#covid19 if we don't understand how we reached this point, we'll be back here again. Over and over. I think…
#covid19 if we don't understand how we reached this point, we'll be back here again. Over and over. I think we reached this point by turning our societies into economies. Where every social transaction is routed through a tiny handful of commercial transactions. /1 https://t.co/upJAYXhtBo
It's not the old moralistic critique of money or commerce. Nothing wrong with either of those things. It's substituting a statistical model of these commercial transactions - what we call the 'Economy' - for society itself. Where that leads.../2
...is the replacement of all basic social activity, including provision of food and shelter, with jobs and incomes. Without the latter, nobody even gets the former. Our greatest obstacle to defeating this pandemic has been this, that our societies cannot function now.../3
...in even the most basic ways, without jobs and the money they provide to ordinary people. We've been unable to take the most basic shelter against this virus, because if we do our incomes disappear, and we don't eat or have a roof over our heads. /4
None of that is necessary. There's no holy writ that says we have to tie basic subsistence to jobs and income. Only the idea of the Economy requires that. A job is the economic lever that displaces people from their homes and communities. /5
There's nothing wrong with jobs per se, but we need to recognise that they create this fundamental displacement. They separate basic subsistence from where we live. 'Travel to where the jobs are', as economic folk often say. QED. In this pandemic these same economic folk.../6
...describe a 'return to normal' as a return to jobs. They resist meaningfully supporting peoples' subsistence as they shelter from the virus, and prioritise 'getting people back into jobs'. This is the economic model of society at its core. /7
That return to jobs is a return to the mass movement and gathering that supercharges viral spread. The daily commute and cramming into workplaces. They're not two distinct things. Without this economic model of society, the pandemic wouldn't even have occurred. /8
The zoonosis that generated the virus derived from landscape destruction, in turn created by economic activity. The ongoing fracturing of communities to ensure the continuous flow of people and resources, via jobs. Everything has to keep moving, people and resources.../9
...otherwise, the 'Economy' stops. It's not coincidental that getting borders open has been an obsession for Economy folk, including for travel and tourism. Displacement of people and goods is all the Economy actually is. /10
Once you displace people and resources, and get them all moving, small numbers of people can then accumulate them and create economic wealth. Normally wealth would be the productivity of the land you tend, the quality of your water and buildings etc. /11
But the economisation of society replaces that wealth with the accumulation of money, a medium of exchange that oils the great movements of people and resources. Nothing wrong with money, but when you replace society with an Economy, money is wealth and power. /12
With money you control people (through jobs), and resources, you get to determine the economic flow that we've come to call society. The financial industry is the controlling agency of an Economy. They're the true agents opposing pandemic action. /end