Calling the economy a myth confuses just about everybody. That’s how deep the framing and normalisation has…

Calling the economy a myth confuses just about everybody. That’s how deep the framing and normalisation has gone. But the history is very clear, it didn’t exist before the 1930s. You must engage with this history, to beat climate change and Covid. /1 https://t.co/ipigIzxWWC

It was a classic case of the measurement of something gradually replacing that thing. There’s no doubt there are ‘economic’ transactions happening in societies, things being bought, sold, traded etc. That’s what GDP tried to capture. But it was what happened next that matters. /2

Those numbers were then called, as the link describes, ‘the economy’, a new entity. A complete flip from measuring existing social activity, to describing a rival for that activity. Like we have society, *and* an economy. /3 https://t.co/ipigIzxWWC

It’s exactly like saying measuring temperature, rainfall, wind speed etc. describes a new separate reality, rather than just characteristics of the one we already live in. Like weather exists separately to the sun and air and water. I don’t think that sleight of hand is seen. /4

Everybody, all politicians, all journalists, members of the public, now talk about ‘the economy’ as if it’s an actual thing. It never was, it was a bunch of measurements of SOCIAL life, one small component of social life. Extrapolated to become a replacement for that society. /5

You might think that’s over-egging it. I’m sorry, but history tells us that was exactly what happened, up in lights. The people who did it don’t even deny it. They removed society entirely. And replaced it with a ‘market’. A ‘market economy’. This was NOT an economic shift. /6 https://t.co/rbuOCIt5DH

It was a social shift, all things humans do together are social. It was these people doing politics, by other means. If you can redefine society as no longer even existing, you no longer have any obligation to do any of the social things. How is it not obvious? /7

That’s the world we’ve lived in for the past 5 decades. The stripping away of everything social or public, in favour of an economy. A market. Of apparent separate individuals, who do well or not depending on how hard they try, in the market. All complete nonsense of course. /8

Many who promoted this shift don’t even believe it themselves, it’s just spin that allows them to vacuum up all of society’s wealth and authority for themselves. But there are true believers too, who believe this lunacy. And the genius of it, as politics? /9

If you take measures for how one tiny part of society is operating, GDP for example, and expand them to replace all of society, then those who are involved in that part of society win everything. ‘Business’, mostly, and those who own it. /10

It’s a hugely effective way to entrench the status quo. You’ll notice that today, where ‘the economy’ won’t allow anything at all that doesn’t just mean the continued operation of the business-led status quo. We’re ‘living with’ a fucking pandemic, because of ‘the economy’! /11

It was the greatest political strategy in all of history. People can completely dismantle centuries of custom and tradition and social life, and say they’re doing it purely because the economy demands it. An ‘objective’ thing, not their doing. Total bollocks, but they won. /12

Everybody now believes this nonsense. Like societies can’t do a thing, unless the economy allows it. Snookered, checkmate. I Tweet a lot, you won’t defeat climate change, or Covid, or any other modern malady, unless you attack this ridiculous concept - ‘the economy’. /13

Humans do not live in markets, they live in social groups, and behave socially. They always have, and always will. Nothing about market economics is true, it’s wilfully ignorant of social psychology and social anything. It doesn’t care, it’s a strategy, not a theory. /14

The global economy is tanking again now, as it does regularly. Because it’s nonsense. The nonsense gets a bit of a head of steam, usually with cheap money, then it all falls in a heap. And nobody questions whether the framing was the problem. It’s the SAME problem as Covid. /15

Or climate change. The problem of refusing to govern humanity socially, and substituting a ridiculous abstraction that has no connection to how humans work at all. All the economic things that happen are social too, the fads and fashions and booms and busts. /16

The ridiculous fantasies of the economy will tell you those are ‘objective’ phenomena, inelasticity of supply and demand etc., they’ll even draw you graphs. All meaningless mumbo jumbo. Humans act socially, in everything they do. Including when they’re acting ‘economically’. /17 https://t.co/SExwoxCAfh

If you don’t challenge and dismantle this lunatic concept, humanity will not survive. We’re at that stage of seriousness. Societies are collapsing. The Earth’s climate and its living things are in disarray. It’s not ‘neoliberalism’, it’s the economy. It doesn’t exist. /end