Kmflett's Blog

Elon Musk, whose treatment of those he employs leaves a huge amount to be desired, opined in 2023 that with AI people won’t need to work anymore. The German Communist, playwright & poet Bertolt Brecht had a rather different perspective on who does the work and who does not

Who built the seven gates of Thebes?
The books are filled with names of kings.
Was it the kings who hauled the craggy blocks of stone?
And Babylon, so many times destroyed.
Who built the city up each time? In which of Lima’s houses,
That city glittering with gold, lived those who built it?
In the evening when the Chinese wall was finished
Where did the masons go? Imperial Rome
Is full of arcs of triumph. Who reared them up? Over whom
Did the Caesars triumph? Byzantium lives in song.
Were all her dwellings palaces? And even in Atlantis of the legend
The night the seas rushed in,
The drowning men still bellowed for their slaves.

Young Alexander conquered India.
He alone?
Caesar beat the Gauls.
Was there not even a cook in his army?
Phillip of Spain wept as his fleet
was sunk and destroyed. Were there no other tears?
Frederick the Great triumphed in the Seven Years War.
Who triumphed with him?

Each page a victory
At whose expense the victory ball?
Every ten years a great man,
Who paid the piper?

So many particulars.
So many questions.

Is a machine really after your job?

Following an AI summit at Bletchley Park, an occasion firmly focused on how AI can benefit the few not the many, Elon Musk has opined that in future AI will replace all jobs.

Musk is a well known if wealthy idiot but is there nevertheless something in the point?

Some jobs have declined thanks to the use of machinery. One need only look at the decline in agricultural labour over the last 150 years in the UK, or check how many people quite large factories producing things like coca cola actually employ (answer, surprisingly few, its mostly done by machine).

However I’m old enough to remember the pamphlet written by the late Chris Harman some decades ago now titled ‘is a machine after your job’.

He meant is a computer after your job. The answer is, no it wasnt. What the computer has done has create yet more work, often of a rather mundane nature.

Some might argue that this is a victory for capital since it must have increased the productivity of labour and increased exploitation of the workforce. It is possible but it is arguable.

The reasons for this were actually pointed out at length by Raph Samuel in his Workshop of the World article in an early issue of History Workshop Journal.

Samuel surveyed in detail the industries of Victorian capitalism, which ones had moved to machine production, which ones hadn’t and why. The reality was that the labour process did not always lend itself to reliable use of machinery and sometimes it was simply just much cheaper to employ lots of workers than use expensive machines and those jobs, then as now, were not well paid. I suspect, broadly, that the same principles apply today.

Beyond that however while Engels rightly wrote of the dull compulsion of economic reality, and much work is drudgery or worse, there is dignity in labour and satisfaction in doing a  decently paid, skilled job well. Is there still a political party that aims to make sure this is the nature of the UK’s workforce I wonder…. The race to the bottom doesn’t work for ordinary people and its usefulness to capital is debatable.

King Charles and Queen Camilla have been in Kenya. The King didn’t apologise for British brutality during the fight for independence in the 1950s but did suggest that it hadn’t been ideal.

On October 31st there was a banquet in Nairobi. Kenya has an excellent cuisine but the lengthy menu including Stilton, Beef Wellington and Earl Grey cake did seem to suggest that it was a sort of imperial heritage affair.

However unlike the recent austerity focused banquet given to the Royals by Macron at the Palace of Versailles recently there does seem to have been plenty to eat…

Beard Liberation Front

2^nd November

Beard Liberation Front says Erik ten Hag must shave his beard off and start again

The Beard Liberation Front, the informal network of beard wearers, has reported on its specialist analysis of Erik ten Hag’s managerial crisis at Manchester United.

United have suffered their worst start to a football season for many years.

While ten Hag has said he is determined to stay at the Club the BLF analysis suggests that this won’t be possible without significant action to address what has become a follicular crisis.

The campaigners say that it has become clear that ten Hag has the wrong sort of beard to successfully manage Manchester United. He will need to shave his beard off and start again, looking at successful managerial facial hair styles such as that of Mikel Arteta at Arsenal or Ange Postecoglou at Spurs.

BLF Organiser Keith Flett said, Beard Power is a key route to footballing success but when a particular beard style is just not working the only thing is to shave it off and start again

Matt Hancock, the language of COVID & the consequences

Thursday at the COVID Inquiry saw further discussion of the role of Matt Hancock who was Health Secretary in 2020.

Earlier in the week Dominic Cummings had been sharply critical of Hancock particularly in respect of care homes and making sure COVID did not spread and cause deaths. As a matter of record that did not happen with tragic but potentially avoidable consequences.

