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

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As we face a new, pandemic-induced cybernetic offensive in the workplace, Mueller digs deep into the history of workers struggles, recovering its traditions, making a persuasive case for Marxist neo-Luddism. Gavin Mueller is an Assistant Professor of New Media and Digital Culture at the University of Amsterdam. Someone’s job is just going to involve having 50 phones in front of them and then hit the same Taylor Swift song again and again. I've found that with hindsight, the best shifts and changes only happened after profound and often deeply painful loss or transformations.

There’s a popular perspective that class is your income, maybe it’s your occupational status, and a few other variables. But the movement lived on in the underground, bolstered by a powerful mythology and its storied confrontation with the detested state.These attacks on machines did not imply any necessary hostility to machinery as such; machinery was just a conveniently exposed target against which an attack could be made.

The harsh sentences of those found guilty, which included execution and penal transportation, quickly ended the movement. The blood shed by the Luddites was “the dew / Which the tree shall renew / Of Liberty, planted by Ludd! Machine-Breaking and the 'Threat from Below' in Great Britain and France during the Early Industrial Revolution. Machine breaking was only one technique among many that the Luddites deployed, reserved for use against the most intransigent factory owners as part of a wider strategy to increase worker power. The Luddites weren’t primitive and they are still a force, however unconsciously, in the workplaces of the twenty-first-century world.

If you think about jobs you’ve had, where were the times where you felt the most solidarity with your coworkers? While this was a general uprising unrelated to machinery, it can be viewed as the last major Luddite act.