How the State Keeps Us in Line: What Mark Neocleous Can Teach Us (Glen McGhee)

If you’ve ever been buried in student loan debt, forced into gig work, or stuck teaching college classes with no health insurance, you’ve probably felt it: the system is rigged. Not just tilted—built to keep working people down. Political theorist Mark Neocleous helps explain how that system works—not just through laws or politicians, but through the day-to-day grind of paperwork, contracts, rules, and debt.

Neocleous teaches in London, but what he writes about hits close to home for millions of people in the U.S.—especially student debtors, precarious workers, and part-time faculty. He takes aim at how the state (that is, the government and all its connected systems) doesn't just respond to what’s going on in society. It actively shapes it to keep the working class in line and protect the flow of money upward.

He calls this process political administration. That’s not about who gets elected—it’s about the boring, grinding machinery that runs things behind the scenes: who gets credentials, who gets benefits, who gets punished for stepping out of line.

According to Neocleous, political administration works in three key ways:

1. Shaping Workers to Fit the System

From public schools to community colleges to workforce training programs, the state helps produce a labor force ready to serve capital. These systems don’t ask what you want out of life—they tell you what kinds of jobs are “realistic.” The college system sells you a degree, loads you with debt, then spits you into the job market where you fight for scraps. Adjunct professors do the teaching while top administrators take home six-figure salaries.

2. Absorbing and Deflating Resistance

If you speak up—protest, organize, demand change—the system often doesn’t crack down right away. It absorbs your anger, redirects it, drowns it in red tape. Government programs and policies are designed to appear helpful, but often just delay real change. For example, income-driven repayment plans for student loans promise relief but often stretch debt for decades. As sociologist Joseph Gusfield once said, poverty isn’t just tolerated by elites—it’s managed and even used to their benefit.

3. Turning People into Legal Subjects

We’re constantly being turned into numbers, files, and categories—students, borrowers, adjuncts, renters, defendants. These labels make it easier to control us. Every time you fill out a FAFSA, sign a work contract, or negotiate with a student loan servicer, you’re entering a system designed to track and manage your behavior. It’s not about freedom—it’s about convenience and compliance for them, not you.

Neocleous builds on thinkers like Karl Marx, Michel Foucault, and Maurizio Lazzarato. But he speaks plainly about the modern reality: control doesn’t always come from cops or courts. More often, it comes from bureaucracies, contracts, and the invisible chains of debt. In his 2021 article “Debt as Pacification,” Neocleous writes that debt isn’t just about money—it’s about keeping people quiet, tired, and scared.

That’s why his work connects so strongly to people navigating today’s economy. If you’re a student loan debtor constantly checking for forgiveness news, or a professor paid $3,000 to teach a full semester, or a parent juggling three part-time jobs—you’re not failing. You’re stuck in a system that was built to keep you stuck.

Neocleous doesn’t offer false hope or easy fixes. But he offers clarity. The state isn’t a neutral actor. It works with and for capital to shape society in ways that keep working people divided, indebted, and under control.

Higher education plays a major role in this process. It promises opportunity while delivering debt. It hires armies of low-paid instructors to teach under the illusion of “prestige.” It turns students into lifelong financial subjects and workers into cheap, replaceable labor.

The fight for loan forgiveness, living wages for educators, and real job security is more than a policy fight—it’s a challenge to a system built to pacify the working class. Mark Neocleous’s work helps us understand the depth of that system so we can begin to challenge it, not just at the ballot box, but at its foundation.

Sources:

• Neocleous, Mark. The Fabrication of Social Order: A Critical Theory of Police Power. Pluto Press, 2000.

• Neocleous, Mark. The Monster of Liberalism. Open Humanities Press, 2011.

• Neocleous, Mark. “Debt as Pacification.” Journal of World-Systems Research, vol. 27, no. 2, 2021, pp. 485–502.

• Lazzarato, Maurizio. The Making of the Indebted Man: An Essay on the Neoliberal Condition. Semiotext(e), 2012.

• Lazzarato, Maurizio. Governing by Debt. Semiotext(e), 2015.

• Gusfield, Joseph R. “The Structuring of Public Behavior: The Social Uses of Poverty.” Society, vol. 12, no. 3, 1975.

• Graeber, David. The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy. Melville House, 2015.

• Block, James E. The Crucible of Consent: American Child Rearing and the Forging of Liberal Society. Harvard University Press, 2012.