Ideology, Violence and Mute Compulsion: Modalities of Power Higher Education Market Making in England

Much of the critical research on the making of higher education markets in England draw either from a (i) discourse approach which foregrounds ideology, such as privatisation (cf. Fielden et al., 2010); (ii) Polanyian approach which highlights the role of institutions, such as state regulatory bodies, in ‘instituting markets’ (Komljenovic and Robertson, 2016), or (iii) a classical Marxist approach (cf. Hall 2021) unable to resolve the gap between Marx’s account of commodity production and capital labour relation, and the empirical reality of higher education as a services sector. Soren Mau’s recent book, Mute Compulsion, makes the case for re-reading and renovating some of the lacunae, redundancies and unfinished insights to be had from Marx’s work in Capital and provides us with degrees of clarity around key processes and relations that enable a more sophisticated rendering of the making of HE markets. In this paper we link together the three modalities of power, ‘ideology’, ‘violence’, and ‘mute compulsion’, to trace out how in England ideology (new public management/formal subsumption) and violence (demonstrations, strikes) were fundamental to the early stages of enclosure of higher education as sector. This was followed by processes of real subsumption over time, whilst the objective and impersonal power of mute compulsion normalises the radical transformation on the nature, conditions and social relation of labouring in the academy and its social reproduction.