Too hard to leave

I wish I could make this a haiku, it was written for and published on twitter.

On #Brexit #lab16 Labour’s Conference is right; redlines on citizen rights or No!

It’s too hard to leave, people with good will, if limited intellect, towards #Brexit are failing to agree satisfactory terms.

On the sanctity of the referendum’s democratic will, we now already have a second mandate, the general election 2017.

Also Parliament can’t guarantee anything, it can always change its mind. …

Counting

I am considering some issues relating to the conduct of elections in the UK. In Lewisham Labour we are selecting a candidate for Mayor and the election will be conducted using a simple eliminating ballot, sometimes referred to as an Alternative Voting scheme. This, it can be argued is a special case of a more proportionate voting system; the special nature being that there is only one winner and thus the result is not so proportionate. The rest of this article is a technical description of an alternative vote election, a single transferable vote election and a closed list proportional representation election using the D’Hondt counting system. …

Women’s Conference Arrangements Committee

Last year Labour Conference voted to make Women’s Conference a policy making body and thus it need a Conference Arrangements Committee. The left candidates are Theresa Clark and Jean Crocker. Their statements, which include their LP Numbers which are needed for the nomination are here… &  here…. Further necessary information needed to nominate Teresa & Jean is on a comment in this CLPD facebook post. …

Franchise

While considering the desirability of Executive Mayors, it’s occurred to me that the Miliband reforms, the creation and empowerment of affiliated members and registered supporters have not been implemented in the selection of the Executive Mayor candidates, even in Manchester and certainly not in the London boroughs. Why not? …

Policy

I wrote a piece on my essay blog, now here trying to resurrect my thoughts on the #digitalliberty agenda just before the election. The thoughts were formed and committed to writing in 2014 and I said in the article that I thought they’d stood the test of time.

On second thoughts I think it’s weak on

  1. the right to privacy being a right to use encryption
  2. a failure to recognise that access to records created for fighting serious crime may have unacceptably low thresholds of access i.e. no-one is checking that the use is about serious crime
  3. justice must be public and require human judgement; algorithms can’t be judges (although it does cover that!)

Third thoughts would be that the Digital Economy Act 2016 widens the definition of criminal file sharing beyond reasonable and proportionate. …

Fragments

I am reading Paul Mason’s Postcapitalism. He examines Marx’s “the Fragment on Machines” in a section called the general intellect on pages 133 – 138.

Mason argues that Marx predicted the transformation of Labour from animal energy to that of organising and applying knowledge and expertise. He also forecast the potentially primary importance of knowledge in the productive process. He also observed that once the machines and their encapsulation of knowledge become significant, then knowledge locked inside the machines is ‘social’.

Improving productivity through improving knowledge use is better i.e. cheaper and limitless, than improving Labour productivity; there’s only so much labour power available but It requires an investment in people.

It’s not possible to value the knowledge inputs of the productive process because it’s independent of the Labour inputs. The price mechanism is undermined as is the means of the appropriation of surplus value.

The development or level of technology is the extent to which social knowledge is a force of production.

This is important, maybe crucial to Mason, as there is now a knowledge based route out of capitalism’s inherent crises. Mason argues that Marx suggested that capitalism cannot co-exist with shared knowledge.

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