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

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Olga V. Solovieva—Ales Bialiatski, Together: On the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize and East Slavic Solidarity One disaster is that Marxism has been understood as productivist philosophy. Where Marxist informed revolutions were most successful, the governments then carried out state-led developmentalist projects. You could look at China today as engaged in one, where instead of the private sector developing things, you have a state-led development project, but it ends up focused on heavy industry, devastating the environment, emphasising working a lot, producing a lot, developing along the same lines as capitalist economies. You have this unfortunate history often justified by looking at Marx’s work and other work in the Marxist tradition, while people from the environmental movement are often critical of such developments. 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.’ GIt’s somewhat submerged, but it’s absolutely present. In the preface, I say that I view it as a very “Viewpoint” book, and I don’t think it would be the same kind of project without my involvement there. One thing that we really emphasize at Viewpoint is what we mean when we talk about class. There’s a popular perspective that class is your income, maybe it’s your occupational status, and a few other variables. This is something that we’re critical of, that class exists as some kind of static empirical object out there. Rather, it’s something that has to emerge in processes of struggle. The interest in class, if you have a Marxist perspective, is not looking for a particular kind of demographic that will have the political solution for you. Instead, you want to look for the struggles themselves: the actual things that people are doing to organize themselves with and against technology, to compose and organise themselves in struggle. JSo cyberpunk is very much in my mind at the moment with the latest scandals of overwork coming out. With cyberpunk there’s an overriding sense that we will end up with fingerprint scanners at work, because that’s just technological development. What I particularly liked about reading the book is those moments where people do find an alternative, find a way to resist, find different ways to do things with technology. Could you talk a little bit about the moments you where people are starting to do this

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. Part of the enduring appeal of techno-optimism is, well, its optimism. The idea that the development of capitalism unwittingly performs socialists’ work for them can provide comfort to the left in moments of apparent defeat. Lean years for the workers’ movement are not necessarily time wasted; the intensification of exploitation today could be balanced out by the expansion of tomorrow’s abundance. We are seeing a lot of encouraging and exciting things. I don’t consider myself that old, but things that have never happened in my life before are happening – like lots of people identifying as socialist. We see these impressive electoral challenges, but they don’t quite ever get over the finish line. One reason for this is the base is still quite depoliticised and fragmented.

Breaking Things at Work: The Luddites Are Right About Why You Hate Your Job" with Gavin Mueller Spring 2021 Breaking Things at Work has another side, equally important: a survey and analysis of views about technology, mostly from a Marxist perspective. In the introduction, he says he has two main aims. One is to alert Marxists to a different way of thinking about technology, in particular to turn them into Luddites: “My argument boils down to this: to be a good Marxist is to also be a Luddite” (p. 5). Mueller’s second aim is to turn people critical of technology into Marxists. 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. The other thing that it does is establish the agency of the people driving those politics – we are going to do this, we have the ability to do this, and we can carry it out, we’re not going to ask permission, we’re not going to wait for some sort of compromise. 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?

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. The Luddites were a group of English textile workers in the 19th century who staged rebellions against the automation of their weaving process. They were rejecting production for production's sake and critical over the efficiency of the process as damaging to their way of life. Their militant reaction to the automation of their work is often viewed as anti-progress. However, Mueller argues that their intention was to have control over their labor process and to not work simply for capitalism's sake. 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. Technology has been overwhelmingly used in the context of capitalism to disenfranchise, disempower and exploit, and workers and communities must engage with technology critically if any common space of liberation is to be carved out. As Kranzberg’s famous first law of technology states, ‘technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral.’ It thus becomes almost fruitless to discuss automation in the abstract: automating tasks does not liberate workers and lead inexorably to greater freedom from the workplace, but instead it is used to redistribute labour, deepen exploitation and further polarise society in favour of profit. Breaking Things at Work: The Luddites Are Right About Why You Hate Your Job by Gavin Mueller (Verso, 2021)I think that any time you engage with militant politics, there’s no guarantees for how it will play out. Often there is this whole discourse that emerges, like when things were popping off in the States around Occupy, this whole debate about if you break a window, does that turn people off? Or, does that get people excited? To my mind it’s quite contextual. There are certainly moments where engaging in property destruction, depending on the composition of the movement and what you are attempting to do, might turn people off. But I do think there are plenty of situations where it doesn’t.

JThere has been a renewed interest in that kind of strain of Marxism, that starts from looking at workers experience. It seems like there is a kind of broader layer of people who are starting from that point of saying, “let’s look at what’s actually happening”, as you say, or let’s look at a moment in the past where we can draw out these things. My question here is what does this mean for helping us to make sense of the current moment? What are the practical implications of this? In the academic field of technology studies, it is taken for granted that technology is not neutral. There is a distinction between artefacts, the material objects such as screwdrivers and earthmovers, and technology, which refers to the artefacts plus accompanying social relations, such as manufacturing routines. Technology in this sense cannot be neutral. It can be said to embody relationships between humans.

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. 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. 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. 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.