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

The Luddites were English textile workers who responded to new technologies by smashing them to bits in the Nineteenth century. This movement has been derided by scholars as backward-looking and ineffectual, but Gavin Mueller argues that it gets at the heart of the antagonistic relationship between workers and the progressive gains secured by new technologies. Breaking Things at Work is an innovative rethinking of labor and machines, arguing that the future stability and empowerment of working-class movements will depend on subverting these technologies and preventing their spread.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 176 pages
Publication date: 09 February 2021
Publisher: Verso Books

In the 19th century, English textile workers reacted to the introduction of new technologies on the factory floor by destroying them. The Luddites roamed the English countryside for years, practicing drills and maneuvers that they would later deploy on unsuspecting machines. Scholars have derided the movement as a backward-looking and ultimately ineffectual effort to stem the march of history. Gavin Mueller, however, sees the movement as a fundamental expression of the antagonistic relationship between all workers, including us today, and the so-called progressive gains secured by new technologies.

The Luddites were not primitive and they are still a force, however unconsciously, in the workplaces of the 21st century world. Breaking Things at Work is an innovative rethinking of labor and machines, leaping from textile mills to algorithms, from existentially threatened knife cutters of rural Germany to surveillance-evading truckers driving across the continental United States. Mueller argues that the future stability and empowerment of working-class movements will depend on subverting these technologies and preventing their spread wherever possible. The task is intimidating, but the seeds of this resistance are already present in the neo-Luddite efforts of hackers, pirates, and dark web users who are challenging surveillance and control, often through older systems of communication technology.

Weight: 174g
Dimension: 139 x 210 x 13 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781786636775