The real problem here is our belief we can debate our way out of Covid, or climate change. The people who…

The real problem here is our belief we can debate our way out of Covid, or climate change. The people who oppose doing both of those things are happy to overwhelm us with their BS in perpetuity. There is no conversation without a power balance. A short thread. /1 https://t.co/nO8sqP14iA

Try engaging in conversation with anybody of international fame, on Twitter. Nearly always you’ll fail, not because they’re bad people, but because with hundreds of thousands or millions of followers, they have to prioritise. Many openly claim they never read any comments,…/2

…it’s unmanageable. And it is, they’re right. The problem is our core belief, that society changes by everybody talking to everybody else, ‘the people’ driving change. That never happens, because it can’t physically happen. Conversation IS the engine room of all change, but…/3

…it’s never a non-hierarchical thing where everybody talks to everybody else. Again, physically that’s not even remotely possible, even if we thought it was desirable. Hierarchies of attention have always solved this problem. We all ‘follow’ a conversational space…/4

…pre-structured by key players. Hopefully by expertise, but often just by popularity, for whatever reason a person becomes popular (this is the social media model, though they sometimes overlap - there are wonderful, popular experts here for example). /5

The point here is that we’ve been duped into thinking that by spending our days talking to each other, we’re changing the world. That’s only true to the extent that talk is itself hitched to organised action outside social media. Action coordinated by these hierarchies. /6

The ‘powers that be’ don’t listen to us, because they don’t have to. Not only is it physically impossible for them to listen to all of us, but there’s also no power balance there. They don’t feel any threat. But we solved this problem more than a century ago. /7

I know I always say it. Because it’s true. The real players in politics are not Left and Right, not LNP and ALP. They’re employers/business, and organised labour. In fact organised labour got there first in Australia, it was the first to set up a political party. /8

Prior to that the wealthy and powerful just ruled, they thought that was their right. Suddenly working people organised an alternative, a political party. Conservative political parties emerged in response, quickly, in a panic. To this day that mass organisation of organised…/9

…labour, unions and their political parties, is the only thing outside wars and plagues that has ever shifted the course of political decision making. The first priority of every conservative government worldwide is *always* to attack and undermine unions. /10

They know, we’ve forgotten. We don’t need to spend endless wasted hours here and elsewhere trying to mobilise millions of people to resist climate and Covid inaction. We did all of that already, more than a century ago. We have our collective institutional weapons. /11

We’re just not using them. Many of us have swallowed the anti-union propaganda put out by conservatives, that they’re corrupt etc. But you don’t have to do a single thing, except join. They’ll do the rest. 10 minutes with a credit card would change the world overnight. /12

Until we do that, there isn’t even a bargaining table. Let alone a seat at it for us. The wealthy and privileged will ignore us, again because they can, and don’t have any other choice anyway. We’re not presenting them with any coherent, organised counter to what they do. /13

I’m not a union organiser, but I do know the history of politics. All of our clever witticisms and ideas will change diddly squat unless hitched to mobilised, coordinated action. Protests won’t do it, petitions won’t do it. A union foot to the throat of organised Covid…/14

…and climate denialism will. It’s the only thing that will, and the unions are sitting there primed and ready to go. They just need members. If we all joined overnight, conservatives would literally shit themselves. And that’s all we’d need to do. Takes 10 minutes. /15

Or we can let plague do the change for us, which will be a tragic, lethal option. Wars, plagues and unions are the only forces that have ever shifted politics. /end