The problem with spectral Luddism is that one can feel its presence without necessarily understanding what it means. When one encounters Luddism in the world today it still tends to be as either a term of self-deprecation used to describe why someone has an old smartphone, or as an insult that is hurled at anyone who dares question “the good news” presented by the high priests of technology. With Breaking Things at Work: The Luddites Were Right About Why You Hate Your Job, Gavin Mueller challenges those prevailing attitudes and ideas about Luddism, instead articulating a perspective on Luddism that finds in it a vital analysis with which to respond to techno-capitalism. Luddism, in Mueller’s argument, is not simply a term to describe a specific group of workers at the turn of the 19th century, rather Luddism can be seen in workers’ struggles across centuries. These are the larger contours of my project: to recover a worker politics that is technologically critical, both practically and theoretically. I started with the Luddites because they’re so often held up as history’s fools who misguidedly opposed technological progress. Even Marx has a few caustic remarks for them. By starting with them and really investigating what was going on in their time, I hoped to reconstruct this trajectory of a more politicized and critical perspective to technology, both in the work but also in other areas of life.

The movement against nuclear power, which has been very successful, has not relied on sabotage, nor has it involved more than a few workers in the industry. Indeed, the movement has been a model of nonviolent action, and the early years of the movement were a seeding ground for the spread of nonviolent action training and consensus decision-making. Many Western Marxists were initially supportive of nuclear power, while in the Soviet Union and other socialist states it was extremely difficult to protest. GI think it fits in really nicely. These are people who are credited (or blamed) with the success of Brexit and Donald Trump. From all accounts I’ve read, there are extremely contentious internal meetings at these companies about how they are going to deal with the fact that a significant amount of politics of all flavors is happening on the systems they design. Staying neutral is not really possible, or even desirable. So tech workers have a huge role to play in the development of movements. If you look at a successful movement, it takes a lot of different ingredients and people who are well positioned within certain kinds of firms, who have a lot of information about how processes run, how the companies are organized. That is essential knowledge and sometimes more privileged workers are better placed to intervene. 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.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. Gavin Mueller’s new book, Breaking Things at Work: The Luddites Are Right About Why You Hate Your Job, was released in February 2021. An alumnus of George Mason University’s Cultural Studies PhD program, Mueller was invited to Cultural Studies’ recruitment event to discuss his book and its themes at large. He says that the research for the book started when accelerationism – the enthusiastic theorizing around technology’s rapid evolution in socio-economic contexts – was in vogue, so much so that even leftists were releasing books on the revolutionary possibilities of technology and how machines would free workers from their oppressive material conditions. Mueller says that as a Marxist, this logic never fully made sense to him; thus he began to conduct research on trends of automation in labor developments and struggles. This is where the work of the Luddites influenced him. The fantasy that socialists could transfer the productive apparatus of capitalism into the hands of the working class lurked behind the strategic failures of the left throughout the 20th century

A manifesto for the neo-luddite revolution: an exhilarating challenge to the way we think about work, technology, progress, and what we want from the futureBut Taylorism was not just designed to expand output. It was also a means to crush the power of workers on the shop floor by diminishing the importance of craft knowledge, allowing disruptive workers to be replaced at will with easily trained substitutes. In fact, Taylorism did help managers suppress working-class resistance in the early days of Soviet industrialization, eventually eliminating any vestige of economic democracy remaining from the revolutionary era.