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

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Ultimately, though, the quest for our time is not instrumental. Rather, just as the hobbyist will spend hours on something which to others will look frivolous or ‘unproductive’, this is about reclaiming time for its own sake, without shame: Through these case studies, Mueller identifies an important dynamic in the implementation of automation. Automation is not introduced for the purpose of efficiency (although this is how it is typically justified) but as a means of control over the labour force. Analysing the ‘scientific management’ of Taylorism, and the US department of defence’s wartime organisation of production, Mueller argues that automation is about gaining control over knowledge of production. By reorganising the process of work into discrete, measurable, repetitive tasks, management reclaims control over the knowledge of the production process. Workers are no longer uniquely valuable for their skill and experience, becoming interchangeable and expendable machines. Automation does not replace workers with machines, freeing us from the burden of labour, it merely intensifies work and disempowers workers as it wrestles control of the production process from their hands. Towards the end of Breaking Things at Work, Mueller broadens his perspective to look at the construction of technologies as a political process. He uses the example of free software, which empowers uses and challenges proprietary software which is designed in service of capital. The construction of liberatory technology might be considered part of a Gandhian constructive programme. The broader contour of the argument is that certain politics and certain social relations are embedded in particular kinds of technologies. If you agree with that, when these technologies become the only way to do things, that can be a form of colonial domination.

But it could also be a way to reimagine society. What really started me on this project, was this idea that new technologies were going to create a ‘post-work’, ‘post-capitalist’ utopia. This utopia was presented as pretty much the same as the world I am living in, but maybe I wouldn’t have to go to work. To me, if you’re really breaking out of capitalism, it’s not just tinkering around the edges, it’s really a very different form of social relations. People relate to one another differently. People relate to what society produces in a different way. 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. These complexities were smoothed over during the consolidation of so-called “Orthodox Marxism” in the late 19th century, the version of Marxist thought that dominated the Second International after Marx’s death in 1883. The German writer and activist Karl Kautsky, often referred to half-jokingly as the “Pope of Marxism” for his role in consolidating the new orthodoxy, saw the steady, politically neutral development of the “forces of production” as the throughline of history. For a long time, capitalism had served to enhance the power and technological sophistication of these forces; but a period of crisis loomed on the horizon, a moment at which a workers’ revolution could take over the machinery of production and restart its progressive development under socialized control. While Mueller’s distaste for slow lifestyle politics or ‘ethics’ might indicate some antipathy with Burkeman’s focus on the existential relationship with time, ultimately they come to a largely common understanding of the challenges facing social life under an accelerationist capitalism which profits from dragging us apart. Returning to the Great Resignation mentioned at the opening of this piece, it is clear that deep discontent with work, production and our relationship to our own finite time have never been more relevant. The search for autonomy(-in-common) is the yearning many of us feel after decades of neoliberal assault, and these books provide two important signposts on the path to that liberation. Our culture editor Harry Holmes interviews Gavin Mueller, author of the newly released Breaking Things at Work from Verso Books. Gavin Mueller is a lecturer in New Media and Digital Culture at the University of Amsterdam and a member of the editorial collective of Viewpoint Magazine.I point to this a few moments of this in the book, where there is an alignment between automation at work with certain military and state prerogatives. This is something missing from stories of automation in the workplace: rather than capitalists improving efficiency, sometimes it’s actually state and military led prerogatives that are producing technologies If those people understand the technology as political, as a source of power, we need to understand it as political too rather than the outcome of a neutral economic decision. Many of the readers of this might have a technology sceptical view, but not a left-wing one. You talk about wanting to turn Marxists into Luddites, but also Luddites into Marxists. So, for readers in that latter camp, what would you want their key takeaway to be? I didn’t see that coming from the accelerationist quarter nor do I see it from the green technologies quarter. There I see an effort to keep us in the world we’re living in, and I don’t think that’s a very good world. I’m interested in thinking about a new one. I see degrowth advancing that. It’s saying, ‘what would it mean if we could have a radical reduction in working hours but that would mean not keeping production going at current levels?’ It would mean to reduce it significantly. It might mean very different geopolitical relationships between global north and global south. Those are the kinds of conversation that I see happening in degrowth quarters that I think are entirely amenable to anti-capitalist politics. Where we are rethinking not just work, not just consumption, but we’re thinking about how to reshape society.

