Science & Tech Quote by Karl Marx

Marx is pointing at a glitch in capitalism’s math: science behaves like a commodity only until you try to price it by labor-time. A discovery can take decades of obsessive, risky mental work, institutional backing, and historical luck. Then, once it exists, it can be taught, copied, and applied at a fraction of that original cost. The labor required to create the first instance and the labor required to reproduce it don’t just differ; they’re incommensurable. That mismatch is the engine of Marx’s critique: value theory strains when confronted with knowledge.

The intent is less to romanticize science than to weaponize it. Scientific knowledge is the clearest case where capitalism’s preferred yardstick (socially necessary labor-time) can’t capture what matters. The subtext is that capital wants science both ways: it thrives on science as a collective, historically accumulated force that raises productivity, yet it tries to treat the results as privately owned inputs, fenced off by patents, trade secrets, and proprietary platforms. Marx is laying groundwork for the idea that “general intellect” - shared social knowledge - increasingly becomes the decisive productive power, and that its quasi-infinite reproducibility makes it resistant to straightforward commodification.

Contextually, this sits in Marx’s broader analysis of how capitalism extracts surplus value by reorganizing labor and technology. Science is not “just another output”; it’s a multiplier that cheapens commodities, displaces workers, and intensifies contradictions. The line lands because it anticipates a modern economy where the most valuable things - code, formulas, data, methods - are cheap to copy, expensive to originate, and politically contested at the point of ownership.