduce’, because of the rec-
ognised influence of Marxism on the foundational ideas of innovation studies. Although this influ-
ence has primarily been transmitted via Schumpeter, Marxism has always existed and developed in
relation to mainstream, or ‘bourgeois’, accounts of the economy. This lies at the core of what Marx
meant when he gave the subtitle ‘a critique of political economy’ to Capital. I return to the question
of what a Marxist ‘critique’ means below. Innovation studies often take capitalism for granted and
the word itself is one of capital’s contemporary slogans. If such studies now represent something
Walsh 3

of a field, then a Marxist response is appropriate, and brings with it theoretical resources for under-
standing the significance of innovation under capital.
The paper is organised into three main sections. First, I introduce the emerging field of critical
innovation studies in order to situate its key areas of focus and insights about the limits and presup-
positions of mainstream innovation studies. Second, I turn to the question of what makes a form of
scholarship ‘critical’ in order to lay the groundwork for a Marxist approach. Following this, I
introduce Marx’s concepts of the formal and real subsumption of labour under capital in order to
demonstrate the relevance these concepts have for critical studies of innovation. While this is only
the beginning of a conversation, with this paper I hope to open the field of critical innovation stud-
ies to the analytic resources of Marxism.

The emerging field of critical innovation studies

If the study of innovation has become a recognisable and institutionally established field, critical
studies of innovation are extremely marginal by comparison. At the time of writing, only one
edited collection, Critical Studies of Innovation, explicitly considers itself to offer a ‘critical’ study
of innovation (Godin and Vinck, 2017). An earlier collection, Challenging the Innovation Paradigm
(Sveiby et al., 2012a), as well as a handful of journal articles, some of which are considered below,
can also be considered to take a critical stance and, taken together, constitute what might be called
the ‘emerging field’ of critical innovation studies.
Both Critical Studies of Innovation and Challenging the Innovation Paradigm begin from a rec-
ognition of the continued dominance of a ‘pro-innovation bias’ that has characterised the field since
its beginnings (See Rogers, 1962). ‘Innovation research’, argue Gripenberg et al. (2012) ‘seems to be
built on a dominant assumption that “innovation is good” regardless of the consequences’ (p. 1).
Godin and Vinck (2017) note that this pro-innovation bias contributes to a situation where innovation
has become ‘a panacea for every socioeconomic problem’ despite a marked lack of attention to ‘what
these problems are, and what the collateral impacts of the innovation would be’ (p. 2).
Mainstream innovation studies hardly ever pause to consider the negative consequences of
innovation. The first task critical studies of innovation are faced with is simply establishing that
innovation does not offer a magic solution to problems of economy and society and establishing
the necessity of challenging such assumptions. Challenging the Innovation Paradigm and Critical
Studies of Innovation are certainly successful in this task and offer valuable reflections on the his-
tory, politics, economics and culture of innovation that dissent from and challenge the taken for
granted assumptions of mainstream innovation studies.
The pro-innovation bias has had a material impact on the field. Sveiby et al. (2012b) undertook
two systematic literature searches and a reading of the six most influential handbooks in the field
of innovation studies in order to account for studies addressing the negative consequences of inno-
vation. They found that only 0.1%–0.4% of the articles their search yielded contained discussions
of the unintended or undesirable consequences of innovation. Moreover, they found that most of
these treated innovation as the dependent variable, meaning that ‘they study effects that have a
negative impact on innovation, rather than the negative effects that follow innovation’ (Sveiby
et al., 2012b: 76). As their analysis makes clear, it becomes very difficult to imagine how innova-
tion could ever be a panacea to social problems when, ‘Environmental issues, harmful products or
issues for society outside the industry, or firm contexts are rarely raised as topics, and when they
are, innovation is the dependent variable’ (Sveiby et al., 2012b: 78). The marginalisation of such
‘externalities’ in mainstream innovation studies means that the ‘fact that the issues and concerns
may be caused by innovation in the first place is not a topic’ (Sveiby et al., 2012b: 78). As we will
see below, this externalising gesture is key to Marx’s concept of formal subsumption.
4 Organization 00(0)

