THE TOOLKIT IS BROKEN
The solution is not about centralisation
Or the reinvention of a priest caste
It's not about de-mechanisation,
Or a middle-class
That rides out of the dawn to save us
On white chargers
Armed with clipboards and Bics
And backed by battery
Of heavy filing cabinets.
It is not about re-hashing ancient debates
About how shift the deck chairs
Every four years
To better mandate our mis-representatives
On false prospectuses
Named nostalgically
Manifestos.
The will of the people defenestrated
The moment those Misrepresenting Perjurers
Take their seats.
It's not about invisible hands, or hand outs
Or charity band aids or sipping trickle down
From dammed up redoubts of exploitation.
It's about the mechanisms of wealth allocation
As well as wealth creation.
But its not about claiming
That there's a benefit to poverty
Or looking for bottom fishing equality
From bureaucratic monopolies.
Or a misguided faith
That a multitude of misapprehended self-interests
Will keep us safe from the cliffs
Of our Armageddon myths.
That there's a perfection in price,
That the tender dance of supply and demand
Will forever be time.
You'll find
That lovers fall out.
THE EVOLUTION ON AN IDEOLOGY
PART I. UP
It seems that some small sample sizes
Short time frames
And incomparable, incomplete data-sets
Swapped DNA, that's to say,
Had sex with some abstract concepts
About the discipline, long-term perception
And self-knowledge of this particular primate.
Incubated in the hubris of the end of history
The resultant virulent virus
First escaped in the region of the US great lakes.
Isolated outbreaks infected
Polemics from academics
Till economics was riddled
With a mimetic epidemic
That migrated to politics
And popular scholarship
To become a pathogenic
Epistemic pandemic.
Endemic among a group thinking global elite
The symptoms:
An astronomic misperception
That markets can be free
And that they are equilibrium systems.
PART II. DOWN
I think we can see that markets are chaotic
In the demotic
Even the idiotic can make a profit
If all it takes is watching the clock tick
When the money is free
And we underwrite the losses.
The king of statistics declares himself shocked
That will of the shareholders
Does not manifest
In the commercial collective
That the body corporate
Has an incoherent perspective
Of its own self interest
Using the bottom rung of the ladder
To build more room at the top
They thought it was a straight path up the hill
Till the flip-flop
And the credit fled
And they found out they were walking
On a river bed.
Steady states are great for pattern seeking apes
But change the parameters and the fortune-tellers
Get undressed as amateur.
THE REVOLUTION IS NOW
It is about eco-systems of innovation
About networks of distributed collaboration
It is about information as the primary commodity
And communication the enabling key.
It is about a new mode of production.
And they can store all our
Phone calls, emails and DNA
But the pretence is
It takes six months to publish their expenses.
It is about a new architecture of power.
Now times are tight
They'll say the state is forced
Into outsourcing the civil service,
But why take such a hapless course
When ways exist to open source
The entire edifice.
It is about progressing collective rights,
Because without solidarity
They'll take individuals by night.
And I'm thinking if you can buy to let
Man United and EMI
Then why didn't my MP
Do that for me?
What is the cost of equity?
It is about new forms of ownership.
And if the west can spend two trillion on banks
To keep the champagne flutes full
And kill foreign civilians with tanks
To get petrol,
Then are we directing our resources
The way the sum of society's choices
Would choose
If with all of our foresight
We apportioned our forces
And all of our voices were valued?
Clearly there is work to do.
There are new battle lines in the old confrontation
The tool-kit redesigned now we can move information
There can be no relaxation on the ramifications
I'm calling no taxation without rights over allocation.
