Anticipation of policy futures – attempts to forecast, influence and govern coming times beforehand – has become increasingly explicit action in education policy-making (e.g. Robertson 2022; Kallo & Välimaa 2024b). The future appears uncertain, with growing ecological crises, the economic and cultural polarisation of society, and the rise of authoritarian, anti-democratic forces. So there are many well reasoned and justified concerns to expand political imagination for alternative ways of thinking, acting and organising societies – and aiming to have a progressive influence for the future (Amsler & Facer 2017). Although in theory policy looks to higher education for solutions, at the same time policy anticipates only economic priorities, which reproduce the regime that arguably contributes to these wicked problems. We argue that economic priorities in higher education amount to a competitive compulsion inherent in knowledge-based economies growth regimes and provide a case study on policy futures in Finnish higher education through a Marxist reading of the ontological premises of these policies. 

Competitive pressures exert increasing influence in the formation of higher education policy. Under global competition between knowledge economies national higher education policy is called upon to support the competitiveness of the national economy. While undoubtedly real, the competitive mechanism is also an extremely potent, even hegemonic, policy discourse (Sum 2009; Sum and Jessop 2013; Poutanen 2023). Fairclough and Wodak (2008) argue that knowledge economies and competitiveness cannot be meaningfully disentangled. Competitive frameworks strongly influence future visions outlined in policy documents and define available policy imaginaries, also supported by transnational agents, such as the OECD and – in the European context – the EU (Robertson 2022). These international actors have actively promoted knowledge economy in the creation of future imaginaries of education (Amsler and Facer 2017; Robertson 2022). 

The increased emphasis on economic priorities in higher education can be referred to as academic capitalism (Kauppinen & Kaidesoja 2014). Given the taken-for-granted nature of the economic-competitive policy imaginary and its underpinnings are rarely critically debated – this includes Nordic welfare states like Finland. A recent study (Tervasmäki 2024a) analysing anticipatory governance of Finnish HE policy futures found that the Finnish higher education system was represented in policy discourse as being in a state of existential crisis and falling behind its competitors in a high-risk manner. Moreover, the narrative structure of future policy determined competition as a existential question for survival, employed ideological fantasies of crisis and salvation as legitimation and anticipated only a feverish struggle for competitiveness: technological futures driven by economic growth, and universities as top-down led corporations (Tervasmäki 2024a). Such ideological determinism rules out any other policy alternatives and imaginaries of higher education, creating a competition fetish (Naidoo 2018). This tendency is also encountered in other European higher education contexts.

Research literature on anticipatory governance of higher education has called upon more research on onto-epistemological bases of anticipation in HE (Kallo & Välimaa 2024a). This research expands the aforementioned analysis to later higher education policy-making 2020–2024 to explicate the possible continuity of competitive ridden ontological grounding in future HE imaginaries. We will employ the critical fantasy studies perspective (Glynos 2021) in the policy analysis to discuss these hegemonic discursive structures.

Our research questions are following: 

1. What kinds of ideological  fantasies are articulated in the anticipatory policies?

2. What are the ontological groundings of these fantasies?

3. Can these perceptions be associated with Marx’s theory on compelling laws of capital?

The purpose of this article is to analyze the compulsion of ever-increasing competitiveness demands by offering a Marxist reading of the nature of capitalist competition (Mau 2023) – the compelling laws of capital present in higher education policy futures.

In the empirical policy analysis will apply critical fantasy studies, which is based on post-marxist discourse theory and psychoanalytic political theory (Laclau & Mouffe 2001; Glynos 2021; Tervasmäki 2024a; Tervasmäki 2024b). One of the central ideas in discourse theory is the construction of ‘common sense’ as a Gramscian hegemony, referring to articulatory practices that aim at persuading and winning the consent of relevant social actors as well as the creation of political projects and establishing coalitions for governance (Howarth 2018; Tervasmäki 2024b, chapter 2). For example, the knowledge-based economy is a hegemonic project par excellence. From this view an effective policy-making necessitates fantasy frames that arouse emotions, mobilize individual and collective excitement, and demand action. Fantasy frames are ideological in the sense that its discursive structures try to conceal the contingent foundations of its own narrative and totalise the social meaning (Laclau 1990, 92; Tervasmäki 2024a). Critical fantasy studies aim at understanding the force behind policy imaginaries, how certain ideas and manifestations possess us through affective investments. Our analysis draws on two sources, firstly public policy documents of the Finnish Ministry of Education and Culture (MEC) from 2017, 2019 and 2021, which outline the future policy needs for Finnish HE. Secondly, we explore webinar recordings of the ministry officials' presentations 2020–2024 from the annual meetings for the leading management of higher education and science institutions. These annual meetings are spaces where the leading management meet, listen to presentations from ministry officials, international and national experts, participate in panel discussions and ask questions. From our perspective these meetings are spaces where the social imaginaries of higher education policy are being discussed and reproduced beyond policy documents. In this way annual gatherings construct the hegemonic common ground on higher education among the leading management and persuade participants to identify with it. The analysis proceeds as follows: first we map out the ideological fantasies that policy documents and presentations articulate. Fantasies consist of a narrative structure with an ontological grounding as an existential guarantee. Our focus is on the ontological foundations of higher education (Dall’Alba & Barnacle 2007; Gibson 2024) to which policy imaginaries ground themselves. We analyze to what extent can these policy needs be associated with the compelling laws of capital that Marx describes. To this end, we draw on primary (Marx 1976/1867, 1993/1973) and secondary sources (Palermo 2017; Mau 2023) of Marxist and postmarxist economic thought.

This article proposes revisiting the Marxist conception of competition as a defining social relation under capitalism. A Marxist reading of competition is relatively brutal: one must compete, or risk being driven out of business (Harvey 2010). Although Marx did not extensively theorize mechanics of competition in the sense of classical economic analysis, he laid out an argument of competition as a typical logic of capitalism that captures the imaginaries of capitalists. Our preliminary analysis suggests that the MEC, drawing from continued state control of HE policy and a vested interest in leveraging HE policy to serve national (economic) competitiveness, can be described as a state capitalist actor, which implicitly acknowledges and reproduces the compelling laws in its policy documents, and which results in downplaying other priorities as a result, which arguably might be more relevant for its policy purview. On the MEC’s part, higher education holds very limited intrinsic value in itself, but is loaded with high expectations of instrumentalized economic value, the delivery of which the policy imaginaries seek to compel as hegemonic common sense. Recognizing that national and institutional particularities challenge universalist models (Acemoglu & Robinson 2015), we contribute to ongoing critical and discursive research on Nordic – in our case Finnish – higher education and innovation policy and policy discourses (e.g. Ampuja and Horowitz 2024; Nokkala and Saarinen 2018). This scrutiny shows the roots of competitive HE policies and state actors in a new light, allowing comparison to other knowledge-based economy contexts also on European level.

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