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 future 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. 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

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. All of which is to say, the meaning of Luddism remains contested terrain. And even though many of technology’s celebrants remain content to use Luddite as an insult, those who would proudly wear the mask of General Ludd are not themselves all in agreement about exactly what this means. 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. Thank you to Gray Matter for the intermission music and to Carolyn Raider for the cover art. Upstream theme music was composed by Robert Raymond.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. 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? 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.

Much of Breaking Things at Work is devoted to a compelling examination of the ancestors of today’s accelerationists — the techno-utopians haunting the corridors of the history of the socialist movement. Far from a 21st-century curiosity, Mueller argues, the fantasy that socialists could simply grab hold of the productive apparatus of capitalism and transfer it into the hands of the working class lurked behind the strategic failures of the left throughout the 20th century. If you look at the summer in the States, the movement against police brutality, militancy was really effective. People were ready for it. There’s a rush to sweep it under the rug by the powers that be, but I think it did really push the issue of abolishing the police. The point is that it was militancy that advanced that and this militancy was popular. That’s where I’m coming from. I think this is something we need to recognise is always a part of labour struggles. 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) Degrowth is part of a larger heterodox economic thinking around an economy being a set of values, and we can have a different set of values focused on care for one another in non-commodified ways, in ways that you can’t really measure using current metrics, even though it is vital to human life and very satisfying for many people as a different way to live. I’m not a primitivist, I’m not trying to ‘ return to monke’, as the saying goes, but I do think there is some value in slowing things down. Many in the environmental movement, when they engage with technologies, do so in relation to global questions of imperialism and colonialism. Say how agricultural technologies in the Green Revolution are really about the global core extracting from the periphery. And most recently, in the hoarding of the vaccine and the focus on defending its IP within the Global North. I wondered what your thoughts are on the relationship between the mobilisation of technology and these problems of imperialism and colonialism? 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.

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Alignment with the degrowth corpus continues in his critiques of productivist radicals (such as the Fully Automated Luxury Communists), writing that, GThere’s a tendency to discount ways of re-evaluating the past as nostalgic or a kind of hopeless romanticism that’s irrelevant for creating progressive politics. That can happen, but there’s a kernel of something else: a legitimate grievance. I teach university students, and they’re all young people, and no one listens to newly released music. Everyone’s opting for some period of the past that’s irrelevant for creating progressive politics. That can happen, but there’s a kernel of something else: a legitimate grievance. I teach university students, and they’re all young people, and no one listens to newly released music. Everyone’s opting for some period of the past that seems appealing to them. I think there’s good reason for that. Music used to be experienced in a more convivial manner, and it literally used to sound better than it does now when everyone listens to YouTube streams on laptop speakers. I love reading the comments on videos from the ‘90s. “I’m 16 and I love watching this rave, because no one has a smartphone.” Smartphones are ubiquitous, but that is because they are compulsory, not because they are beloved. And young people find out that they hate a lot about that. That kind of general dissatisfaction with the current state of things is useful. It’s a step towards imagining alternatives, many of which were conceptualized in the past. 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?

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. 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. Breaking Things at Work concludes with a call for the radical left to “put forth a decelerationist politics: a politics of slowing down change, undermining technological progress, and limiting capital’s rapacity, while developing organization and cultivating militancy” (127-128). Such a politics entails not a rejection of progress, but a critical reexamination of what it is that is actually meant when the word “progress” is bandied about, as too often what progress stands for is “the progress of elites at the expense of the rest of us” (128). Putting forth such a politics does not require creating something entirely new, but rather recognizing that the elements of just such a politics can be seen repeatedly in worker’s movements and social movements. With Breaking Things at Work, Gavin Mueller has crafted a vital contribution to Luddism, and what makes this book especially important is the way in which it furthers Luddism in a variety of ways. On one level, Mueller’s book provides a solid introduction and overview to Luddite thinking and tactics throughout the ages, which makes the book a useful retort to those who act as though the historic Luddites were the only workers who ever dared oppose machinery. Yet Mueller makes it clear from the outset of his book that he is not primarily interested in writing a history, rather his book has a clear political goal as well—he wishes to raise the banner of General Ludd and encourage others to march behind this standard. Thus, Mueller’s book is simultaneously an account of Luddism’s past, while also an appeal for Luddism’s future. And while Mueller provides a thoughtful consideration of many past figures and movements that have dallied with Luddism, his book concludes with a clear articulation of what a present day Luddism might look like. For those who call themselves Luddites, or those who would call themselves Luddites, Mueller provides a historically grounded but present focused account of what it meant, and what it can mean, to be a Luddite.Considering that computer technologies were amongst those that the Neo-Luddites called to be dismantled, it seems pretty clear where they came down on this question. Yet contemporary discussions on the left around computers, a discussion in which Breaking Things at Work is certainly making an intervention, is quite a bit more divided as to what is to be done with and about computers. At several junctures in his book, Mueller notes that attitudes of technological optimism are starting to break down, yet if you survey the books dealing with technology published by the left-wing publisher Verso Books (which is the publisher of Breaking Things at Work) it is clear that a hopeful attitude towards technology is still present in much of the left. Certainly, there are arguments about the way that tech companies are screwing things up, commentary on the environmental costs of the hunger for high-tech gadgets, and paeans for how the Internet could be different—but it often feels that leftist commentaries blast Silicon Valley for what it has done to computers and the Internet so that the readers of such books can continue believing that the problems with computers and the Internet is what capitalism has done to them rather than suggest that these are capitalist tools through and through. 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.

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. So, what happens is a very creative and interesting endeavour to create alternative intellectual property licences that preserve these values of openness, of sharing code, and of customising software. Free and open software licences say ‘ok, anything I make will be open and available for other people to look at, to use, to copy but the one rule you have to follow if you use my code is abiding by these rules as well.’ 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 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.