In addition to combatting the pro-innovation bias, the need for a critical approach to innovation
is evidenced by the ambiguous position politics holds within the innovation literature. A central
theme of existing critical approaches to innovation is found in their affirmation that innovation is
an object for political contestation. As Godin’s (2008, 2015, 2016, 2017) historical work tracing
the origins and development of the concept from antiquity shows, the widely celebrated position
innovation enjoys today sits in contrast to what was once a widely contested and, importantly,
political concept. His comprehensive bibliometric study of the development of the concept shows
that its present configuration as a concept devoid of politics is a relatively recent phenomenon.
This shift in the position of politics with regard to innovation is significant. The ancient under-
standing of innovation as something that threatened ‘the established order’ (Godin, 2015: 5) is
fundamentally different to the role innovation plays within contemporary capitalism, where it
functions to defend and expand the command of capital.
The academic depoliticisation of innovation is contemporaneous with innovation playing a cen-
tral role in state policy and economic planning. Pfotenhauer and Juhl (2017) challenge the ‘consist-
ently narrow framing of the relationship between innovation and the state as a normative and
deeply problematic construct’ (p. 70). Their critical summary of Mazzucato’s (2015) The
Entrepreneurial State describes a situation where innovation ‘plays out in a seemingly apolitical
and conflict-free space between objective science and technology, on the one hand, and efficient
rational markets, on the other’ (Pfotenhauer and Juhl, 2017: 69). As such, the role of the state, they
argue, is routinely limited to the ‘mere facilitation of a naturalized dynamic’ (p. 81). This apolitical
framing of innovation is insincere; by their own reckoning, innovation is a means for governing
society. The constant framing of innovation as apolitical turns out to be a crucial part of innova-
tion’s political agenda. The routine presentation of innovation as ‘a naturalized dynamic’ means its
specific ‘political aspects’ (Courvisanos, 2009) as part of the governance of modern capitalist
economies are obscured or put off the table.
Working within what most would recognise as a neo-Keynesian framework, Courvisanos (2009)
develops an important critical account of ‘the political aspects of innovation’, analysing the strate-
gies capitalist organisations use to protect their interests by influencing innovation policy, and
demonstrating how these strategies coincide with the movement of mid to long-term business
cycles. Although the main motivation for this work is the development an analytical policy tool,
Courvisanos’ contribution offers an important counterpoint to the otherwise broad depoliticisation
of innovation. Innovation might indeed be presented as a naturalised dynamic in much of the litera-
ture, yet as Courvisanos makes clear, capitalist firms and their lobbyists are perfectly aware of the
‘political aspects’ of innovation and incorporate these within their strategies. Courvisanos there-
fore reveals the implicit political aspects of the otherwise ‘depoliticised’ sphere of innovation.
Godin’s (2006a, 2006b) efforts to account for the origins of the technological and economic
framing of innovation that predominates today are similarly attentive to the political aspects of
innovation. This is shown in his concern for the homogenisation of innovation policy. Godin (2003,
2006a, 2006b) shows in detail how the relatively independent investigations into innovation by
three separate communities – scientists (including social scientists), management theorists and
economists – coalesced, with the help of OECD statistics, into the homogenous concept that now
informs government science policies worldwide. Despite Schumpeter’s (1939) distinction between
invention and innovation, which bracketed scientific invention as being ‘without importance to
economic analysis’ (p. 85), the idea that innovation primarily concerns the commercialisation of
scientific invention has become standard in the literature. This path from scientific invention to its
commercialisation is what came to be known as the linear model of innovation. This is now fully
standardised within the statistical approaches to the measurement of innovative activities that
inform government science policies worldwide. As Godin (2006b) demonstrates, the development
Walsh 5

of statistical modelling was crucial in reinforcing this particular understanding of the innovation
process: ‘Having become entrenched – with the help of statistical categories for counting resources
and allocating money to science and technology – and standardized under the auspices of the
Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and its methodological manu-
als the linear model functioned as a social fact’ (p. 641).
In both the economics and policy fields, those analysing innovation often build their models
around the most economically significant aspects of the process, describing the path from ‘basic’
or ‘pure’ scientific work through to its application, development, commercialisation and diffusion,
including marketing. This places particular emphasis on the processes by which firms or organisa-
tions can capture value generated by workers and turn this into profit. Not only is this the main
conceptual framework within which innovation is considered, it also operates as the main account-
ant of innovative activity, as measures such as Gross Domestic Expenditure on Research and
Development (GERD) become key indicators determining how ‘innovative’ a particular country or
region is. This focus on measurability obscures much scientific work by relegating it to the inde-
terminate category of ‘basic research’. I return to this question of measurement below where I
show how the ‘demand pull’ model of innovation demonstrates the importance of Marx’s concept
of formal subsumption to understanding innovation under capital.
Within the context of a widespread pro-innovation bias, innovation appears as a form of ‘hyper-
confident social engineering’ (Bauer, 2017: 162) that is ignorant to other ways of understanding the
world and other ways of enacting social change. As such, organised resistance to innovation reveals
the ‘other side’ of the increased homogenisation of innovation policy (Bauer, 2017; Brandao and
Bagattolli, 2017; Fougère and Harding, 2012; Thomas et al., 2017). While the dominant under-
standing of innovation is depoliticised, focused on its technological and commercial aspects, and
tending toward homogenisation, a few studies have evidenced what might be called the ‘imperial-
istic’ nature of this and have attempted to understand innovation ‘from below’ (Fougère and
Harding, 2012; Thomas et al., 2017). Thomas et al. (2017) argue against ‘reductionist perspectives’
of the resistance to innovations, such as those represented by the derogatory use of the term
‘Luddite’. Rather than reducing the rejection or destruction of artefacts or technological systems
‘to a simple irrational act of rejection of the new’ (Thomas et al., 2017: 184), or ‘neophobia’
(Bauer, 2017: 163), forms of resistance to innovation have their own logics and purposes. Fougère
and Harding (2012) are attentive to the imperialistic nature of the homogenisation of innovation
policy. Arguing that ‘successful innovations are part of the constructions through which the West
knows itself as ‘modern’ or ‘advanced’ (p. 22), their analysis offers an important political explana-
tion for the ongoing pro-innovation bias. Innovations cannot fail, ‘because failed innovations
would have devastating ontological consequences – we would no longer be “advanced”’ (p. 22). I
return to the resistance of innovation when I consider Marx’s concept of the real subsumption of
labour below.