Chris Wormald who was Permanent Secretary at the Dept of Health was asked if he thought Hancock was lying or thought to be lying about what was happening and what was being done in the early months of COVID. Wormald said that he thought rather than Hancock ‘over promised’. He went on to note that Hancock set ambitious targets to promote achievement against them.

In reality the targets and spin were not matched by things actually happening. The consequences are to be found in the COVID death toll and those living with long COVID

A Times Editorial (2nd November) returns to one of the paper’s favourite subjects- the right to protest. Unlike the hate filled far right Home Secretary Suella Braverman it agrees that there is such a right.

However it has yet to find an occasion or a subject where it would be appropriate to actually exercise that right.

It has previously fulminated on protests by Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil. Now protest on the action of the Israeli Army in Gaza is in its sights. Its concerned in particular about protests by Jews who are opposed to the current far right to fascist Israeli Government. Their views are inconvenient to the narrative that Murdoch & Co want to spin.

The Sunday Times (Editorial 5th November) returns to the subject ‘the right to peaceful protest is fundamental….but’ The Editorial calls for organisers of protests to ‘take heed of the public mood’. Britain First, Nigel Farage and Suella Braverman are not that. 75% in public polls support a ceasefire in Gaza, which is the central demand of protests

Its a reminder that unless the right to protest is exercised its a right that can disappear

The importance of demonstrations in recent British political history

The right to demonstrate was hard won in practice. It took a massacre at Peterloo in Manchester on 16^th August 1819, where soldiers on horse-back, cut down and killed and injured protesters for the vote, to remind the State that allowing political demonstrations was perhaps, mostly, preferable to such confrontations. It is a right that has required exercise in practice down the decades and centuries, and there have of course been times when demonstrations were banned, or attacked by the police.

Since the 1960s protest marches have become a significant way of focusing on issues which official Westminster politics ignores.

CND set the benchmark from the late 1950s often bringing hundreds of thousands on to the streets in an effort to ban nuclear weapons. They did so again on cruise missiles in the 1980s. It reinforced and promoted a tradition that democratic politics was about people themselves being active, as much or sometimes more than, voting for an MP every few years.

27^th October marks the 55^th anniversary of the anti-Vietnam War march that went to the US Embassy in Grosvenor Square, central London. 1968 was a year of revolt and the State took precautions against revolution.

Protesters may have had this in mind in some cases, but the immediate aim was to stop war. That demonstration of 100,000 was historically large but much larger protests followed. The march against the Iraq War on 15^th February 2003, which saw well over a million on the streets remains the largest so far in UK history.

That march ushered in an era when the message that politics was as much for the streets as it was the Commons reached a much wider layer of people. The right, with the Countryside Alliance, and the centre, with pro-EU marches also put hundreds of thousands marching through London.

These were usually one off marches, not within a democratic structure and certainly not feeding into longer running campaigns like CND and Stop the War. The distinction is important. Its not just the march but the on-going grassroots, community and workplace organisation that is key.

In the last period a Conservative Government has sought increasingly to crack down on the right to protest. The current Home Secretary Suella Braverman gives a strong impression of wanting to ban all protest. Labour leader Keir Starmer, despite a human rights lawyer background, often seems not far behind. He has clearly read at least the opening passages of Ralph Miliband’s 1961 book Parliamentary Socialism which notes that Labour is the most dogmatic of parties- about Parliament not socialism.

Numbers on the streets can frustrate the banners. Current protests in support of Palestine have seen hundreds of thousands participate. Starmer has attempted to ban Labour from having anything to do with them. As Aditya Chakrabortty has argued in the Guardian the freezing out of legitimate issues from official politics simply encourages people to protest more

There are two wider points. Firstly marching is not the only way to get change. There is indeed what the US sociologist Charles Tilly called a repertoire of contention, of possible strategies, from riots to meetings, petitions and lobbies. All have their place depending on context.

Secondly that the era of mass politics will continue, as politics is defined by the media and politicians as something that is done from above, the motivation to effect change from below grows with it. Its surely what motivated those who made their way to Manchester on that August Monday in 1819, and history suggests that it can work.

This post appeared in the Morning Star

The Chartists are coming & so is Storm Ciaran

Hurrah for old England and liberty sweet,

The land that we live in and plenty to eat;

We shall ever remember this wonderful day,

The Chartists are coming, get out of the way.

