there is no public in the global market

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2022-08-14 07:00:03

Two years ago, just after the pandemic was declared, I suggested that we need to go beyond civil society, governments, and markets — toward a commons or noosphere — to deal with the entangled complexities facing us. My assumptions at that time have not changed much to date.

I am less inclined to include the tribal form of organizing as pertinent — after having read Graeber & Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything — but the continuing dominance of the market form and the incompetence of the institutional (government) form to deal with our global challenges continues. This was recently highlighted by Dr. Henry Madison on a long Twitter thread. This is the most succinct explanation of how our market-dominated society operates, and why this is not sustainable.

Why don’t governments protect us from Covid? Because market economies replaced societies, and they don’t have a public. Only individual consumers. No geographical or ethnic or any other identifier for people, except as customers of a global market.