Upstream - Breaking Things at Work with Gavin Mueller

Episode Date: January 3, 2023

As the capitalist class continues to glom onto a kind of tech-utopianism, many of us are starting to recognize not just the detrimental impacts of certain technologies on our lives, but also the lies that have been sold to us about those technologies. Despite all of the technological advancements, we’re more isolated, exploited, and alienated than ever before. And it really does feel like there’s a growing, popular backlash against many of the technologies of our modern world as well as a resigned realization of their false promises. So, why is it that technological progress rarely seems to really improve our lives? Why does it feel like every new piece of software or gadget imposed onto us in our homes and workplaces more often than not adds to our stresses and leaves us with more to do?  Well, we’ve brought on a guest today that has a pretty clear answer to these questions. Gavin Mueller’s new book, Breaking Things at Work: The Luddites Are Right About Why You Hate Your Job, seamlessly weaves together the philosophies and strategies of Luddism and Marxism, to explain why technology itself is a site of class struggle, and that, to truly understand the role of technology in our lives, we must approach the topic from a Marxist perspective — one that is infused with the critical technological perspective of the Luddites of 19th century. In this conversation, we dispel a number of myths about who the Luddites were, what they believed, and what their goals were. We also explore a somewhat nontraditional perspective on Marxism and industrialization, what the Luddites taught us about how technology functions under capitalism, and how to resist the exploitation and alienation that often accompanies it. 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. This episode of Upstream was made possible with support from listeners like you. Upstream is a labor of love — we couldn't keep this project going without the generosity of our listeners and fans. Please consider chipping in a one-time or recurring donation at www.upstreampodcast.org/support If your organization wants to sponsor one of our upcoming documentaries, we have a number of sponsorship packages available. Find out more at upstreampodcast.org/sponsorship For more from Upstream, visit www.upstreampodcast.org and follow us on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and Bluesky. You can also subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts.  

Before we get started, please, if you can, go to Apple Podcasts and rate, subscribe, and leave us a review there. You can also leave us a rating on Spotify now. This really helps us get in front of more eyes and into more ears. We don't have a marketing budget or anything like that for Upstream, so we really do rely on listeners like you to help grow our audience and spread the word. Also, please visit upstreampodcast.org forward slash support to support us with a reoccurring monthly or one-time donation. This helps keep this podcast free and sustainable, so please, if you can, go there to donate. Thank you. When you look at the politics of class struggle, technology is a part of that and is not a neutral force. It doesn't seem clear to me that you can actually just sort of appropriate it.

And so this to me is, this is the way that I think that is useful to think about Marx if we want to think from the realm of politics. Rather than get these kind of broad historical sweeps, right, we need to think about the class struggle. What is technology doing from that perspective? How is it shaping the terrain of how workers kind of rebel, create spaces of autonomy, organize themselves, produce practices of solidarity, all the things that create a kind of strong workers' movement that can offer a political challenge to the rule of capital. And to me, if that's your perspective, then we have to take a different perspective on technology, that we can't rely on the dialectic of history or something like that

to kind of lead us to a good outcome. You're listening to Upstream. Upstream. Upstream. Upstream. A podcast of documentaries and conversations that invites you to unlearn everything you thought you knew about economics. I'm Della Duncan.

And I'm Robert Raymond. As the capitalist class continues to glom on to a kind of tech utopianism, many of us are starting to recognize not just the detrimental impacts of certain technologies on our lives, but also the lies that have been sold to us about those technologies. Despite all of the technological advancement, we're more isolated, exploited, and alienated than ever before. And it really does feel like there's a growing popular backlash against many of the technologies of our modern world, as well as a resigned realization of their false promises. So why is it that technological progress rarely seems to really improve our lives?

is it that technological progress rarely seems to really improve our lives? Why does it feel like every new piece of software or gadget imposed onto us in our homes and workplaces more often than not adds to our stresses and leaves us with more to do? Well, we've brought on a guest today that has a pretty clear answer to these questions. Gavin Mueller's new book, Breaking Things at Work, The Luddites Are Right About Why You Hate Your Job, seamlessly weaves together the philosophies and strategies of Luddism and Marxism to explain why technology itself is a site of class struggle, and that to truly understand the role of technology in our lives, we must approach the topic from a Marxist perspective, one that is infused with the critical technological perspective of the Luddites of the 19th century. In this conversation, we dispel a number of myths around who the Luddites were,

what they believed, and what their goals were. We also explore a somewhat non-traditional perspective on Marxism and industrialization, what the Luddites taught us about how technology functions under capitalism, and how to resist the exploitation and alienation that often accompanies it. Just a quick thank you to Upstream listener George Richardson for recommending Gavin's book to us. Now, here's Robert in conversation with Gavin Mueller. All right, well, welcome to Upstream, Gavin. It's great to have you on. Oh, thank you for inviting me. I'm wondering to start if you could briefly just introduce yourself for our listeners and maybe just tell us a little bit about how you came to do the work you're doing.

