The developed world became the overdeveloped world. Commodification ran up against the limits of what it could claim to organize efficiently or effectively. Whole chunks of social life had to be hacked off and fed into the flames to keep the steam up. Commodification moved on from land to things to information. A whole infrastructure grew, of information vectors, backed up by the growth of “intellectual property” into a comprehensive set of full private property rights. This for me would be a sketch that makes sense of neoliberalism as effect rather than cause.

This would help make sense of an aporia in Foucault and Brown

Competition implies not equality but inequality. Some are just better than others and deserve more. It is as ideological and self-proving a nostrum as exchange, of course.

Brown shows that there’s a slippage in neoliberal thought about the subject, between the individual and the family. Homo economicus is still imaged as a male head of a household, or at least one with the benefits of such a household. He may no longer have slaves, but someone tends the kids and does the dishes. The family remains a nonmarket sphere that cannot be economized. It’s a space of needs, interdependence, love, loyalty, community and care—where it is women who take care of all that “stuff.” I might venture that for all its patriarchal faults, the family is the minimal unit of communism, not as a utopia of course, but strictly understood as a domain of shared or pooled resources outside of both exchange and even gift, as Karatani might see it.

The disinvestment in higher education may be more explicable in terms of labor-market requirements. Today’s vectoral class has no need of the mass worker. Labor is bifurcated between a small core of a highly skilled hacker class using or designing information technology and a vast precarious population whose jobs have been deskilled by the same information technology.19