What can Marx contribute?

What a Marxist approach will add to this emerging discourse hinges on what is meant by the term
‘critical’. So far, critical studies of innovation have tended to be ‘critical’ in the conventional sense
of the term by focusing on the negative or ‘bad’ aspects of innovation. In their willingness to chal-
lenge an innovation status quo marked by naive celebration and rhetoric, these studies are ‘critical’
in the sense that they bring the harmful aspects of innovation to light. As demonstrated above, criti-
cal studies of innovation have usefully drawn out the negative and undesirable aspects of innova-
tion that some researchers have sought to obscure over the past few decades. These negative aspects
of innovation were a concern from the very beginnings of what we now call innovation studies,
6 Organization 00(0)

especially in the case of Schumpeter, and it is only more recently that they have become obscured.
These studies are an important voice dissenting against the noise of the pro-innovation lobby.
A second sense of critique is evident in the existing literature; what we might call an
‘Enlightenment’ or ‘Kantian’ sense of critique (Kant, 1996). When put to innovation, these works
test the concept and its uses and see how it stands up to rational scrutiny. They do not take innova-
tion for granted as an established category and rather conduct independent investigations that chal-
lenge the core assumptions of mainstream innovation studies. Godin’s work is exemplary here, as
well as many of the contributions to Critical Studies of Innovation (Godin and Vinck, 2017) and
Challenging the Innovation Paradigm (Sveiby et al., 2012). The specifically Marxist form of cri-
tique that I suggest here is one that certainly shares the Enlightenment spirit of careful scientific
analysis and open criticism. It is, however, more specific in the way it situates itself in relation to
mainstream discourse. Enlightenment critique sets itself against dogma. It offers an abstract nega-
tion of dogma, in the sense that it rejects received knowledge in favour of independent investiga-
tion and verification (Kant, 1996). This form of criticism is abstract in the sense that it applies to
all dogma, rather than to specific doctrines. A truly scientific spirit perpetually applies this princi-
ple to itself and its own productions, and ‘critique’ means the ongoing cycles of hypothesis testing,
conjecture and refutation (Popper, 2002).
Rather than an abstract negation of dogma, Backhaus (2005: 17) offers that Marx’s concept of
critique represents a determinate negation of economics. This form of critique takes the categories
and arguments of mainstream, or bourgeois economics, and sees them as the manifestation of a
particular form of knowledge. This knowledge is not merely ideological but contains a kernel of
truth, albeit a one-sided truth, that cannot be abstractly done away with. The strength of this form
of critique is found in its reckoning with the details. Backhaus (2005) offers a clear formulation:
‘The project of a critique of “the” economy, as it was, is and will be, can be conceived and devel-
oped only on the condition that “the” economist or “the” economy can become object of a critical
ideological investigation’ (p. 23).
To better understand this, it is useful to think about what the autonomous discipline of econom-
ics represents. Wood (1981) argues that perhaps ‘the most effective defense mechanism available
to capital’ is found in the separation of the economic and the political in bourgeois economics and
political economy (p. 67). By abstracting from the social and positing the economy as an autono-
mous sphere, these disciplines can largely ignore political questions, relegating them a secondary
status to properly ‘economic’ analysis. We have already seen that this is largely the case with inno-
vation today. Externalising political concerns has the effect of naturalising the capitalist mode of
production, abstracting from and obscuring its history.2 Despite this, the categories of economics,
‘do reflect – albeit in a distorting mirror – an historical reality specific to capitalism’ (Wood, 1981:
67). Rather than rejecting the ideological construction of the categories of bourgeois economics
and political economy, Marx adopted them ‘as his point of departure precisely because they
expressed, not a universal truth, but a historical reality in capitalist society’ (Wood, 1981: 69).
Marx was able to ‘decipher the real meaning of the “appearance”’ through ‘the critical elaboration
of bourgeois categories’ and to return to these categories their properly political status (Wood,
1981: 69). The critique of political economy, then, involves an immanent engagement with the
material in question. In Marx’s own words, this form of critique does not merely ‘show up contra-
dictions as existing; it explains them, it comprehends their genesis, their necessity. It considers
them in their specific significance’ (Marx, 1979: 91).
When discussing innovation, mainstream economics have been less celebratory than the policy
crowd and if they have exhibited a ‘pro-innovation bias’ it is only because this is caught up in a
broader ‘pro-growth’, ‘pro-profit’ or indeed, ‘pro-capital’ bias. Whether this is at the micro or
macro level, economists have generally opted for a more ‘realist’ view of innovation than many
Walsh 7

