Reanimating Marxist state theory: On the material force of capital's silent power
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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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.054 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.010 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".