The standard story goes like this. The ‘economy’ was sailing along in ‘normal’ life, and then a pandemic…

The standard story goes like this. The ‘economy’ was sailing along in ‘normal’ life, and then a pandemic arrived and derailed it for a time. But it’s recovering now. It’s time to reframe that story. /1 https://t.co/cTflU3P3uh

To begin at the end, what we call ‘the economy’ has always been a trick to redistribute wealth and power away from the public. It’s society stripped of anything even remotely social. It’s the measurement of the flow of resources and wealth, decoupled from social life. /2

Social life that creates that wealth. But we don’t talk about that any more, about societies. Only economies. That’s deliberate. ‘The economy’ is described as some big objective machine, that you can prod fiscally and monetarily, to try to get it to run in an optimal way. /3

All nonsense, because again it ignores that what generates all of the wealth is the social life of nations. But to focus here on the pandemic. Rather than see the pandemic as an interruption to ‘normal’ life, it’s much more accurate to see it as the breakdown OF that normal. /4

That’s what pandemics (and wars) always are. The breaking down of social life, through neglect of basics of life like adequate shelter and income and food, and clean water and air. We know Covid is likely a zoonosis, caused by widespread environmental destruction. /5

Pandemics, like wars, are symptoms of social breakdown. Of the ‘normal’ that prevails, the status quo. I’ve Tweeted a lot that it’s catastrophes like this that are the only thing in history that has ever shifted the actual social arrangement of societies. /6

The idea of the public itself emerged from infectious diseases and war, when the elites at the time invented public health to try to control the outbreaks of disease. The first time they had ever conceived of society as everybody, interconnected. /7

Here’s another way to see this. In Australia, in this pandemic, the government originally funded a complete shift in social life. What some call ‘lockdowns’ . A lockdown is really just a pause button, on the old normal. /8 https://t.co/h4ysDWeB2G

This was a fundamental redistribution of our common-wealth, towards ordinary people. After decades of economy-driven politics stripping that wealth away. It lifted huge sections of the population out of poverty. (From: https://t.co/vMJrUJ8SEA) /9 https://t.co/YGKrXztPOg

Think about those ‘Covid support payments’. How they were used to keep people and businesses solvent. The entire ‘economy’ was so lacking in resilience that nobody could even do a basic thing, like shelter from an infectious disease. The economy *required* dangerous mixing. /10

That’s the old normal, the unhealthy, power-skewed set of social arrangements that both generated and perpetuated disease, injustice and poverty. The normal those who did well out of those arrangements have been desperate to put back. /11

And you can see here again how that began already in 2020. The red line plummeted already before we even got to 2021. The government at the time didn’t see this crisis as a pandemic. They saw it for what it actually was, a shift of our common-wealth, back towards the public. /12 https://t.co/bvAUqeRwAA

Which they opposed with every fibre of their political beings. This whole pandemic hasn’t been a medical phenomenon, it’s been the same political battle humans have lived for centuries. For example, we’re still told that the money spent on Covid nearly bankrupted the country. /13

Bollocks. We spent FAR more on WW2, as an example, as a proportion of GDP. And we’ve now lost about the same number of Australian lives in under 2 years to Covid as we lost in the nearly 7 years of WW2. Let that sink in. /14 https://t.co/nIiyD6nKpR

Here’s the figures updated to take into account the pandemic. Still under half of what we spent on WW2, as a proportion of GDP. (See: https://t.co/zc3E3rrpoX) We’ve been conned. The previous federal government rushed to staunch the flow of money to ordinary folk. /15 https://t.co/PFpgqq2ziL

Because that flow violated 7 decades of ‘economic’ politics, whose purpose always was to reverse that flow. To restore the ‘normal’ of pre-WW2. Suddenly Covid looked like undoing all of that work. The pandemic didn’t have to be stopped, the action against it had to be. /16

Because that pandemic was the breakdown of a social life, which that economic shift in politics caused. The economy crowd are desperate that we ‘live with’ Covid, because otherwise their balls-out con on ‘the economy’ might be exposed. Guess what happened after that enormous…/17

…government spend in WW2? Australia had DECADES of prosperity, the greatest it has ever experienced. Re-purposing public spending towards public ends led to a collective wealth of unprecedented scale. Governments redistribute wealth, it’s why we invented them. /18

And why economic politics attacks government harder than anything else, with its ‘small government’ obsessions. It wants the old normal back, not just the pre-Covid normal, but the pre-WW2 normal. Feudalism. That’s all the economy ever was. Feudalism in drag. /19

To end with an interesting statistic. One that shows the profound inter-connection of disease and social life. (Thanks to The Guardian.) What was the greatest killer of Australian troops in WW2? Not bullets, not shells. Disease. Infectious disease. The battles in the tropics. /20 https://t.co/gEdPTJQEsV

People uprooted from their normal social environments, under assault from pathogens. Pandemics are just an extension of this. A breakdown of societies. Of their ‘normal’, unhealthy lives. We won’t ‘live with’ Covid because it already was a breakdown of how we were living. /21