There is a paucity of studies addressing the nature of the social relations of production prevailing in academia prior to the commodification of academic research. By filling that gap, this paper enables us to better understand the historical presuppositions from which the process of knowledge commodification in academia has evolved. Our theoretically informed analysis will focus on peer review, given that it is one of the few academic practices where traces of that historical past can still be found. On the (...) basis of Marx’s exposition of the main features of pre-capitalist social relations of production in the Grundrisse, it will be concluded that peer review reveals that social relations of production in academia were of a pre-capitalist, or natural-like, nature: peer review is labour of a direct nature; is the practice through which the academic community mediates its own reproduction, determining how – and, sometimes, if – its members enter into contact with the objective conditions of production; finally, in this latter capacity, peer review presupposes that the academic community relates to the conditions of knowledge production as though they were their collective property. These findings are employed to account for the underlying logics of the ongoing ‘functional transformation’ of peer review. (shrink)