writing in the policy or management realm. Indeed, for economists, being ‘pro’ or ‘anti’ innovation
seems a little beside the point. Rather, innovation is a strategy available to firms seeking to main-
tain or capture market share, for those seeking to increase revenue, or indeed, for those seeking to
subvert worker resistance. In other words, innovation is one strategy capitalists employ in their
efforts to make profits, whatever specificities these efforts entail. General economic trends and
business cycles will influence what strategies are most promising. In turn, investment in innovation
has long been recognised as an important driver of these cycles (Courvisanos, 2012; Mandel,
1998). This recognition was perhaps Schumpeter’s (1939) most important contribution.
Leitner’s (2017) discussion of ‘no’ and ‘slow’ innovation strategies offers an instructive exam-
ple. Recognising that ‘the call for innovation has become a mantra in the modern economy’
(p. 201), Leitner seeks to account for the reasons why some firms are choosing ‘non-innovation’
and ‘slow innovation’ strategies. Indeed, Leitner cites numerous studies that find that there has
been a slowdown in innovation activity among European companies. While some of this can be
explained by broader economic pressures such at the 2008 Global Financial Crisis, it remains puz-
zling that this decline is concurrent with the rise of innovation as a central pillar of regional eco-
nomic strategy. Leitner makes it clear that for capitalist firms, innovation is rarely seen as a good
in itself. Whether technological innovation is good or bad for a firm depends largely on the firm’s
structure and the ‘business environment’ in which it operates. Innovation policy, riding on the pro-
innovation bias, can then be seen as an attempt to govern this environment and construct the best
possible conditions for firm driven innovation.
For capital, the question is never: innovation, yes or no? It is always: when to innovate, how to
innovate and what kind of innovation is best. It is about recognising innovation as a key strategy
for capitalist accumulation and recognising that policy settings can, in turn, encourage or discour-
age capitalist innovation. This latter point is vital. Technical developments in production are largely
determined by the ‘business environment’ that a firm operates within, as these are the basis from
which innovation strategies are enacted. This explains the rise of innovation as a key factor of
economic policy over the past 30 years (Bontems, 2014; de Saille, 2015). Policy recommendations
that seek to promote innovation or ‘technology adoption’ are, for example, often made against poli-
cies designed to protect workers (Walsh, 2020).
It is a disarmingly simple point. In a capitalist economy, innovation is firstly a vehicle for the
accumulation of capital; any other concerns come second. As Courvisanos (2009) makes clear,
understanding the specific innovation strategies employed by firms is crucial in understanding the
significance of innovation as an economic and political fact. What a Marxist approach offers is a
way to make sense of these diverse aspects and to situate capitalist innovation within a broader
historical account of economy and society. This is what I propose to do in this paper by introducing
Marx’s concepts of formal and real subsumption.

Subsumption
A key aspect of Marx’s critique of political economy is found in his demonstration of how capital
takes over existing production processes and social arrangements and intervenes in both for its
own purposes. Innovation is not only a name given to technological development spurred by capi-
talist competition but refers more broadly to a spectrum of strategic options available to capitalist
firms. As we have seen, these can be, and often are – somewhat paradoxically – non-innovative
strategies. Innovation is therefore not only about progress in science and technology or the adop-
tion and ‘diffusion’ of new technologies, but about the creation, maintenance and development of
a particular form of production and a particular way of organising society and economy. In this
third section I introduce the concept of subsumption as it is used by Marx. This is a focus of
8 Organization 00(0)

