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Primitive Accumulation and Capital Expansion in Public Knowledge Production Across Generative Levels

Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: This paper develops a provisional political-economic and epistemic framework for investigating the initial formation, historically specific primitive accumulation, and recursive expansion of knowledge-producing capital across generative levels. The inquiry distinguishes inherited knowledge resources, feasible productive capabilities, effective control of generative conditions, and the capitalization of particular positions within evolving relations of production. It examines meta-knowledge, research methods, standards, infrastructures, applications, and generated outputs as model-relative positions in partially ordered and reciprocally revisable dependency structures. The consequences of accumulation are proposed to depend on effective dependencies, feasible substitutions, governance arrangements, and the distribution of authority to maintain or transform production conditions. Capital formation and expansion are compared across capitalist enterprises, public institutions, cooperatives, knowledge commons, and communist conceptions of collective production, while retaining the historical specificity of primitive accumulation through separation and dispossession. The analysis distinguishes heterogeneous value creation, recognition, appropriation, circulation, and reinvestment, and investigates how these processes affect the continuing reproduction of knowledge-producing capabilities. Ownership, access, practical autonomy, epistemic authority, and institutional power are considered separately. A preliminary relational formalism represents typed productive dependencies, feasible activities, differentiated rights, plural valuations, and substitution-sensitive counterfactual dependency; its mathematical implications are explicitly distinguished from empirical findings and normative judgments. Documentary illustrations address publishing, shared software, scientific standards, artificial intelligence, and cultural archives. The discussion proposes revisable public generativity as one provisional ethical criterion concerning opportunities to create, maintain, understand, and transform shared productive conditions under contestable governance. The paper concludes by identifying the historical, measurement, causal, and comparative evidence required to assess concentrated control and possible extraction at different generative levels. Its contribution is an open research framework rather than a universal hierarchy of knowledge or an empirical law of capital expansion.
DOI: 10.17613/8jm78-3e474
Language: English
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7223465025
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