Sometimes it is used as a reason to bring back the social norms of the 1950′s, i.e. today’s job market is overcrowded BECAUSE of the influx of women into the workforce.

That’s an argument some people have made, sure, but it’s certainly not my argument… my whole point is that the alleged “prosperity,” as far as the numerical majority of the population was concerned, was a sham. Trying to reinstate the sham by bullying or forcing more women out of the paid workforce is more or less exactly the opposite of the upshot I take from all this. The problem as I see it is not the number of workers competing for a scarce supply of employment, but rather the system of violent political and economic privilege which has made livelihoods so scarce for working people in the first place. (In part, by making a decent livelihood so dependent on maintaining a relationship with a capitalist employer, rather than on your own labor or co-operation with your fellow workers.) Get rid of the enforced scarcity, and the competition won’t be a problem.

Sometimes the “managerial” character of that time period is framed as something from which we are now somehow liberated, free to pursue our livelihood through “entrepreneurship” instead of the rapidly disappearing economic phenomenon called employment. This is the tactic of people who frame things in terms of “security society” vs. “opportunity society.”

OK, but that’s not how I frame it. My whole point above was that the hyperbolic claims made on behalf of the “entrepreneurial,” “non-managerial” features of neoliberal economies are also a sham for everyone but a select few, just as the “prosperity” and “economic security” of post-WWII were shams for everyone but a select few — the shift from the 1950s (say) to the 1990s (say) was not a shift in the character of the underlying system, but just in its advertising slogans and its strategies for perpetuating itself. I’m all for entreprneurial rather than managerial economies (just as I’m all for prosperity rather than poverty), but the whole point is that what we’ve got right now is nothing like that, in spite of common claims to the contrary.

I respect that you are (I think) entrepreneurship-positive, but such framing is of course most likely coming from people advocating capitalism rather than markets.

Sure. That’s why I think it’s so essential to expose the differences between neoliberalism and genuinely freed markets. I just don’t think that a romanticized picture of the old Vital Center political economy is very useful for that purpose. Better to contrast it with more radical alternatives, not of a world in which people were (allegedly) better treated by corporations and more secure in their relationships with their bosses, but of a world without bosses, and a world where people’s shot at a decent living don’t depend upon how corporations treat them to begin with.