#auspol #covid19 when we turned our societies into economies, they lost the resilience to do the most basic…
#auspol #covid19 when we turned our societies into economies, they lost the resilience to do the most basic act. Taking shelter. If societies had that resilience, to allow most to stay home for weeks, the pandemic would never have happened. The 'Economy' doesn't allow it. /1 https://t.co/fwNzCI3dXa
What we call the Economy is really the continual displacement of people and things from their 'home'. Whether it's the daily commute, or the international circulation of goods and people, the Economy is really code for movement. And movement in turn displaces, literally. /2
That displacement is political. The old saying, a person's home is their castle. Forcing the continuous displacement of people and goods is designed to remove that sovereignty from peoples' lives. 'Go where the jobs are'. /3
Many of us sit in cars, buses, trains or planes for hours every day. Just to 'get to work', and home again. The separation of work from where you live is a defining feature of the Economy. Intuitively we know this is a disempowerment.../4
...because millions then vote for parties that promise 'strong border protection'. Our sense of sovereign space, our idea of 'home', homes continually weakened by economic displacement, has been weaponised into nationalism. /5
This feeling of a loss of sovereignty, of an idea of home, begins with our 'job'. A job is work, divorced from location. Meanwhile he beauty of where we live declines as roads in particular come to dominate, to maximise economic flow of goods and people. /6
This drives us to travel obsessively, to try to find again the beauty of what we once had in our own locations. The travel industry is a major opposition to public health action in this pandemic. Many say the basic act of sheltering in their own home now causes mental illness. /7
The real illness here is what we call The Economy. A pandemic that would not have started if our social lives had the resilience of not needing to move everywhere to do the basic acts of survival. Movement is displacement, political dispossession. /end