Marx’s work, and of Marxism more broadly, that has much relevance to the critical study of inno-
vation, as I hope to make clear in what follows. There are of course other possible applications of
Marx and Marxism to the study of innovation and these will look very different to what I present
here. In this paper I have attempted to identify openings where critical innovation studies might
engage with Marxist theory. For the task of recovering Marxism for innovation studies, subsump-
tion is a useful place to start because it cuts to the core of Marx’s own methodology and estab-
lishes the grounds of his analysis.
Subsumption is a relational concept that refers to the process by which something particular is
gathered within, or placed under, a general category. In short, to subsume something means to
subordinate it to something else. Marx was familiar with the concept from his deep reading of 18th
and 19th century German philosophy, notably the works of Kant, Schelling and G.W.F Hegel
(Murray, 1988). The concept is an important feature of Kant’s ‘transcendental deduction’ in the
Critique of Pure Reason, where he argues that the manifold of intuitions are subsumed by the cat-
egories of understanding (Kant, 2007). Against Kant, Hegel (2015) saw subsumption as a limited
activity of understanding itself; as an intellectual process of abstracting from the particular and
leaving its specificity behind as it becomes incorporated within a higher category. Following
Hegel’s use of the concept, Marx recognised that subsumption was not always a neutral process, as
it might be with purely philosophical speculation, but rather something that affected, sometimes
violently, the particulars in question. Marx drew out the concrete aspects of subsumption, showing
them to have a thoroughly social as well as intellectual reality.
With the subsumption of labour under capital, capital presents itself as the truth of the produc-
tion process while labour is taken to be nothing but wages to be paid or an industrial obstacle to be
overcome. This has concrete manifestations in both the intellectual realm (economics) and the
social (relations of production). Marx (1990) divides the subsumption of labour into two main
types, formal and real, and two minor variations, hybrid and ideal (pp. 645; 1019–1038). Although
some important contributions have emerged on the questions of ideal and hybrid subsumption
(Murray, 2016; Tomba, 2013), here I deal only with the main categories: formal and real.

Formal subsumption
Formal subsumption is the precondition for real subsumption. Indeed, Marx (1990) refers to formal
subsumption as ‘the general form of every capitalist process of production’ (p. 1019). Formal sub-
sumption concerns the basic building blocks of capitalist society; the social-economic formations
that put wage labour between workers and their access to the means of social reproduction.
Although Marxist scholarship of recent decades has tended to focus on the question of real sub-
sumption, which I return to below, a few important works have recently emphasised the fundamen-
tal importance of formal subsumption to Marx’s critique of political economy (Harootunian, 2015;
Tomba, 2013, 2015). Formal subsumption accounts for the near complete capture of the discourse
of innovation by the categories of the capitalist mode of production. As such, formal subsumption
offers a theoretical explanation for the depoliticisation of innovation, as well as for its homogenisa-
tion into a predominantly economic and technological concept, both key foci in the emerging field
of critical innovation studies.
Recalling that subsumption involves an erasure of particularity, the formal subsumption of
labour marks the erasure of non-capitalist particulars, and their designation as ‘externalities’. This
is an important point when we consider the depoliticisation of innovation. Abstracting from the
social base of production and externalising non-capitalist particulars as secondary to immediate
‘economic’ concerns is the precise ‘defense mechanism’ Wood speaks of above. With the formal
subsumption of labour under capital, particularities that may have been of central concern to the
Walsh 9

production process, such as the reproduction of the community from which workers come, are no
longer of an immediate concern to the organisation of production when considered from the per-
spective of capital.
Formal subsumption is often used to refer to a process whereby previously independent crafts-
people (or those engaged in simple co-operation) enter a wage relation with capital without the
production process itself being altered. The technical aspects of the work remain the same, how-
ever a capitalist now owns of the means of production, pays wages to workers and takes responsi-
bility for coordinating the production process. Formal subsumption refers to a formal change in the
relations of production while the content, the technical process itself, remains the same. The sub-
ordination of the production process to the logic of capital is therefore key to formal subsumption.
Before any technical interventions into production, formal subsumption marks the moment where
the prerogatives of capital are cemented as that which commands production.
In order to demonstrate the importance of formal subsumption to critical studies of innovation
we can look to the history of the ‘demand pull’ model of innovation. This alternative conception
challenged the privileged place held by basic research in the linear, or ‘technology-push’ model
(Godin and Lane, 2013; Kalcheva et al., 2018). Rather than seeing innovation as stemming from
basic research begetting new technologies and these being rolled out onto the market (technology-
push), the demand-pull model identifies ‘social need’, in some form, as the motivating force of the
innovation process. In the 1970s ‘push’ and ‘pull’ conceptions were cast against one another with
the ‘push’ side ultimately emerging victorious due to its compliance with established statistical
methodologies for measuring scientific activity (Godin and Lane, 2013: 629–631). During this
period, economists drew attention to methodological complexities associated with the measure-
ment of human needs. Need, they argued, is a broad concept and difficult to measure. In a decisive
1979 paper, Mowery and Rosenberg (1979) argued that the failure of the demand-pull model was
due to a failure to distinguish between (social) need and (market) demand. According to Mowery
and Rosenberg, ‘need’ was a ‘shapeless and elusive notion’, whereas market demand was a ‘pre-
cise’ and measurable concept (p. 140). Following this intervention, considerations of social need
has been uniformly reduced to market demand in the innovation literature.
While formal subsumption signals the capitalist takeover of existing production processes
without substantially modifying the labour process, this radical inversion of the purpose of pro-
duction denotes a profound social shift (Tomba, 2013: 83–89, 2015: 294). As Murray (2016) puts
it: ‘The social transformations involved in formal subsumption are epochal, but the material
transformations are slight’ (p. 304). Formal subsumption sets up the terrain of capitalist relations
of production and is repeated everywhere that productive activities previously conducted outside
the capital relation are brought into the fold. Formal subsumption lays this transformation bare
because no meaningful technical change in production is involved. The production process is
ostensibly the same, capital merely takes command. In a strictly technical sense, there is nothing
innovative about this:

