In this consumerist-led version of proletarianization, which is very per-tinent to what is happening with the commodification of higher educa-tion, the argument is that ‘consumers are “discharged” of the burden as well as the responsibility of shaping their own lives and are reduced to units of buying power controlled by marketing techniques’ (p. 34). For example, in rating and ranking scales and league tables, marketing agencies have essentially appropriated the decision-making process from students and their parents. Today’s ‘cognitive capitalism’, Lemmens says, is producing the ‘systematic destruction of knowledge and the knowing subject’ (p. 34), in what Stiegler calls the ‘systematic industri-alization of human memory and cognition’ (p. 34). As Stiegler (2010b) cryptically puts it, what is at stake is ‘the battle for intelligence’ (p. 35) which had its most recent genesis in the ‘psychopathologies and addic-tive ‘behavior patterns’ (Lemmens 2011, p. 34) brought about by the ‘logic of the market’ ushered in by Thatcher and supported by Reagan. This unleashed ‘a cultural and spiritual regression of unprecedented magnitude, transforming the whole of society into a machine for profit maximization and creating a state of “system carelessness” and “systemic stupidity” on a global scale’ (p. 34). It is literally ‘a global struggle for the mind’ in a context where there is an erasure of ‘consciousness and sociality’ (p. 35)

Far from ‘competition’ supposedly driving ‘innovation’, Connell (2013) argues that it does the reverse. In the first instance, what a neo-liberal conception of the university produces, is the ‘reproduction of global dependency’ (p. 2)—through a ‘neocolonial dependence...built into performativity through international rankings of journals, depart-ment and universities’, whereby local intellectual cultures are under-mined and obliterated through an unhealthy reliance on ‘impact factors and ‘citations’ (p. 2). Secondly, the ‘entrenchment of social hierarchies in knowledge production and circulation’ (p. 2), act to further sediment privilege in the already advantaged—institutionally, in Australia in the older so-called ‘sandstone’ universities, and individually in the scions of the privileged who attend them.

rgues that the very fibre of democracy which we understand to be ‘individual and collective self-rule’ and which we take to be ‘a perma-nent achievement of the West’ and that cannot be ‘lost’, is in the process of being completely ‘overwhelmed and ... displaced by the economium to enhance capital value, competitive positioning, and credit ratings’ (p. 10)

Transformed in this process is the very nature of knowledge:Neoliberalization replaces education aimed at deepening and broadening intelligence and sensibilities, developing historical consciousness and her-meneutic adroitness, acquiring diverse knowledge and literacies, becom-ing theoretically capacious and politically and socially perspicacious, with [forms of] education aimed at honing technically-skilled entrepreneurial actors adept at gaming any system. (p. 123)

By way of explaining why there is so much internal unrest and dissention in universities, Boyer (2011) says that the ‘dominant critical narrative’ emerges from the ‘dissipat[ion of] organizational and collegial auton-omy in order to better saturate universities with market-oriented prin-ciples (knowledge as commodity, faculty as wage labour, administration as management, student body as consumer public, university as market-place)’ (pp. 179–180).The loudest opposition to this intensified neoliberal regime has come from ‘faculty’ who, ‘among the three estates of the university (students, faculty, administrators)...has experienced the deepest erosion of auton-omy under the current reforms’ (Boyer 2011, p. 180). Coupled with this is the view that students stand to ‘enhance their social power with their new image as sovereign consumers, and the re-imagination of the uni-versity as a kind of for-profit corporation run by profit-minded managers has helped to cement the political hegemony of administrators’ (Boyer 2011, p. 180).

In other words, neoliberalism works through the way in which it ‘dissemi-nates market values and metrics to every sphere of life and construes the human itself exclusively as homo oeconomicus’ (Brown 2015, p. 176). Brown (2015)

All the leftists in Paris came with completely bogus projects. Felix supported them blindly. We bought a camera for one person, a motorcycle for another…we gave money to someone who came to us saying, ‘I need five thousand francs for an abortion tomorrow.’ ‘Send the money back to us when you can, ok, here you go.’ And they never came back.