The Chartists are Coming, Ballad, 1848

According to the weather forecast Storm Ciaran is due to hit much of the UK over the next couple of days. The forecasts are made by professional weather forecasters, often trade union members of the professional’s union Prospect, they both deserve to be taken seriously and are highly likely to be accurate.

Such storms are causing significant damage and disruption, partly due to climate change and partly because of a failure to invest in infrastructure

That said you don’t need a weatherman to tell you that in recent times there have been an increasing number of ‘weather events’

The inability to cope with the impact of storms is not a natural but a political phenomena, causing by a failure to act on climate change and a failure to address the impact of a changing climate

The expectation of a storm is a significant factor of social life and interaction now. People peer anxiously out of windows for signs of rain and wind and search for reports of it approaching (these days much easier to find with social media). In the mid-nineteenth century London, 170 years ago,  it was the Chartists who got people looking out of windows, checking for any sign of impending trouble.

Suffice to say that in the revolutionary year of 1848 the Chartists did indeed come, on April 10th 1848, but actually they were rumoured to be coming far more often than they actually arrived.

Ticket Offices Saved: A reminder that pressure from outside Parliament works

The campaign to stop the closure of rail ticket offices has won. The Government has withdrawn its plans in the face of a mass campaign, led by the RMT, community groups and also Labour MPs and activists.

Yet Parliament let alone a Labour Government was not central to this success. It was pressure from outside of Parliament that did.

That’s not to say that ejecting the Tories from Office and electing a new Government is not important. It must be said however that Keir Starmer has reduced expectations of a Labour Government to such a low level it will be interesting if it does produce even modest change. The slogan kick out the Tories and keep on kicking has never been more relevant.

The Labour Party was formed for a reason and we are fast approaching the one hundredth anniversary of the first, brief, Labour Government. Leaving Starmer aside the impulse to change things through Parliament won’t go away.

However the nineteenth century suggests changes of some benefit to working people can be achieved without a Labour Party but, as with ticket offices, by pressure from without. Laws which put trade unions, strikes and picketing on a legal basis, all passed in the 1870s, were all achieved by pressure from without. Extensions to the right to vote and workplace safety, hours and conditions legislation likewise were achieved by political campaigning outside of Parliament.

Its not an argument in my view for anti-Parliamentary politics but it is one for understanding that the Parliamentary Road to Socialism is not the only way forward.

COVID Lockdown & Boris Johnson March 2020: the wasted 10 days as thousands got ill

Labour MP Jon Ashworth in an interesting Guardian piece(March 2021) on Downing St and COVID three years ago claimed that in March 2020 there was a feeling of British exceptionalism in Downing St. It reveals that the virus was widespread at the centre of Government in Whitehall as Boris Johnson havered over lockdown measures:

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2021/mar/12/no-10-plague-pit-how-covid-brought-westminster-to-its-knees

On Monday 16th March 2020 Johnson suggested people avoid pubs and theatres (I’d been in a London pub on Sunday 15th March- the Cock Tavern in Hackney and didn’t go into one again until July-the same pub as it happens). On 20th March he ordered them to close and on Monday 23rd March he announced the first lockdown.

Yet it was all late. COVID was already widespread in the community-certainly in London. As the Guardian article notes numbers may have had it but getting a test was virtually impossible.

The Covid Inquiry on 31^st October 2023 has heard that Johnson knew a full lockdown should have started on Saturday 14^th March. However he was incapable of making a decision and was not in any case an enthusiast for lockdowns. So ten days were wasted during which time thousands got ill and some died.

However many, myself included, started to act before Johnson. I cancelled a socialist history seminar at the Institute of Historical Research on 16th March (the building was open) and also a London union officers committee meeting in central London I was due to chair the previous week. In both cases there was a sense that getting people together in small rooms was not a great idea.

It was still happening in Downing St though.

On Friday 12th March 2020 I attended the annual Bernie Grant Memorial meeting in Tottenham. It was packed with hundreds of people and I felt uneasy. I’m not aware though of a significant COVID spike related to it, thankfully. At this stage the precautions stage was at elbow bumps rather than handshakes. Social distancing and masks were a way off.

Probably the thing that really brought home how far Johnson was behind much of public sentiment was the start of the cancellation of Premiership football matches.

The game between Spurs and Manchester United on Sunday 15th March 2020 was much anticipated. It was cancelled at short notice. As often business (which is what Premiership football mostly is)was in front of Johnson.

He stuck to his Podsnappery, ‘Not English’ line that COVID restrictions were for *other* countries for another week. As a result many more got ill, died and suffered long term illness than might have been the case.

And then came the Downing St lockdown parties