Breaking Things at Work: The Luddites Were Right about Why You Hate Your Job
Gavin Mueller
London and New York, NY: Verso, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-78663-677-5
VIII + 168 pp.
Most readers will be aware of the Luddites and their propensity to destroy the cotton spinning equipment that was being introduced. Many will also be aware of the reason why they did that destroying – for fear that their jobs would be taken away from them by a combination of the machines and the people who were going to operate them. They were, of course, right in this expectation. However, I would imagine that few people these days would sympathise with the same approach today – we are all expected to be willing and able to change with the times, embrace new opportunities and new technology and make the most of what now can be done that could not be done before. Indeed, we often end up doing work for large corporations that really could afford to do it for themselves – every time you have to select the squares in a captcha short that do or do not have bicycles or helicopters in them, you are in fact contributing to the ability of very large, very rich, unaccountable Silicon Valley corporations to make more money. Maybe it does not appear to be such a big thing and, besides, we are rewarded for our time by access to some resource or another and rarely stop to think why these things appear to be offered for free.
Gavin Mueller’s argument in this book is that we, working people, should see changes in the workplace and in workplace relations for what they are – attempts to enforce control over workers and therefore extract more value from their efforts. His principal argument is: “… technology reduces the autonomy of workers – their ability to organize themselves to fight against their exploiters. It robs people of the feeling that they can control their own lives, that they can set the terms of their world.” This is the reason, he argues, that we should recognize the world as a Luddite would and to fight against the change that brings about further loss of control.
Mueller uses the history of Taylorism as an example of how this kind of change operates. He points out that, before Taylor’s measurements (much of which, including his assumptions, were arbitrary and influenced by his own dislike of workers), bosses generally had little or no knowledge of how production processes took place: At the turn of the century, it was the workers, rather than their overseers, who understood how manufacturing worked, and their methods for completing tasks were often based on intuitive and informal ‘rules of thumb:’ what colour a chemical admixture should take, the appropriate heft of a specific part, and the like. Factory owners and managers might have only a dim idea about how products were actually put together, and no ability to do it themselves. This control of knowledge meant that workers could control the pace of work. Out of desire or necessity, they could slow it down, even stop it altogether (p.32).” As a result, bosses were limited in what they could force workers to do because they could just be told that what was being asked for could not be done and because of specificity of actions to workplaces, workers could not just be replaced by someone else without significant loss of productivity. This placed power in the hands of workers and so they could arrange things to suit their own pace and make sure people were not required to do more than they could manage. Taylorism (and its related activities like time and motion studies): “Scientific management, for all its pretensions, was less about determining ideal working methods and more about shattering this tremendous source of worker power. By breaking apart each work process into carefully scrutinized component tasks, Taylor had cracked the secret of labour’s advantage, thereby giving management complete mastery over the productive process (p.33).”
Mueller provides several examples of how these changes have worked in history, including containerization and the provision of free software. The latter is a good thing for Luddites since it enables people to adapt the designs to their own purposes, to change and edit and to maintain control over the situation and to share it with others. Compare this with what happens with proprietary software, which a user pays for but does not even own – it is rented and the understanding is that any attempt to change it would result in the product being withdrawn. Hence, Luddites have a clear attitude towards technology: “it views technology not as neutral but as a site of struggle. Luddism rejects production for production’s sake: it is critical of ‘efficiency’ as an end goal, as there are other values at stake in work. Luddism can generalize: it is not an individual moral stance, but a series of practices that can proliferate and build through collective action. Finally, Luddism is antagonistic: it sets itself against existing capital social relations, which can only end through struggle, not through factors like state reforms, the increasing superfluity of goods, or a better planned economy (p.129).”
The argument is clearly one based on Marxist principles and the author is very open about his attempt to provide such an analysis. As he notes, Marx himself did not hold a simple or even a consistent attitude towards technology – not surprisingly, perhaps, given the different ways in which it could be used and because of its prominent role in the development of capitalism and, hence, in the expansion of the world economy and raising the living standards of many people. Mueller has been successful in his effort in that he has provided a readable and quite clear argument which will resonate with many people who have sought to circumvent the reins placed on them by their bosses. It is not surprising that the current situation, with millions locked down and obliged to work from home, has seen a new front opened in this war as exploitative employers and complicit neoliberal governments have begun to introduce new measures to strip away workers’ rights by insisting on monitoring their computers at home, requiring obedience to new controls and so forth. The struggle continues.
John Walsh, Krirk University, April 2021
Ladprao 64 