Money wealth never invented nor fabricated the spinning wheel and the loom. But, once unbound from
their land and soil, spinner and weaver with their stools and wheels came under the command of money
wealth. Capital proper does nothing but bring together the mass of hands and instruments which it finds
at hand. It agglomerates them under its command (Marx, 1993: 507–508, emphasis in original).

Still, on the other hand, this can be considered the most far reaching organisational innovation of
the modern era. The entire purpose of production moves from varied forms of social reproduction,
to production for the sake of the reproduction of capital on an ever expanding scale, which is both
historically and logically distinct (Marx, 1990: 711–724). Formal subsumption therefore denotes
10 Organization 00(0)

the formal specificity of the capitalist mode of production, it is ‘the form that enables us to deter-
mine the mode of production as a capitalist one’ (Tomba, 2015: 294).
Beyond the immediate implications this has for production, formal subsumption signals the
beginning of a form of thought that subsumes production to the demands of capital and, with the
normalisation of wage labour, externalises broader questions of the reproduction of the community
or the welfare of the environment (James and Dalla Costa, 1972). Formal subsumption can be
considered the historical and logical basis from which this reconfiguration of the social unfolds.
This is an important point that is often missed in the Marxist literature. Although the capitalist
subsumption of labour originates in distinct historical moments, it is not limited to this. Rather,
formal subsumption names a major transformation in the logic of production that is repeated eve-
rywhere the mode of production is a capitalist one. For this reason, formal subsumption is some-
thing both ongoing, in the concrete sense that specific instances of it happen today, and universal
to capitalism.

Real subsumption
If formal subsumption marks the establishment of the labour capital-relation and is ‘the general
form of every capitalist process of production’ (Marx, 1990: 1019), then this almost immediately
inaugurates what Marx calls ‘real subsumption’. Real subsumption involves the on-going transfor-
mation of labour processes in accordance with the dictates of capital. With formal subsumption,
existing production processes came under the command of capital, with real subsumption, capital
actively intervenes in these processes for its own purposes.
Real subsumption is driven by both competition among capitalists and the efforts of capitalists
to gain advantage over workers. With formal subsumption, because capital merely integrates exist-
ing processes of production, the knowledge and skill of workers remains vital to the production
process. Uniquely knowledgeable and skilful workers are not so easily replaced. Moreover, as eas-
ily as they can apply their knowledge to production, they can withhold it to leverage power. A large
part of real subsumption is found in capital’s efforts to overcome this burden. Knowledge is there-
fore central. Real subsumption names the on-going ‘separation of the intellectual faculties of the
production process from manual labour, and the transformation of those faculties into powers exer-
cised by capital over labour’ (Marx, 1990: 548).
Importantly, and alongside extracting knowledge of the production process from the heads of
workers, real subsumption involves the integration of scientific invention into the service of capi-
tal. Harry Braverman detailed this in his study of transformations to the labour process. The ‘key
innovation’ of the 20th century, argued Braverman (1974), was not to be found in any specific
technology, ‘but rather in the transformation of science itself into capital’ (pp. 114–115). In one of
the most highly cited papers in the innovation literature, Teece (1986) outlines the importance of
intellectual property in determining who seeks to profit from innovation. Managing ‘appropriabil-
ity’, seen as a firm’s strategy for placing legal limits on the informational content of an innovation,
proves to be an important mechanism through which firms are able to secure profits from their
innovative activity, or prevent would-be entrants from competing with an improved technology
(Teece, 1986). Put simply, a firm’s ability to appropriate and control access to knowledge is funda-
mental to profiting from the innovation process.
Real subsumption also accounts for the on-going development of management theory and sci-
entific research and development applied to industry. Indeed, the development of innovation policy
in the post-war 20th century was in large part an effort to better align scientific research and devel-
opment with industry. The intimate connections forged between science and industry during the
war were transformed into permanent weapons of class war in peace time. Policy debates over
Walsh 11

