Conspiracy

[dukealien]

It’s crazy to think
people with similar interests
might conspire or collude
to make themselves better off.

For seeming at first no more than a sarcastic expression of cynicism, this little poem is quite complex and informative on second or third reading.

Poetically, the only soft spots I see are "interests" and "conspire" which a reader might give three syllables instead of two (the latter Midwestern-US "con-spy-ur").  The trouble comes when a reader who pedantically gives "interests" three tries to read "conspire" as two.  Perhaps the order of "conspire" and "collude" could be reversed - "conspire" naturally has two syllables at the end of the line.

The first cut, programmatically, is the sarcastic (it's obviously *not* crazy to think so) and the upshot after making the sarcastic reversal magnified by understatment ("might") is that most people conspire to further their own interests.  As a check, replacing "might" with "never" yields a statement of simple, not even especially cynical common sense.

The second cut is to place the observation - either form - in classical economic context.  There, Adam Smith famously observed that those with similar interests *seldom* meet except to conspire against the public (that is, for their own betterment).  He then turns this cynical-sounding common sense on its head by asserting that these efforts, as if by his famous Invisible Hand, nonetheless work to the public's advantage.

A third cut is to replace or widen the concept of betterment.  People do conspire to make themselves better off... but also their children and other relations (infamously and particularly nephews and illegitimate offspring).  They also conspire and collude for *causes* which may in fact make them better off ("they set out to do good, and did very well") but not necessarily.  So the betterment may be in their own eyes - or even in the eyes of others they respect and wish to impress.

The issue in this third cut is that economic analysis ("better off") is not the sole scale for analysis, as Marxians tend to make it.  Marx himself pictured his ideal life under Communism as including art and leisure activities (plus, presumably, tupping housemaids, though where one would find such workers under Communism is problematic).  That the poem seems to share this focus on the material lightly points out - since it also contains the sarcastic reversal - that there might be other reasons to coordinate.

A fun read.