Kmflett's Blog

Marx and Engels at New Year

Both Marx and Engels were regular senders of new year greetings (at least in the 1870s)but their actual New Years differed somewhat.

For example Marx spent New Year’s Day 1866 starting to transcribe a clean copy of Capital Volume 1 the MS of which he had completed at the end of 1865.

In the 1850s Engels the Manchester businessman was to be found joining a hunt at New Year which he claimed was good for his health (if not the foxes).

Retired and living in North London Engels ventured out to friends for New Year’s Eve 1888. A Thick fog prevented him from returning home and he told Laura Lafargue that he spent all night and after a few hours sleep much of New Year’s Day drinking (pilsner and claret)

Otherwise both beard wearers were frequent senders of New Year greetings and wishes suggesting a hope for the future.

Marx to Wilhelm Liebknecht 7^th Jan 1875

Happy New Year!

Engels to Wilhelm Liebknecht 9^th January 1877

D’abord,” a Happy New Year to you and family and all our friends

Marx to Thomas Allsopp 1^st Jan 1878

I hope one good thing the new year will do—act beneficently upon your health… The whole family send you their new year wishes and you know that they come from the heart

Engels to Johann Becker  11^th Jan 1878

Avant tout, a Happy New Year to you, and may it bring you less in the way of troubles and burdens than the previous one!

Twelfth Night is part of a season of festival, carnival and revolt that starts on All Hallows Eve (Oct 31) and can end as late as Shrove Tuesday.

The appointment of a Lord of Misrule is connected with Twelfth Night but can occur earlier.

The title Lord of Misrule sounds radical but there is no mention of it in Christopher Hill’s The World Turned Upside Down’. Some commentary suggests that it was really more to do with poking fun at the established order the better to keep it in place, and in some cases- for example in New Orleans- it became firmly established with a celebration of the old- reactionary- order of things.

Less controversial is the tradition of wassailing and of having cakes and ale on Twelfth Night. Since it is Try January, why not do that. It does underline, if nothing else, how out of touch with seasonal traditions Dry January is.

This time of year is that of few hours of daylight and scarcity of fresh produce so things like cake and ale were and are welcome.

A tradition was to bake a cake with a bean, or possibly a pea or a coin in and the person discovering it in their piece of cake became the Lord of Misrule for Twelfth Night

There is a case I think for attempting to reclaim a radical tradition of the Lord of Misrule. A giant model of a naked Nigel Farage paraded through the streets sitting backwards on a donkey would add something to the sum of human jollity at this time of year after all.

Click below to book (free)

https://www.tickettailor.com/events/calderdaletuc/1097983?#

Eric Hobsbawm, the Foreign Office & Revolutionaries (1973)

DeClassified have unearthed some open files at the National Archives which deal with the UK operations of a Foreign Office Unit mainly focused on what it saw as subversion elsewhere in the world.

The files (details below) cover the work of a Unit that focused on communists in the trade union movement the Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm and World in Action journalists.

Since the activities of the CP in the unions were no doubt also being monitored elsewhere the selection of Hobsbawm and a couple of journalists to focus suggests a private obsession by one or more senior officials.

The specific interest in Hobsbawm relates to his 1973 volume Revolutionaries. It is a collection of short pieces, reviews etc that appeared in New Left Review, the Times Literary Supplement, Marxism Today etc.

Hobsbawm was always an engaging and interesting historian even if one doesn’t agree with this or that point, and the book stands up well 60 years on.

The file notes that the FO Unit saw the publication of Revolutionaries as the ‘peg’ to have a go at Hobsbawm over the Nazi-Soviet Pact at the start of World War Two. ‘Peg’ is the key word here because none of the chapters in the book focuses on that subject.

The interesting thing is that the FO Unit wanted to use this as a way of getting a piece notionally authored by Lord Chalfont in the Times, attacking Hobsbawm. When this didn’t work out they tried Robert Conquest etc etc.

It can be seen as part of the ideological Cold War, history department, perhaps.

It is worth reflecting however that Eric Hobsbawm ended up as a Companion of Honour

Was Starmer’s ‘anti-Westminster’ speech making a nod to the ‘Provinces and Tom Maguire’?

Keir Starmer made a start of 2024 speech in Bristol today. One phrase was that people were right to be ‘anti-Westminster’ and suspicious of politicians who loved power for its own sake.

Modern labour politics started 131 years ago. Not in a London HQ but in ‘those shadowy parts known as the provinces’

The Independent Labour Party was formed 131 years ago meeting in Bradford Labour Institute from 14-16^th January 1893 Keir Hardie was elected as the first Chair.

The point about where power in the labour movement has been historically was made by EP Thompson in his 1960 essay Homage to Tom Maguire. Maguire was an ILP activist who died too young.

It appeared in Essays in Labour History, but is quite difficult to come by now (it was recently reprinted in the collection EP Thompson and the Making of the New Left edited by Cal Winslow).

