Michael Murray 

“A bee puts to shame many an architect in the construction of its cells. 

But what distinguishes the worst of architects from the best of bees is namely this: the architect will construct in his imagination that which he will ultimately erect in reality. At the end of every labour process we get that which existed in the consciousness of the labourer at its commencement.” 

Karl Marx: Das Kapital

Introduction

The 4th September marks the anniversary of the death, in 2020, at the age of 86, of Mike Cooley, author of the seminal book, first published in 1980 by Spokesman Books: “The Architect or the Bee? The Human Price of Technology

The 2016 edition has a must read 7 page Foreword by Frances O’Grady, former TUC General Secretary, and no stranger to Labour Affairs, or its predecessor, Labour and Trade Union Review.  

This year also marks the anniversary of the publication of what is generally referred to as the Lucas Plan, otherwise “The Corporate Plan for Lucas Aerospace.”  

What prompts this article, apart from marking the anniversaries, is to draw attention to the relevance of “The Architect or Bee? ” and “The Corporate Plan for  Lucas Aerospace  to some of the burning issues of our time, beginning with the external pressures on Britain to increase its Defence spending at the expense of all other civil and social expenditure: “Warfare spending instead of Welfare spending” as the catalyst and main driver of economic growth. 

Defence Spending

A propos  defence spending: yesterday, a leaflet  addressed to Labour members came into my virtual letterbox. It read: “Assumptions are often made about what Labour Party members think on key issues but our polling work this summer surprised many. We found that Labour members support reducing welfare spending more than the general public, and also supported higher defence spending.”  

The giveaway: In tiny print at the bottom of the leaflet: Copyright Labour Together ! 

Labour Together with a ThinkLabour rebrand. It is pretending to be reporting news when they are in fact making it – as with their ‘focus groups,” which became a substitute for democratic decision-making at Annual Conference.  

And true to the tried and tested Labour Together  playbook, Burnham’s first serious political statement endorsed the “Warfare not Welfare” government trajectory and moreover, has promised to fulfil all the exorbitant financial commitments made  to Ukraine by Starmer.  Of course, this can only be paid for by cutting back on State spending, including Welfare, since he’s also  committed himself to keeping within Labour’s self-imposed fiscal rules. Though don’t ask him where the countless billions promised to Ukraine “for as long as it takes.” are going to come from. (his words: faithfully repeating Starmer’s).

Of course, any hardship involved is in the “National Interest.” 

The prestigious journal “Open Democracy“ begs to differ. In an in-depth series of investigative articles on the US Military Industrial Complex it reports: 

“The rapid expansion of Anduril’s UK footprint reveals how a clutch of US defence-tech firms backed by Trump’s family and close supporters are looking to profit from the US president’s insistent pressure on the UK government to increase its defence spending. As Trump’s erratic foreign policy has raised military tensions across the world, these firms — which include controversial spy-tech firm Palantir — are poised to benefit.” Ethan Shone Open Democracy, 24 August, 2026. 

Bear in mind, also, Andrew Feinstein’s “The Shadow World: Inside the Global Arms Trade,” 2011, which exposed systemic corruption, close ties between governments and defence contractors. He found that the arms trade represents 40% of international trade corruption, despite constituting only 1% of international trade.  In this book he also connects the legal, government-backed arms trade to the illicit black and grey markets, showing how bribery and political collusion fuel both. And he cites the invidious “revolving door” between political, military and defence companies. And the ubiquitous “donations” (not confined to the Defence sector, admittedly). 

Hardly had the ink dried on Andy Burnham’s signature in the House of Commons’ “Test Roll”  when it was reported in  “Open Democracy” that, in June, one of his Ministers accepted a £20,000 donation from Signum Global Advisors, a “war profiteering firm”  Open Democracy, 21 August, 2026.  When challenged to rebut the accusation, she declined. Another feature of the Defence Industry identified by Feinstein: the impunity it enjoys because of its political connections. A reciprocal culture of impunity in fact. And this corruption is not victimless, which makes it reprehensible.

Is Defence spending a driver of growth?

There is, today, a consensus in macroeconomic research and multilateral organisations from the World Bank to the UK’s own Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) that spending on Health, Welfare, Housing and Education yield substantially higher multipliers and long-term productivity gains, reduces long-term state costs, and narrows social inequality.

A healthier, highly educated workforce is inherently more innovative, efficient, and adaptable to technological change. 

A significant portion of defence spending is allocated to heavy machinery and specialised equipment that does not directly improve the everyday productivity of the wider civilian work force.