Okay, sure. Currently, I'm a media studies professor at the University of Amsterdam. I'm American, actually, and lived my entire life until I came here in the U.S. And I did my PhD in cultural studies at George Mason University, which is just outside of D.C. How did I get interested in this subject? Well, I would say it was a kind of mixture of what I was doing in graduate school. I started graduate school, my PhD program, right after the financial crisis. And I kind of said, well, this would be a good time to figure out exactly what happened and how the system works. So I started reading and studying a lot of kind of Marxist theory and political

economic analysis as part of my studies in my dissertation, towards my dissertation. But also just a few years after I started my PhD, the Occupy movement burst on the scene, and I got involved in the resurgence of socialist politics in the U.S. through work with magazines like Jacobin Magazine and Viewpoint Magazine. So it was a really nice place to explore things about sort of Marxist analysis and kind of socialist perspectives that was not so tied to kind of an academic context that was really tied to really thinking about politics and how you actually kind of intervene in politics and how you foster direct social movements and those kinds of things. So

it was a fairly fervent time, intellectual time for me. So I think it was a mixture of those two things. Great. Thank you so much. And okay, just to start before we get into it all in more detail, I'm wondering if you can just maybe provide us with like the 20,000 foot view of breaking things at work. Like what was your intention with this book? And yeah, what sort of inspired you to write it? Yeah, well, as part of this kind of revival of socialism, you know, this is, to my mind, a movement that thrives through and survives through all sorts of debate and discussion and contention. And one kind of debate that resurfaced in this time was a debate over the role of technology in capitalism. Was technology neutral? Was it detrimental? What should we have

a position on these things? And there was a lot of interest also at this time, kind of unrelated to the resurgence of socialism in mainstream economics about the impact of automation on the world of work. And there were all these kind of apocalyptic scenarios about mass unemployment. And then on the radical left, there were all these, there was a kind of utopian spin on this, that we were actually looking at a kind of post-work world that was coming into view through the introduction of increased automation at work. And so I was kind of interested in this because it was an interesting question to me, but I also thought that the debate was leaving a lot out. To me, if we want to be a good socialist, we need to, and a good Marxist analyst, we have to pay attention,

not just to sort of like the broad kind of macro level changes in society, but we also have to think about what are the content of the actual social struggles, because ultimately this is the sort of vehicle of our politics, right? The kind of movements and forces of contention around these issues. And so this kind of motivated me to sort of, all right, I need to do some research. Like, when we have new technologies introduced at work, how do the actual workers affected by it, how do they respond, right? I had a lot of jobs and experienced technology at work. I didn't always experience it in a liberatory fashion. So I was kind of motivated to sort of investigate this. And so my kind of approach to the book was, on the one hand, I wanted to look at sort of the history of

workers' movements and how they kind of approached technologies with the introduction of new technologies and also how they dealt with existing technologies with the introduction of new technologies and also how they dealt with existing technologies. And I also wanted to kind of look at the sort of theoretical perspectives that had been developed coming out of and in relation to the workers' movement. So what were Marxist theoreticians saying 30 years ago, 50 years ago, 100 years ago? What did Marx say about technology and work? And kind of put those two sides together, the sort of the theory side and the practice side together and see if I could come up with a kind of coherent narrative. Yeah, and that is a really interesting

question. What did Marx say about technology? And I love that you open the book with the quote, about technology. And I love that you opened the book with the quote, one of my goals in writing this book is to turn Marxists into Luddites. And so before we dive super deeply into the connection between Marxism and technology and industrialization and all of those questions, I really want to take some time to dive into Luddism and the Luddites. Who were the Luddites? What's their history? And what's the politics behind their movements? And importantly, too, what myths do you want to dispel about them? And why are they significant to this conversation? Yeah, well, I kind of start the book with the Luddites because this is the dawn of the industrial system that's a part of the capitalist mode of production, right? So this is a kind of convenient

