Breaking Things at Work: The Luddites Are Right About Why You Hate Your Job

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Forget the space age utopias of Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos. The propagandistic technophilia of capitalism is a lure. As Gavin Mueller’s sober, breakthrough book shows, these cyber-dreams are a cover story. We should not revel in the productive powers of the machine, but wonder at how it is so consistently used as a weapon in class struggle from above. Our quaint notions of technological progress are no match for a machine that programmes the relentless imperatives of capital at our expense. As we face a new, pandemic-induced cybernetic offensive in the workplace, Mueller digs deep into the history of workers’ struggles, recovering its traditions, making a persuasive case for Marxist neo-Luddism. Nothing could be more valuable or timely.” What degrowth recognises, is we’re already in a moment not just of climate crisis but also of economic crisis. If you read Aaron Benanav’s work on the current state of political economy and other people who are influenced by Brenner and the like, we are looking already at a capitalism of slowing growth, of stagnation. For degrowth, this presents an opportunity for rethinking.

Mueller starts from a Marxist perspective but is open to a range of views, including those of anarchists. He is critical of the assumption, in much writing and practice, to assume that technology is neutral and that socialism can be built directly on capitalist industrial practices. Mueller says theorists need to learn from what workers actually do, in particular from their resistance at work. If workers break machines, then there is probably something wrong with the machines. Activists and scholars interested in degrowth have long considered freedom from the dictates of the capitalist workplace a core part of any viable degrowth future. From very different angles, two timely books were recently released which expertly delve into these issues, and are worth reading alongside one another.

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a review of Gavin Mueller, Breaking Things at Work: The Luddites Were Right about Why You Hate Your Job (Verso, 2021) Maybe launching out a lot of policy proposals can be very exciting and interesting, but it doesn’t seem to quite do what we’ve hoped it would do. One reason for this is it still has this top-down perspective of ‘we are going to help you out.’ A lot of people don’t relate to that, they don’t believe in it, or they don’t hear those messages because I don’t think we’ve done the work of really building a base that will then get attached to policies and start actually informing policies. So that’s one reason I really orient the politics of the book in these struggles, because it is important to do at this moment.

This sense of disillusionment is bad news for a group of writers on the left who have banked hard on the enduring appeal of techno-utopianism, as Gavin Mueller observes in his insightful new book, Breaking Things at Work: The Luddites Were Right About Why You Hate Your Job. Sometimes called “accelerationism,” this school of thought argues that socialism — or “postcapitalism,” or “fully automated luxury communism” — can come about by seizing the sublime technological infrastructure created by today’s leading capitalists and redeploying it towards proletarian or at least egalitarian ends. The technology itself is terrific, they claim. The problem is just that it’s controlled by a small group of people who only use it to enrich themselves.

My Book Notes

Much of the book serves as a sophisticated review of ideas about Marxist and related perspectives on technology and work, especially about Luddism. Mueller tells about Marx’s views, as expressed in The Communist Manifesto, and those of a great number of others. This could serve as a primer of left responses to Luddism, and is presented with clarity and balance. My idea of how you solve that problem is really to recognise the ways in which people are already engaged in struggle, particularly people in these incredibly exploited positions. There’s always resistance. But that resistance doesn’t always get amplified, it doesn’t always get connected or articulated with other forms of resistance. To me, that’s something that has been missing from these left-wing political challenges. All of this helps to explain why the figures who populate the Luddite counter-genealogy that Mueller interweaves throughout Breaking Things at Work were not as uniformly hostile to technology as the label would lead you to expect. William Morris, the champion of the Arts and Crafts movement in Victorian Britain, “favored the use of machinery to reduce working hours” even as he insisted that work itself should be made more pleasurable, creative, and useful. The great German Marxist cultural critic Walter Benjamin, while excoriating the linear view of “progress” that many contemporary leftists shared with their capitalist enemies, celebrated the ability of new technologies like the motion picture to level aesthetic hierarchies and democratize access to art.

I want Marxists to become Luddites, but I want tech workers to become Luddites as well. I think many of them already are, and recognizing that and recognizing their power, and their connection to larger struggles, is going to be vital to the future. This episode of Upstream was made possible with support from listeners like you. Upstream is a labor of love — we couldn't keep this project going without the generosity of our listeners and fans. Please consider chipping in a one-time or recurring donation at www.upstreampodcast.org/support

I think anyone who cares about the environment, about labour politics, sees the establishment powers are not very responsive to these things. I’m American, so a lot of my political points of reference come from the States where you hear a lot of dithering around the edges, but it doesn’t really take the gravity of the situation seriously. So, Malm thinks the environmental movement needs to establish a kind of militance to really push the issue. I tend to agree. I haven’t had a chance to read the book, but I did watch a talk that he gave on it and I have read some of his other work. What I got out of the talk I viewed from him, is that things are quite dire, and we need to develop a real militance if we’re going to really make changes. You hear a lot of talk about how carbon emissions are bad along with claims we’ll have a new technology of carbon capture or renewables, which one, will fix the problem, and two, will allow us to maintain our current lifestyles more or less unchanged. We can still consume a lot of electricity as long as its coming from windmills, or we can still pollute as long as we have some other technology that captures it. There’s been some very interesting developments in renewable technology, but I think we are quite far from any realistic technological solution to the climate crisis. So technology is something that structures the organization of the workforce, in a kind of very direct and deliberate way. I think this is one thing that a lot of accelerationist and post-work people miss. It’s not that workers politicize the technology, it’s that management introduces technology that is already political as a tool to break up existing forms of worker organization and autonomy that threaten capitalist control. I get that people say it sounds like austerity, but I also think when you talk to ordinary people many of them are interested in simplifying their lives, of not having to buy crap all the time, to have more time to spend with one another doing things that don’t necessarily revolve around shopping. That’s a fairly popular position, especially amongst people who are looking to make big changes in their world.

The Luddites have a bad reputation. They were English weavers in the early 1800s who opposed the introduction of mechanised looms and went about destroying them, taking their name from the imaginary character Ned Ludd. Since then, the term Luddite has been turned into a derogatory label for anyone critical of new technologies and therefore deemed to be against progress. If you don’t want to use a mobile phone or eat genetically modified food, you might be called a Luddite, and it’s not complimentary. More specifically, workers who damage their equipment are portrayed as irrational. When workers break things at work, they are resisting a non-neutral artefact, in other words a technology designed and used for control and exploitation. In this sense, all challenges to technology are political: they are about power, and technologies are like congealed systems of power.

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Burkeman contrasts such collective idleness to the stifling overwork of contemporary surveillance capitalism, but also to early Soviet attempts to re-engineer the workweek and keep factories running every day of the year, without pause (called the nepreryvka). Under Stalin, workers were divided up into staggered four-day workweeks and would follow different calendars, with just one day off as a ‘weekend’. As one commentator notes, ‘With the weekend gone, labour became the framework around which people built their lives’. Rather than smoothly conforming people to the machine, however, resistance developed as people realised they could no longer relax collectively, with even spouses ending up on utterly mismatched shifts. In an age of instrumentalization, the hobbyist is subversive: he insists that some things are worth doing for themselves alone, despite offering no pay-offs in terms of productivity or profit.’ (158)