Why don’t governments protect us from Covid? Because market economies replaced societies, and they don’t have…

Why don’t governments protect us from Covid? Because market economies replaced societies, and they don’t have a public. Only individual consumers. No geographical or ethnic or any other identifier for people, except as customers of a global market. A 🧵/1 https://t.co/emeHZxZBPU

Many wonder when the Covid debacle will end, any day now surely governments will come to their senses. (In Australia this MAY still happen.) But we may have reached a tipping point. And the idea of ‘endemic’ Covid might hold the key to understanding where this might go. /2

As Katherine Wu showed, ‘endemic’ can mean many things. But historically it practically meant a disease that couldn’t be eliminated. And just about always, that meant a disease left to fester in poor countries we didn’t care much about. /3 https://t.co/XhVx8PdBxw

We told these poor countries to ‘live with’ these diseases, because we couldn’t be bothered helping them to control them. But with the politics of market economies, there are no countries. Just global markets. How we used to just treat other countries…/4

…is now how we’re starting to treat our own people. They’re all just market economy consumers, where they are is irrelevant. You can see this with the amount of labour we import, which our lockdowns highlighted, when they couldn’t come. The reason modern governments decided…/5

…to ‘live with’ a lethal virus, is because that’s what they’ve always done, when it was other countries. And now the globalised market (as they see it) is reaching its apogee, the distinctions between rich and poor countries are reproduced *within* rich countries as well. /6

It’s an evolution of the same colonial model, now within our societies, not just between countries. Note the obsession with ‘jobs’ in the Covid recovery, the only territorial remnant people are now allowed is their attachment to a workplace. /7

You’re interchangeable now with the poor in countries who have historically been plagued with malaria and other endemic diseases, which is why you’re now told mass infection here is ‘endemic’ too. Your government doesn’t defend you as an Australian, because we’re not citizens…/8

…now, we’re all (global) employees. Every bit of agency and identity people have, including their relationship to their own land, has been increasingly replaced with a global job market. Look at how often conservatives say ‘move to where the jobs are’, and how transport…/9

…infrastructure is one of their greatest passions. The hyper-mobilisation of humanity, nobody should ‘work from home’, because their home now is increasingly their job. Their identity is as an employee. You’ll be treated like a citizen in a developing country now, because…/10

…to the market economy, that is in fact what you are. What all of us are. This is the endgame of neoliberal and libertarian politics, where it was always going to arrive. /end

@YouAreLobbyLud