Competition in education (both amongst institutions and amongst individuals) is not something that spontaneously emerges once state regulation is removed - on the contrary, it is something actively produced by new kinds of state control. The REF and the school inspections regime overseen in the UK by OFSTED are both classic examples of this syndrome.
Since there is no automatic way to “marketize” education and other public services and there is no straightforward way of quantifying the “productivity” of workers such as teachers, the imposition of business discipline has meant the installation of colossal bureaucratic machineries. So an ideology which promised to liberate us from state socialist bureaucracy has instead imposed a bureaucracy all of its own.
This only looks like a paradox if we take neoliberalism at its word – but neoliberalism is not classic liberalism. It is not about laissez faire. As Jeremy Gilbert, developing Foucault’s prescient analyses of neoliberalism, has argued, the neoliberal project was always about vigilantly policing a certain model of individualism; workers have to be continually surveilled for fear they might lapse into collectivity.
A few followups:- On the demonizing of solidarity as "atavism, based on primordial emotions" see Hayek's stab at anthropology.
- On the way disasters break down neoliberal atomization and allow the emergence of prosocial solidarity, see here and here and here (thanks to Daniel Levine for the last link).
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