‘basic’ versus ‘applied’ research were largely formed around the efforts of the scientific commu-
nity to secure autonomy against industry seeking to capture a larger share of science funding
(Pielke, 2012).
To understand the logical specificity of real subsumption it is necessary to understand the role
‘socially necessary labour-time’ plays in Marx’s overall conceptual apparatus. According to Marx
(1990), ‘socially necessary labour-time is the labour-time required to produce any use-value under
the conditions of production normal for a given society and with the average degree of skill and
intensity of labour prevalent in that society’ (p. 129). The key here is that socially necessary labour-
time is not a cumulative measure, but an abstraction denoting the average or general level of
labour-time necessary for a particular form of production at a particular level of technological
development. In other words, it is the level of productivity expected of a firm if they hope to be
competitive in a given branch of industry and in a particular location. Within Marx’s theory of
value, socially necessary labour-time is the measure against which the individual production of
commodities is always set. The time it takes to produce an individual commodity is always relative
to this average. It is always less or more.
This difference is crucial to capitalist competition. Because of the capitalist’s orientation toward
the market as a means to realise profits, capital is necessarily cognisant of the level of productivity
required to be competitive within a given branch of production. Technological innovation can
allow a firm to temporarily produce at a rate faster than the social average. This allows firms to
accrue ‘surplus-profits’; profits above the average rate of profit for that industry (Marx, 1991:
273–301, 1989: 470). They are, quite simply, able to produce more for less. This only lasts, how-
ever, as long as the social average remains lower than that of the innovating firm. It is the differ-
ence that is crucial. As soon as the difference is dissolved the firm’s advantage disappears. While
this gives insight into capital’s appetite for technological innovation in the narrow sense, it also
reveals something that is fundamental to capitalist innovation in a much broader sense. As a sys-
tem, capitalism requires these differences in levels of productivity for its own dynamism. Tomba
(2015) characterises these as ‘asynchronies’ within the capitalist mode of production, arguing that
they are absolutely necessary for the ongoing survival of capitalism, ‘necessary in order to extract
relative surplus value from the benefits of technological innovation’ (Tomba, 2015: 291).
Because real subsumption is such a large category – conceptually capturing everything that
capital does and has done to transform the world, both materially and ideologically – most of what
has been observed of the techno-economic paradigm of innovation falls within it. Yet capital is
always situated and innovation, we are told, is only possible within economic conditions where
such strategies are feasible. Capital always runs up against limits and innovation is one trajectory
where this becomes legible. Deregulation is common strategy pursued by capitalist lobbyists
because it creates a favourable environment for the expansion of capital and this is often pursued
in the name of innovation. In some contexts this lobbying strategy will be more attractive to capital
because of the high financial risks of genuinely transformative technological innovation.
Indeed, much of what is called innovation today falls within the category of real subsumption.
What an understanding of formal subsumption reminds us, however, is that what is at stake is not
the particular subsumption of one sphere of production or another (for example the subsumption of
scientific labour in research and development), but the subsumption of labour as such as being a
foundational aspect of the capitalist mode of production, and the presupposition from which it
develops its understanding the world. A key question concerning real subsumption is how far capi-
tal’s interventions into this world can go. The question is this: if capital is indeed transforming the
world then what are the limits of this intervention?
Critical innovation studies offer empirical and theoretical insight into this question. Marxist
theorists trying to understand this important concept in Marx can also learn from an engagement
12 Organization 00(0)

with innovation studies. The homogenisation of innovation policy and the resistance to innovation
offer examples of real subsumption. This is a key element of real subsumption because it concerns
the integration of scientific research and development into an overarching logic that is not only
geared toward accumulation, but presupposes its own structure as the basis from which it measures
its object; innovation.

Conclusion
The analysis of innovation afforded by a Marxist approach has wide application. Take the OECD’s
original Oslo Manual, which offers guidelines for the measurement of innovative activities. In this,
innovation is only dealt with in terms of,

changes which take place at the level of the individual firm. It does not cover some other categories of
innovation discussed for example by Schumpeter, such as the opening of a new market, the conquest of a
new source of supply of raw materials or semi-manufactured goods, or the re-organisation of an industry
(OECD, 1997: 8).