Bottom line: Defence spending is not the growth engine it’s made out to be by those across the political parties calling for it. 

So why are they calling for it? 

The Party political consensus is that the UK is in a “pre-war” situation caused by a Russian threat to UK Nato allies and the UK itself – while, conversely  claiming that Russia is too weak to beat the Ukraine. Apart from a bi-partisan consensus regarding this threat, the new Labour PM has also bought into it personally, a matter of weeks after declaiming 40 years of neoliberalism and austerity. 

Then there’s Lord Robertson, a prominent advocate of more Defence spending with cross party support, the epitome of the symbiotic relationship between the military, the political elite and the Defence industry. He’s a former Secretary General of NATO, former Labour Defence Minister under Blair and Senior Counsel for the US based Cohen consulting Group, amongst whose clients are companies in the Defense sector. 

In 2025 he was given a year’s leave of absence by the Cohen  Group to lead the UK’s Strategic Defence Review, to maintain the image of being an honest broker, representing the national interest, not his paymasters of 20 years duration.       

The debate in Parliament has narrowed to finding existing pots of money to cut, putting the UK’s social security and welfare budgets in the crosshairs. 

So the game is to create consent for the cuts – the same cuts that finally brought the last PM down – by replacing a Starmer by a Charmer.

Artificial Intelligence (AI)

Artificial intelligence,  to most ears, sounds very modern, but was in fact coined as far back as 1955 in the course of a research funding submission written by a John McCarthy and others. They explained the proposal“  (would) proceed on the basis of the conjecture that every aspect of learning or any other feature of intelligence can in principle be so precisely described that a machine can be made to simulate it.” (My emphasis MM)

The proposal outlined goals “for machines to handle language, form concepts, solve human-level problems, and improve their own performance.” (My emphasis MM)

AI not being an issue, directly, in the Lucas Aerospace struggle, Mike Cooley only became immersed in it in the years immediately following the Lucas experience and by1987 he had become the founding Chairman of the international journal “AI & Society.” 

The journal honed his critique of Artificial Intelligence and automated systems. It championed a vision of technology that saw it enhancing human skill and dignity. More broadly, it spearheaded a vital campaign to raise awareness of LLMs (Large Language Models) and other areas of digital transformation. 

Decades before the mainstream world began worrying about ChatGPT or algorithmic bias, Cooley and his co-founders launched this journal specifically to question the social cost of automated systems. Today, the journal is more relevant than ever. 

In Chapter 4 of the “Architect or Bee?” Mike takes us as far back as Socrates and Plato in an absolute tour de force potted history of the conceptual origins, and evolution over the centuries, of what we now know as “Artificial Intelligence.” 

 In a later chapter, appropriately titled “Some Social and Technological Projections,”  quoting an un-named  British AI expert, he left  us with this sobering thought:

“If AI is not challenged and the human designed in,  then ….”humans will have found their natural place in evolutionary hierarchy. Namely, animals at the bottom, human beings in the middle and thinking machines at the top.

 “The alternatives are stark,” he cautions. “Either we will have a future in which human beings are reduced to a bee like behaviour, reacting to the systems and equipment specified for them, or we will have a future in which masses of people, conscious of their skills and abilities in both a political and technical sense, decide that they are going to be the architects of a new form of technological development which will enhance human creativity and mean more freedom of choice and expression rather than less.” 

“The truth is, we shall have to make a profound political decision as to whether we intend to act as architects or behave like bees.”

THE LUCAS COMBINED SHOP STEWARDS COMMITTEE

A life long trade union activist, up to and including many times elected Delegate to the TUC and becoming President of the TASS section of the AEUW-TASSunion before, via a number of  later amalgamations, that union ended up in the union known as Unite, whose leadership, sadly, has taken a position on defence spending which would have been anathema to Mike – and to the TGWU General Secretary Jack Jones, Cooley’s greatest trade union  supporter, who also believed in a ‘bottom up” shop stewards  movement.

“Structure is a function of Purpose,“ a former TUC General Secretary, George Woodrow, had long ago concluded.  Mike Cooley came to the same conclusion. 

The multi-union TUC based on differentials,  demarcation and institutional competition between (and sometimes within) individual unions was too cumbersome to deal with large corporates like GEC or Lucas and easy for unscrupulous managements to divide and conquer. Cooley highlights this organisation challenge in the “Architect or Bee?”  And, from the beginning took a different “bottom up” view of the structure needed for dealing with the complexity of thousands of workers, from a multitude of grades, trades and  semi skilled workers spread over dozens of sites,  represented by twelve different unions. 