There are paths we haven’t taken, paths we haven’t fully explored that could lead us to a future where we have a bit more control over things and we don’t feel like these massive tech companies are watching and controlling everything we do. I wanted to ask you about another book recently published by Verso which seems very similar. Malm’s How to Blow Up a Pipeline makes the case for rejecting a focus on non-violence and looking to sabotage fossil fuel technologies. Now you talk about sabotage and opposing many technologies, but predominantly in the tradition of looking at workers, Malm really is talking about environmental movements. Given many extractive debates often see ‘movements’ clashing with industry workers, what are your thoughts about the recognition of sabotage as import for both sides? Gavin Mueller challenges this picture of the Luddites and more generally wants to argue for the positive role of machine-smashing. But this is not the book you might expect from the part of the subtitle “about why you hate your job.” This is less about hating jobs and more about workers’ struggles.As a caveat this is something I am still learning about. I get a sense that it is a debate that is heating up, that I’m excited to learn a lot from. My understanding of degrowth, why I am attracted to it, and why it fits the theme of the book, is it’s particularly opposed to technological solutionism for the climate crisis. In this conversation, we dispel a number of myths about who the Luddites were, what they believed, and what their goals were. We also explore a somewhat nontraditional perspective on Marxism and industrialization, what the Luddites taught us about how technology functions under capitalism, and how to resist the exploitation and alienation that often accompanies it. Artefacts are products of human imagination and effort, and it shouldn’t make sense to call them neutral. True, a car or a computer can be used for a variety of purposes, but it is easier to use it for some purposes than others. Jamie spoke to Gavin about his forthcoming book, Breaking Things at Work, which will be available from Verso Books in March 2021. I don’t think that sabotage is a kind of end in and of itself. You won’t actually solve these problems simply by blowing up pipelines, nor will you solve the problems of the workplace simply by jamming up a machine. But this kind of intransigence, if it can be sustained, could provoke larger structural changes.

I’m not saying we should all burn our computers, but that we should look at them critically and say ‘you know, maybe the technological world, the digital world, that we’re in right now, it’s not the only way things have to be, it’s not a particularly good thing for a lot of people, and there are other options.’ Nessa Cronin on Martin Woessner — The Pedagogy of Rage: Teaching Working Students During a Pandemic So, why is it that technological progress rarely seems to really improve our lives? Why does it feel like every new piece of software or gadget imposed onto us in our homes and workplaces more often than not adds to our stresses and leaves us with more to do? 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. There are many parallels between the stances outlined by Glendinning and those outlined by Mueller. Though it seems that the key space of conflict between the two is around the question of dismantling. Glendinning and the Neo-Luddites were not subtle in their calls for dismantling certain technologies, whereas Mueller is considerably more nuanced in this respect. Here attempts to define Luddism find themselves butting against the degree to which Luddism is destined to always be associated (for better or worse) with the actual breaking of machines. The naming of entire classes of technology that need to be dismantled may appear like indiscriminate smashing, while calls for careful reevaluation of technologies may appear more like thoughtful disassembly. Yet the underlying question for Luddism remains: are certain technologies irredeemable? Are there technologies that we can remake in a different image, or will those technologies only reshape us in their own image? And if the answer is that these technologies cannot be reshaped, than are there some technologies that we need to break before they can finish breaking us, even if we often find ourselves enjoying some of the benefits of those technologies?

Gummo Clare is a PhD researcher in the School of Media and Communications, University of Leeds. Listen to more episodes on: G Gavin Mueller is a lecturer in New Media and Digital Culture at the University of Amsterdam and a member of the editorial collective of Viewpoint Magazine.