A good marker both illuminates and obscures. The term "neoliberal," with its temporal specificity and historical contingence, is very good at pinning down the culprit. It is is a clear and specific political and economic marker, so we can mark something as neoliberal and that's clearly what it is, we've got the offender.
Less apparent however is its existence as a universal phenomenon: it is the state in which an organized living system begins its cycle of disintegration, in which its many finely tuned moving parts begin to get up and walk away from each other. And then as they reach the limits of their mutual attachments, they begin to fight each other.
The free-for-all that is the free market is simply a universalization of predation, in which a multitude of economic entities compete to exploit the dwindling whole, and even the constituents of those economic entities are competing to exploit the spoils accumulating within the larger economic units, and then this predation reaches down into individual relations and the self.
It is not that the whole contains only predation, but that the activity of predation has reached a certain critical threshold, and the movement of the greater system itself moves in that irreversible direction and the system's character itself can be said to be predation, no matter the well-meaning efforts of individuals and institutions looking to stem the tide. Transformation comes through extreme measures at this point.
