‘Capitalism’, ‘communism’, ‘authoritarianism’ are lazy concepts. Societies share so many characteristics,…

‘Capitalism’, ‘communism’, ‘authoritarianism’ are lazy concepts. Societies share so many characteristics, just called different things. Take the idea of a ‘planned economy’, compared to a ‘free market’ economy. /1 https://t.co/wVmsy1hkcP

The central planning of an ‘authoritarian’ society is mirrored almost exactly by large corporates in market economies. We’ve seen how they increasingly take over entire supply chains, to get greater control over the ‘market’. ‘Home brand’ products are this. /2 https://t.co/5jkrJ9BmKV

Another way we’ve been infected by libertarian ideas is our gut reaction to this as somehow bad. That ‘big business’ is corrupt, scale is bad, let’s all worship small businesses. But big business emerges when you have small government. There’s a certain amount of coordination…/3

…and planning needed to get a society to function properly, and if you don’t do it with government, business will need to do it instead. Look at how we exercise ourselves over ‘monopolies’, we don’t see that the slavish worship of small business is just the economic version…/3

…of neoliberal/libertarian political ideas about the primacy of the individual. Scale is good, it brings economies of scale. The reason monopolies get bad press is because we’ve allowed them to operate in essential services, which should really be publicly governed. /4

So many of the corporate behemoths, particularly out of the US, make so much money because they occupy a space which is really a public space, offering essential services that have been stripped from government in the big libertarian ideological push. Look at our own Telstra,…/5

…how our telecommunications infrastructure collapsed into expensive dysfunction because we forced a market mechanism onto the most basic 21st century service, telecommunications. Scale is not the problem, destruction of the ‘public’ is the problem. ‘Authoritarian’ societies…/6

…retain at least some sense of a public sphere. It’s a practical, logistical thing as much as anything else. Societies don’t function without it. They also collapse under plagues, you can’t have public health, without a public. All our current problems are one belief. /end