Thompson makes the point that ‘provincial events are seen as shadowy incidents or unaccountable spontaneous upheavals on the periphery of the national scene’. But, Thompson counters ‘the ILP  grew from the bottom up, its origins were in the shadowy parts known as ‘the provinces’.

Thompson was no huge fan of London, but argued that from the 1950s it had irreversibly won out over the provinces in terms of political power. Recent events suggest that this was far from the whole picture, Thompson the political activist had fed back into Thompson the historian on the point.

Whether Starmer’s anti-Westminster comment was a nod to the importance of grassroots politics or a wave to supporters of Reform UK might usefully be debated.

Beard Liberation Front

3rd January

The Beard Liberation Front, the informal network of beard wearers, has said that the World Darts Championship Final at Alexandra Palace between two Luke’s with a beard, Humphries and Littler, has seen the former triumph.

The campaigners say that Humphries carefully manicured designer beard was clearly able to influence the airflow of darts at key moments in the Final. By contrast Littler’s organic beard made an early impression but ultimately lacked control.

BLF Organiser Keith Flett said, the World Darts Championship is an early reminder that 2024 will the year of Beard Power in sport.

The 1930s when darts was banned

Premier League darts concludes at the O2 on 29th May after weekly competitions around the UK and Europe since February 2025. It has attracted particular interest again perhaps because one of the finalists Luke Littler is perhaps a little more youthful than some other darts players.

Like snooker, darts in the 2020s is as much a spectator sport as one to be played directly. The enjoyment of the spectacle by the O2 crowd (and Ally Pally at year end for the World Championships) is sometimes remarked upon disdainfully, although crowds at many sporting events are to be seen similarly enjoying themselves.

There is not a great deal of research on the social history of darts in the UK with the exception of Dr Darts, Patrick Chaplin, who has researched a PhD on the subject.

One interesting sidelight with an angle even today is the attitude of authorities to darts and indeed to all games that might be played in pubs:

While the King and Queen playing a brief game of darts in Slough in 1937 did something to promote the cross class appeal of darts in reality in Glasgow, Huddersfield and Liverpool darts playing in pubs was banned at various points in the 1930s.

In most cases it wasn’t just darts but all pub games that were banned, being seen to be associated with drink and unruly behaviour. In most cases the ban was relaxed for some pub games but not darts.

The Second World War intervened and as Chaplin notes by the 1950s darts had become a regular feature of pub life, often promoted by breweries to attract custom

At the start of every year for some decades The Times has published a chart of Royal activities during the preceding year. The chart is compiled by a reader Tim O’Donovan from the daily list of Royal engagements that the Times publishes.

No doubt the list is designed to impress us, the Royal subjects, about busy the Royals are, albeit of course mostly financed in various ways from public funds.

Column B which looks at receptions, lunches, dinners and banquets is an interesting detail

King Charles managed 50 of them but was surpassed by the Duke of Edinburgh (Edward) with 59 and the Princess Royal (Anne) 84.

No doubt they attended out of a sense of duty….

Official Politics, Gaza & the view from below. New Year update. A political rage is growing

Before Christmas Aditya Chakrabortty went to Luton and reported for the Guardian

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/dec/07/young-britons-massacre-gaza-luton-israel

What he found, as he notes, is little reported in the media and when it is sneeringly so, as if organised by old men with beards behind the scenes (hello there)

As E P Thompson wrote in the Making of the English Working Class of Richard Carlile’s radical paper shop in Fleet St in the 1820s, where those minding it were regularly arrested and jailed, it was in fact never left untended. As soon as someone was carted off someone else, unknown to them arrived to do it. They came out of a culture Thompson notes, and from all over England.

No doubt there was some organisation behind that but at root it was a reaction from below to events.

Chakrabortty found college students walking out to attend a mass rally on Gaza. They had no doubt heard the official words of Sunak and Starmer and then they had looked at their screens and talked to each other. Images of death and destruction to stretch the imagination, on the horror scale.

Official politics continues to make gestures about the murder of thousands of Palestinians and does little. The Luton students by contrast are taking action as are many others.

After eons of deliberation the UN has agreed that more aid be sent to Gaza. There is no ceasefire and the murderous forces of the IDF press on, even as Israeli Government’s lies are exposed even now in mainstream media. Palestine is the historical source of the Christmas story but there was no peace and goodwill from the Tel Aviv regime. Indeed Netanyahu made a Christmas Day appearance in Gaza to underline that genocidal actions will continue.

A political rage continues to grow, not in the corridors of power but in communities and on the street. Protest continued over the holidays, at companies making arms for Israel, at Barclays Bank which is funding it and New Year’s Eve Vigils. People will be on the streets again as the New Year gets going.

If we return to Thompson he made the distinction between what he called Experience 1 and Experience 2. Theoretically it can be discussed and challenged as a framework. In practice though it draws a distinction between what people are told is happening and what they actually see is happening. In the gap, yawning in the case of Gaza, politics develops. Whose politics is of course up for debate and discussion but it won’t be those of Keir Starmer who still hasn’t managed to call for an immediate ceasefire