Vanessa Austin Locke: False economy
The bank’s just offered me vast sums of money to buy a house. I didn’t ask them for it, they just offered. I’ve never thought about buying a house in my life. I don’t actually own anything of value aside from a cello, a collection of inherited jewellery and a six-year old Macbook containing my entire world. I don’t see the point in owning a house that I can’t pass on without slapping offspring that I may or may not ever even have with unaffordable death tax.
But when I’ve mentioned to people that the bank’s offered me this cash they all say tell me to get on with it immediately and stop throwing money away on rent.
Thing is… I haven’t got time. What I’m paying for when I ‘throw money away’ on rent is the ability to be commitment free, have a high-end lifestyle and keep my time for other things without the hassle of property management. That’s valuable to me.
The people who are trying to persuade me to buy a house tell me to buy a dump and do it up. But I’d rather write poems than spend money that isn’t mine on a property I don’t want and am not going to live in.
“Economics has become a sort of Frankenstein’s monster”
It seems to me that economics has become a sort of Frankenstein’s monster. It’s grown into a separate entity, so complex as to be entirely beyond our control or comprehension. I’m told by people who I assume know a lot more than I do that it’s needed and justified and terribly important. They even call it a science. But I always thought the point of economics was to serve humanity. When did humanity become the servant of economics?
In a new book called The Uprising: On Poetry and Finance, Franco “Bifo” Berardi calls economics a dogma: “Economic dogma has taken hold of the public discourse for three decades, and has destroyed the critical power of political reason. The collapse of the global economy has exposed the dangers of economic dogmatism, but its ideology has already been incorporated into the automatisms of living society.”
He goes on to suggest that the key to reversing the brain-washing of algorithmic and “magical” formulae developed by a few bankers in their ivory towers lies in language. “Only the conscious mobilization of the erotic body of the general intellect, only the poetic revitalization of language, will open the way to the emergence of a new form of social autonomy.” And that’s all in the first two pages folks. It’s a cracking little read and if there’s anyone out there on the other side of the fence who can coherently set me straight on the subject I’d love to hear from them, but for now I have poems to write, and a girl’s got to write a lot of poems to pay the rent these days.
