Reanimating Marxist state theory: On the material force of capital's silent power
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article engages critically with Søren Mau's Mute Compulsion: A Marxist Theory of the Economic Power of Capital (2023), which presents a compelling account of capitalism's structural domination, transcending ideology and repression. While Mau effectively foregrounds the material compulsions of capitalist life, we argue that his abstraction of economic power neglects the spatial, racial, institutional, and geopolitical configurations through which mute compulsion is concretely produced, sustained, and contested. Drawing on Marxist state theory, imperialism, and authoritarian populism, we expand Mau's framework by situating mute compulsion within the lived geographies of global capitalism. Through two U.S.-based case studies: the deportation of pro-Palestinian student protesters and the structural exploitation of immigrant labour, we show that mute compulsion operates unevenly, mediated by legal precarity, racialization, and imperial statecraft. Moreover, we trace how authoritarian populism reinforces mute compulsion by dismantling mediating institutions while weaponizing the rhetoric of ‘freedom’ to obscure deepening domination. In moments of rupture when protests erupt or exploitation is exposed, capital's silent power gives way to overt coercion, revealing its reliance on spectacular repression to restore order. We argue for a Marxist geography of mute compulsion: one attentive to its global asymmetries, institutional moorings, and crisis tendencies. Ultimately, mute compulsion is not only economic; it is geopolitical, racialized, and contingent; always haunted by the possibility of its breakdown.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it