grey morning. a friday. hail the binmen.
yesterday horsemouth listened to two podcasts - talking politics (back after the summer break and touting two books) and the grenfell tower fire inquiry (reliably blood boiling). he also listened to a radio show, former FT columnist lucy kellaway's could do better on her throwing up the journalism gig to become a maths teacher in hackney.
on talking politics adam tooze has his book shutdown on how global capitalism handled the pandemic. in some places (china, south africa) there was a lockdown (a top-down state intervention with policemen) but in others (europe notably) there was as much a shutdown (where the people began by staying home), e.g. in spain the auto industry closed down because of wildcat strikes by the workers.
the last time horsemouth mentioned the workers he was talking it like their power was increasing post-covid/ brexit etc. and soon we would be seeing union leaders invited into no.10 for beer and sandwiches (to encourage them to encourage their members to be more moderate in their wage demands, as happened in the 70ies). to be clear, and after listening to the talking politics lot discuss exactly this in these terms, horsemouth doesn't expect this to happen. the workforce is too thinly unionised to make this possible.
horsemouth is slightly scared. china is on the way up. the US is on the way down. the US might be tempted to use its superior military power to have a politico-military confrontation with the china to assert and thus retain its residual dominance. (this is what the submarine pact with the UK and australia is about - well no really it is about huge subsidies for a military-industrial complex - if horsemouth was the french or german he would be delighted to be well out of it).
meanwhile lucy kellaway has thrown up her job of twenty plus years at the FT to become a maths teacher in a secondary school in hackney (and further she has encouraged loads of other near retirees to do the same). lucy proves surprisingly adapatable, swallowing the taylorised personality bypass now required to teach in a team focused way (memorably described by a refusenik as robot time). she now sees her time in the world of the corporates and of journalism as one of intellectual freedom and self actualisation.
adam tooze takes as his model marx sitting in the british museum reading reports by british factory managers, researching the nitty-gritty of capitalism (the processes that economics hides), rather than the german philosophy or french politics. and here we have lucy diarising this process for us.
horsemouth has a sorry you're leaving card from his former boss (one of the better ones - and visually quite like lucy kellaway). you can see horsemouth is not cut out for the world of work by this line already. on the one hand he takes it as his right to have an opinion on how he is managed, on the other he lacks the necessary resistance to the process (he sees their point). the card contains a number of comments from fellow workers. horsemouth is praised for his professionalism (you can make of that what you will).
he also got on with some writing of business plans (the fantasy of development) and must get on with some more as soon as we are done here.
tomorrow horsemouth is child minding (wisdom's alternative to work). monday a meeting of the communal endeavour.
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