Fougère and Harding (2012) argue ‘the understanding of innovation articulated in the Oslo Manuals
has become so dominant that it is close to such a hegemonic status’ (p. 17). The centrality of the
firm to this, grounded on the formal subsumption of labour under capital, and the ‘real’ transforma-
tion of the world in capital’s own image and interests, is crucial to understanding the political
aspects of innovation policy. As discussed above, Godin’s (2003, 2004, 2006a, 2006b) work dem-
onstrates how statistics following OECD methodologies have contributed to the ossification of a
homogenous and depoliticised ‘techno-economic’ paradigm of innovation.
The resistance to innovations likewise informs us of the limits of real subsumption and offers a
rich resource for organising outside the limits of formal subsumption. Thomas et al. (2017: 193)
discuss an example of Indigenous Mapuche people in the Bίo Bίo region of southern Chile who
resist the advance of the ‘agro-business system’ through traditional seed sharing. These explicitly
non-market practices of social reproduction form a barrier to the extension of market logics into
these societies. Rather than being a last line of resistance against the global capitalist hegemon of
agro-business, Thomas et al. (2017) show how this is part of a wider ‘socio-technical alliance’
between farmers and organisations participating a global agro-ecological movement against
‘hegemonic commercial-extensive agriculture, based on the use of technology packages’ (p. 192).
In other words, a broad network of resistance to capitalist innovation. Such examples offer empiri-
cal cases that demonstrate the limits of real subsumption.
This paper has offered a Marxist approach to innovation that seeks to build on and advance
existing critical work in the field of innovation studies. As I have demonstrated, a Marxist approach
to innovation offers tools for a broad system-wide analysis, with particular strength in identifying
how innovation plays a central role in the tensions, conflicts and contradictions of the capitalist
mode of production. With the concept of subsumption above, I have shown that a Marxist approach
offers a nuanced account of the innovation strategies of firms. The above discussion of formal
subsumption exposes the way that capital, or more specifically individual capitals, have the same
basic form in both highly advanced and comparatively less advanced economic environments.
Such an analysis is able to account for the ‘uneven’ development of innovations globally, providing
a framework for understanding the historical constitution of this difference (Tomba, 2015). In this
sense, Marxist theory offers opportunities for connecting the general systemic features of contem-
porary capitalist innovation with unique local experiences such as those outlined by Thomas et al.
(2017). The Marxist concepts of formal and real subsumption offer useful tools for critical studies
Walsh 13

of innovation concerned with the ‘top-down’, ‘imperialistic’ or indeed ‘neo-colonial’ nature of

innovation models and innovation policy, and to those attentive to the ‘one-sided’ presentation of
innovation within mainstream economic and policy approaches.
What I offer here is by no means the only way Marxist theory can be useful for innovation stud-
ies. As the above analysis has shown, a Marxist approach to innovation offers insight into many
key areas of concern at the forefront of critical innovation studies. Where possible I have attempted
to point to a few key places in Marx’s own writings that are relevant to the questions of innovation
under consideration. I have also pointed to several key developments in contemporary Marxist
thought that shed light on innovation. These references are no doubt incomplete, but they do offer
a few starting points for innovation researchers unfamiliar with the Marxist canon to begin consid-
ering the significance of a Marxist approach for their own work.
While this is an invitation to innovation researchers to consider Marxism seriously as a valuable
intellectual resource, it is equally an invitation to researchers already versed in Marxist thought to
consider the importance of the category of innovation to understanding contemporary capitalism
and its forms of organisation. A great deal of contemporary Marxist thought is preoccupied with
theoretical minutia and somewhat esoteric debate. What I have attempted to do here is to demon-
strate the strength of an applied Marxism that is engaged with developments in discourses outside
the mainstream of Marxism itself. Beating global capital requires the critical elaboration and refu-
tation of capital’s own categories, one of which is innovation.

Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD
Shannon Walsh https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7718-7841

Notes
1. One notable exception to this neglect within the realm of innovation studies is a 1974 article by Nathan
Rosenberg on ‘Karl Marx on the Economic Role of Science’ published in the Journal of Political
Economy. In this paper, Rosenberg, an economic historian who also appears as a key figure in Fagerberg
and Verspagen’s (2009) survey of innovation studies, seeks to introduce in broad strokes Marx’s ‘views
dealing with the complex relations between science, technology, and economic development’ (1974: 713).
2. Here I leave aside many examples from the field of economic history, from which we can expect a more
nuanced historical account. Yamamoto’s (2018) Taming Capitalism Before Its Triumph: Public Service,
Distrust, and ‘Projecting’ in Early Modern England is a particularly insightful example with implica-
tions for understanding innovation today. The transhistorical projection of capital was discussed by Marx
(1993) explicitly in his ‘Introduction’ to the Grundrisse. This aspect of Marx’s thought has been further
developed by Postone (1993), Wood (2017) and Murray (2016).

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Author biography
Shannon Walsh is a doctoral candidate at the University of Auckland and a strategic researcher for the New
Zealand Education Institute Te Riu Roa (NZEI TRR). He is also a member of the research and publishing
collective Economic and Social Research Aotearoa (ESRA).