The first moment of the critique allows us to clearly identify the way in which capital is subsuming the university and the academic labour that constitutes it. This movement of capitalist mediation in academia is the root cause of the university crisis. In this chapter, we not only present a critique of the political economy of higher education, but also discuss how this method differs from the proposals put forth in both mainstream higher education research and Marxist reflections on the sector. Marx did not leave us a ready-made analysis of the sector, but he did leave a method of capturing the movement of capital that we find helpful in our critique. Therefore, we move on to discuss the main figures of capital and the cycles they create. This leads to the concepts of how labour is subsumed under capital and how, in its movement, capital assimilates specific organisation dynamics of science and higher education.