The job is the basic unit of the ‘economy’. And now that the economy has replaced society, it’s also the…

The job is the basic unit of the ‘economy’. And now that the economy has replaced society, it’s also the basic unit of society. ‘Jobs, jobs, jobs’, remember a PM saying that? A job is much more than a way to organise work. It’s a way to structure (and destroy) a society. /1 https://t.co/rog30umDd1

No Big Brother needed, if the way of organising society is now mostly business, then how business is organised is how society is organised. To even exist or survive, you need a job, jobs are what allocate society’s common-wealth. I don’t think that’s factored in enough in…/2

…understanding why we struggle to solve major problems, like climate change or Covid. Our agency as a population is splintered into millions of jobs, answering to hundreds of thousands or more employers. We have limited power or agency to effect collective…/3

…change, because our energies are dissolved across those hundreds of thousands of workplaces. But more than that, it becomes almost possible to solve any complex problem, because even if we were going to by allocating them to all of those businesses to somehow solve (and why…/4

…would they, their bottom line is always going to be their main consideration), there’s nothing about those problems that lends itself to a neat packing up into millions of separate jobs, to solve. Each job and business will look at the problem from the perspective of…/5

…the specific work they do, which may have little relevance to solving the major collective problem at all. For Covid, you get a handful of businesses, like Big Pharma, mask manufacturers, sanitiser makers etc. with direct relevance to the pandemic. But nearly everything…/6

…else in the ‘economy’ has little relevance at all, despite the problem to be solved impacting every single person, in every one of those businesses. Thus the claim we need to ‘balance’ the economy against Covid action, because most of the economy has nothing to contribute…/7

…at all, to an event that threatens the entire society. Societies that transform all of their social relations into economic relations, into jobs, are therefore woefully lacking in resilience. No collective effort is possible, because even with the best intentions, the…/8

…most people and the businesses they work for can do is to keep spitting out the rubber ducks and cat toys and TV sets that is the work they do. Most of which will have no use at all, in an emergency. Without a collective focus not just to emergencies but to the…/9

…everyday work of society itself, you castrate your capacity to respond in any way at all to even extinction-level threats. And that’s what the economy is, and was always intended to be. A way to pulverise anything collective or social, into tiny job-sized bits. /end

(*im*possible that should say)