Their fetishization of competition intensifies the contradictions of neoliberal modernity---only through restricting the invisible hand can we break the cycle of failing governance.

For some 20 years we have been experiencing and witnessing the consequences of the naïve neo-liberal belief that ‘we’ve got competition in a box, ready to roll out’. In both cases, these consequences can be described in terms of ‘blowback’ (Johnson 2004).This article has addressed the effects of the fetishization of competition as a principle of societal organization and its role in subordinating society to the logic of profit-oriented, market-mediated accumulation. It began by noting the polyvalence of the ‘market economy’ (commercial economy, market economy, capitalist economy, financialized economy, finance-dominated economy) and the extent to which this could be exploited in efforts to legitimate neo-liberal financialization and the drive towards a finance-dominated accumulation regime that extends markets and capitalist (and even financialized) market proxies into areas where they tend to be far more creatively destructive than destructively creative. For competition has a formal, procedural rationality suitable for supplying standar-dized private goods and services (and even then is prone to unplanned disruption through Schumpeterian innovations) and is less rational, even in its own economistic terms, when dealing with customized commodities (where competition has not yet established socially necessary labour and turnover times) and/or where goods and services have strong elements of common pool resources or public goods. Competition is even less suited to the production and reproduction of the four categories of fictitious commodities and the supply of goods and services that advance human flourishing. It was also argued that simple governance solutions to complex problems do not work and are especially inappropriate where there are multiple substantive goals that are hard to specify consistently, let alone measure in terms of a single metric. In this context, the rolling out of competition as a principle of regulation and governance has actually been just one in a repeated succession of attempts to overcome government and governance failure by turning to another mode of governance – which is equally doomed to fail, albeit in its own distinctive ways. The growing unaccountability of capitalist market forces and their tendency to generalize and intensify the contradictions and crisis tendencies inherent in the capital relation make it imperative – but also increasingly hard – to reclaim some measure of democratic accountability in material provisioning and the care economy by limiting markets to areas where the invisible hand works well, and restricting and regulating it where it produces substantively irrational results for humankind and the planet.