btw, you ask what AI would say:
(deepseek said) Placing “markets” alongside “state,” “capital,” and “commons” as alternative loci of power is a mistake. Markets are institutions for exchange, not power-holders. Power-holders are actors (states, capitalists, commoners) who operate within, shape, or bypass markets.
What people often call “marketism” is not a genuine faith in spontaneous order, but an ideological justification for shifting power from state and commons to capital, while maintaining state intervention for capital when needed (bailouts, QE, intellectual property, subsidies).
Neoliberalism reconfigures the state (privatization, deregulation for corporations, austerity for welfare), but doesn’t reduce its overall power or spending — it redirects state power toward protecting and enriching capital.
Markets have no agency, no preference, no enforcement capacity. When people say “the market decided,” that’s a metaphor obscuring real actors (usually capital, sometimes the state, rarely the commons).
