Breaking Things at Work is valuable in showing the scale of resistance by workers to their own subjugation, in particular their resistance to technologies that facilitate this subjugation. No doubt there is even more to learn from the history of machine-breaking. Rather than being retrograde, Luddism may be a way to help construct the future. Breaking Things at Work: The Luddites Are Right About Why You Hate Your Job" with Gavin Mueller Spring 2021 Given that it falls broadly into the genre of (anti-)self-help, this focus on the self might sound individualistic, apolitical, or selfish. Yet, this very acceptance and cultivation of limits is a thread which also runs through much of the most insightful work on degrowth. Burkeman is aware, of course, that our ability to negotiate with time is certainly structured by our social conditions – the self is social, as much as our sense of self can contribute to larger patterns. To create a healthier and less capitalist or productivist relationship with time, he highlights the key importance of collective rhythms of slowness. Drawing from the work of Terry Hartig, for instance, Burkeman notes that ‘what people need isn’t greater individual control over their schedules, but rather what he calls ‘the social regulation of time’’ (191). Studies, for instance, have shown how the more people are on holiday simultaneously, the happier a nation is likely to be. A collective holiday provides not just individual rest and time for families and friends to break bread together, they provide a collective pause, a social sigh of relief from the treadmill of the Machine economy. Far from demanding individualistic adaptation, this would indicate the need for a renewed focus not just on shortening the working week, but including other transitional demands like extended public holidays, festivals and the right to a statutory sabbatical. 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)

I wrote this book to show there is a different way of thinking about technology, one that I argue is more closely aligned to the political self-activity of workers. It also suggests that for those who care about more egalitarian futures we must start politicising technology and having a critical approach to it, rather than assuming it’s developing in a progressive way on its own. JI think, what’s really helpful about this is it breaks down how new technology is brought into the workplace. We think that it could only have been that way, because we see the end result of it. Whereas those struggles over who are making the technology reminds us that somebody made a choice, somebody was told to do something one way and not to do it the other way. Where you see those kinds of struggles like tech won’t build it, or some of the organizing with Tech Workers Coalition, fitting into the argument? Nessa Cronin on Martin Woessner — The Pedagogy of Rage: Teaching Working Students During a Pandemic Review of Gavin Mueller, Breaking things at work Gavin Mueller: Breaking Things at Work: The Luddites Are Right about Why You Hate Your JobJSo my final question, is taking the logic of some of what you’ve argued, what are the kind of the implications of this? Where do we go from here? Siobhan Airey on Martin Woessner — The Pedagogy of Rage: Teaching Working Students During a Pandemic 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. The other value I get from a Marxist analysis is it really helps me tie a lot of things together. You can tie politics to the economy, tie other kinds of anthropological and sociological concerns, and it all makes a certain kind of sense. It also has a rich political tradition we can learn from. Obviously, we don’t live in full communism, but there has been a lot of interesting and worthwhile successes we should learn from. That’s my pitch to readers that are coming to this from an ecological perspective.

At core, Breaking Things at Work is less of a history of Luddism, and more of a manifesto. Historic movements and theorists are thoughtfully engaged with throughout the volume, but this is consistently in service of making an argument about how we should be responding to technology in the present. While contemporary books about technology (even ones that advance a critical attitude) have a tendency to carefully couch any criticism in neatly worded expressions of love for technology, Mueller’s book is refreshing in the forthrightness with which he expresses the view that “technology often plays a detrimental role in working life, and in struggles for a better one” (4). In clearly setting out the particular politics of his book, Mueller makes his goal clear: “to make Marxists into Luddites” and “to turn people critical of technology into Marxists” (5). This is no small challenge, as Mueller notes that “historically Marxists have not been critical of technology” (4) on the one hand, and that “much of contemporary technological criticism comes from a place of romantic humanism” (6) on the other hand. For Mueller “the problem of technology is its role in capitalism” (7), but the way in which many of these technologies have been designed to advance capitalism’s goals makes it questionable whether all of these machines can necessarily be repurposed. Basing his analysis on a history of class struggle, Mueller is not so much setting out to tell workers what to do, as much as he is putting a name on something that workers are already doing. My belief is we need to meet people where they are, which for most people is in the everyday struggles they have at work and in their wider life. Technology is a huge part of that, and often something many people already have already a critical approach to. They don’t like the way it is, they want things to be changed. They don’t want to hear a science fiction story about the robots allowing them to stay at home all day. I don’t think that will resonate. So that is a big motivation for the book. It’s an intellectual perspective I have, but I do think there is political value in it as well. I’m interested in the category of High-tech Luddites you identify towards the end of the book, could you tell us a bit more about that?

For Complementary themes are raised in a book which, unlike Burkeman’s, does explicitly and sympathetically mention degrowth, albeit in passing. Breaking Things at Work is a punchy, decelerationist Marxist book which brings to the fore the ongoing value of a Luddite analysis of technology. It advances ‘a politics of slowing down change, undermining technological progress, and limiting capital’s rapacity, while developing organization and cultivating militancy’ (127-128). While Luddism has long been misunderstood as a general animosity to all technology (whatever that would actually mean), Mueller rightly emphasises that Luddism – true to its original sense – actually implies a collective politics which questions the capitalist application of technology. An exhilarating challenge to the way we think about work, technology, progress, and what we want from the future 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. 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.’