The economy is doing great, the middle class is collapsing. These aren’t two separate things. This is the…

The economy is doing great, the middle class is collapsing. These aren’t two separate things. This is the trap we’ve fallen into by interpreting social and cultural things, economically. The purpose OF the economy is to remove the middle class. /1 https://t.co/N2odDz7NJJ https://t.co/KqD5XYcUDe

‘The economy’ is a construct. A replacement for society. No conspiracies, the people who invented it SAID ‘there is no such thing as society’. It’s not some objective infrastructure underlying societies. It’s just society, re-branded. /2

You don’t need to run your economy to be able to afford to do social things. That’s the framing that lets it win. Your economy IS already social things. Work is a social thing. This isn’t two domains of reality. It’s just one. /3

Things like economic growth happen when you have educated and healthy people, drinking clean water and healthy food. It’s outrageously stupid to see this as some separate thing to ‘the economy’. They’re the same thing. People don’t like it when I say the economy is a fiction. /4

Because they mistake the presence of economIC transactions, like trade, for ‘the economy’. That’s the con. Economic transactions are social transactions. There is no ‘economy’ they sit inside. They happen IN society. Humans have always done economic things. /5

But economic things are social things. They don’t happen in an economy, this fiction invented as a substitute for society. They happen in society. People do them, acting socially. There’s no binary here. You don’t run your economy alongside society. /6

Just as you don’t run an economy alongside people getting Covid. Those people ARE the bloody economy. It’s just society. So why is the middle class doomed? Because the people who invented the idea of the economy represent history’s dominant social form. Feudalism. /7

It was their way of reversing the great shift to public-focused governance post-WW2. The shift that took authority and wealth from generational privilege, in rich families, to fund the war effort. They never forgave that shift. They mobilised to reverse it. /8

That’s been the entire ‘free market’ project since the 1970s. They don’t actually believe in free markets, that was an idiot idea a few economists held which these privileged groups in society latched onto as a Trojan Horse. None of them act as if free markets exist. /9

They live in a world of cronyism, jobs for the boys, networks of privilege through private schooling and other social mechanisms. But they saw straight away that the idea of a free market was a way to smash public-focused governance. To paint that as a restriction on freedom. /10

The middle classes always were the institutional home of modern life. The professional classes, actually running the country. They’re doomed in an economy. And that’s what we’re living right now. /end