He wrote: “(The Lucas Combine) is unique in the British trade union movement in that it links together the highest level technologists and the semi-skilled workers on the shop floor.

“There is therefore a creative cross-fertilisation between the analytical power of the scientist, and what is more important, the direct class sense and understanding of those on the shop floor.”

To understand Cooley’s thinking fully, it is important to know he wasn’t talking only about industrial relations. He saw this creative  “cross-fertilisation” as key to developing and nurturing what Marx called  the “relations in production” (ie division of labour) as distinct from the “relations of production.” (i.e. ownership and control) – a pre-requisite of truly social production in place of the Taylorist division of labour that hitherto existed – which cautioned the production worker, on clocking in, to leave his head in the locker room with his coat. 

Socially useful production in Cooley’s understanding was both what was produced  (the What: product or service) and  the How: the choice of technology, work organisation and consideration for the social and environmental impact of the product or service. 

Crucially, socially useful production would not include destructive military contracts or products leading to environmental degradation. 

Production should instead fulfil unmet civil, environmental, and medical needs. The wastefulness of  profits-driven built-in obsolescence was one of his greatest bugbears – and has become an infinitely bigger issue over the years.

Technology should augment human skill rather than replace it. Hand-and-mind  craft should be prioritised, along with the  practical know-how, and intuition of experienced workers over the detached, abstract formulas of technocratic experts. 

Allied with that, he believed the manufacturing process must satisfy the psychological and creative needs of the worker, eliminating the rigid division between intellectual labour (the architect) and purely mechanical execution (the bee).

“The choices are essentially political and ideological rather than technological, he argues in “The Architect or  Bee?”  “As we design technological systems, we are in fact designing sets of social relationships. 

“As we question those social relationships and attempt to design systems differently, we are then beginning to challenge, in a fundamental way, power structures in society.”

The Lucas Plan

In its final form it comprised a 6 volume, 200 pages per volume of technical details, engineering drawings, costings and micro-economic calculations.   

At its core was a list of socially useful products for which there was an identified need and for the production of which there was within the Lucas sites threatened with cuts, the identified requisite skills, tools and machinery to produce them, as demonstrated in the Plan. 

This mammoth task was carried out over two years in which 150 product ideas were identified by the workforce and organised  in turn into six product ranges, as varied as medical equipment, transport vehicles and energy conservation equipment.

Inspired and led by Mike Cooley, this was the work force response to the threat of the Company’s plan for large cutbacks and redundancies arising from the 1974 Labour government’s reduction of Defence spending. 

It was chosen as an alternative strategy to the more traditional route of strikes, sit-ins and negotiated redundancies which had been seen to have failed in GEC with the loss of 10s of thousands of jobs. 

The Labour Government and Official trade union sellout

In the mid-1970s, management at Lucas Aerospace faced international competition and shifting state defence budgets. They announced restructuring plans to make up to 20% of the 18,000-strong workforce redundant, which amounted to roughly putting 3,600 jobs at risk. 

By 1979, management formally moved forward with an updated target to cut 2,000 jobs. Despite the Lucas Plan demonstrating that the job cuts were unnecessary, official union executives and Labour government ministers negotiated separately with management. They agreed to a compromised figure of 1,500 redundancies, funded by £8 million in taxpayer money paid to the company. 

While the Combine successfully delayed and prevented forced mass redundancies during the peak height of their campaign, the rejection of the plan meant the job cuts were ultimately carried out via voluntary redundancy, site closures, and restructuring. 

Following the 1979 election of Margaret Thatcher, the remaining union resistance was fragmented, leading to further targeted sackings of the key activist shop stewards. 

FINAL COMMENT

A final comment on the Lucas Plan. The management’s reasons for non-acceptance of the Lucas Plan were: an assertion of “management’s right to manage,” linked to that, its fiduciary duty to the shareholders not to put their investment in jeopardy by attempting to switch from manufacturing armaments to the likes of health care products.

 Looking at that side of the story, I would have thought it had a fiduciary duty to seriously examine a business plan so comprehensively prepared. 

Instead they treated the Lucas Combine as an “unofficial” body, outside the agreed structures and procedural agreements. 

They did not commission a Report on the Lucas Plan despite the thorough research that went into it and professional presentation.

Fiduciary duty ?

The Lucas Plan has stood the test of time, its methodology studied and applied world-wide in the 50 years since in different situations. 

In Part II   “Some seed fell on fertile ground “…The International take-up of Mike Cooley’s  core ideas – focused on the BRICS’ member states, contrasted with the G7  countries (including the UK).