“Enacting this aspect of the proclamation wages familial, rather than market warfare on democratic principles and institutions” (Brown, In the Ruins of Neoliberalism, p. 115.
I am trying to figure out how families and the mediations that govern them are not commodified and therefore can be treated in contrast to the “market warfare on democratic principles and institutions.”
I am trying to figure out how “democratic” — a process — as opposed to “republican” — a substantive social form — principles and institutions might contrast with the market.
It strikes me that Brown reifies a slice of capitalist ontology, arbitrarily (but not arbitrarily) isolates it from its generative form, and counts it as a determinate form of resistance against the dominant form.
I do not get it. Is she just theoretically sloppy? Or is she really, deeply, fundamentally, internally committed to the abstract value form of the commodity?