place to start. We don't have to get in debates about when exactly did capitalism begin, but this is when we can really identify a strong kind of social movement against how capitalism was operating at the time. So the Luddites, they were textile workers. They were often kind of weavers and other skilled craftsmen connected to fabrics and making things like socks. And they were located in the sort of north and midlands of England at the beginning of the 19th century. And what they became known for is these weavers were threatened by new forms of technology that mechanized a great deal of their labor process. And so they recognized very quickly that if these new machines were able to be incorporated into these kind of emerging

factory system that was starting to take over the British economy, that they would be out of work and that their communities would be decimated, right? This is a time there's no welfare state, there's no unemployment. And in fact, the prevailing economic viewpoint of Thomas Malthus and others is that you naturally have these kind of boom and bust cycles of population. So there was nothing else for them. There was no backup. There was no kind of plan B to save them. So they organized themselves in they started to oppose these new machines. Now, they were most notorious for breaking machines. So they had a series of raids at the height of the Luddite raids. They were breaking into factories and smashing machines almost every night. But there was actually a host of practices. They didn't start with breaking machines. They actually started by saying to the government that, well, hey, we actually have a

right under currently existing laws to regulate our trade, and we didn't agree to these machines, so you should take our side. And that didn't work. Then they wrote threatening letters. They conducted protests, right? They had all manner of ways to kind of oppose these new changes and to try to secure themselves. But eventually, things got to a head where it became a kind of confrontational and even violent rebellion against this new way of doing things. And the reason they're called the Luddites is they created this kind of collective subject. It was illegal to be in any kind of what they called combinations at the time, like any kind of union or any kind of worker organization. It's completely illegal.

So they had to be an underground and secret movement. And they said that they were followers of a mythical King Ludd. And they often would sign their letters or they would give credit to the followers of Lud or King Lud himself when they would conduct their actions. And so they became known as the Luddites. And they conducted their struggles for several years and, in fact, met with some success. They intimidated factory owners into closing up shop or going back to the old machines. And so threatening was their movement that the British crown actually sent thousands of soldiers into the countryside to root out this rebellion. And it took quite some time because the

Luddites, in addition to having this perspective of technology, were quite good at keeping secrets. They had remarkable kind of practices of solidarity where entire communities refused to cooperate with authorities and kept people hidden, kept activities secret for quite a long time. Now, ultimately, the Luddites were defeated, right? The crown was able to identify leaders, to prosecute them, to hang people, to deport people to the colonies, right? To crush this rebellion. And because this rebellion happens at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, the Luddites seem like this kind of sort of irrational outburst to a progress that from our perspective looks inevitable, right? Well, we were just going to have this way of doing things. Who were they to stand in the way? You

know, bad for them, but you know, that's progress for you. But I think that their reputation gets passed down to us today, that to be a Luddite is to have some sort of fear or irrational resistance to technology. And I think that's one myth that I would want to dispel about them, because I don't think they were technophobes. They weren't afraid of technology. They were skilled craftspeople, many of them. They were good at using technology. And what they did was in many ways quite rational, right? These machines did actually threaten their communities, which, you know, fell into destitution after the Luddite rebellion had passed. They were correct in their assessment. And so that this kind of critical, what I would call not a technophobic

perspective, but a critical perspective on technology was, I think, something that we need to think about, right? We really need to do what they did, not in terms of breaking machines necessarily, but in terms of having a critical assessment of what is the impact of new technologies on workers, on people's communities, on people's livelihoods, right? And those people who are affected, they need to have a say, right? They need to have a voice in these processes of change.

And if we don't give them a voice, then many of them will find ways to be heard. And that itself is also legitimate. not through the lens with which the people who want to shape the narrative of sort of they were, you know, technophobic or whatever, like, like you had mentioned, but that they were really much more complex in their views on technology. And this idea of is technology inevitable? And what's appropriate technology? And those questions are things that they really brought up. And yeah, I really appreciated the way that you framed that in the book. And speaking of sort of, I think, just to stick with the history a little bit before we jump into other threads of the conversation, I'm wondering if you can just talk a little bit about this idea of Taylorism, the idea of the scientific management of work, and how that's sort of related to this conversation and how it fits into it.

Sure. So Taylorism is named after Frederick W. Taylor, who was, I guess, what we would call a kind of engineer. And what Taylor was able to do, he's coming about 100 years before our conversation now and about 100 years after the Luddites. And what he's able to do is he's someone who he himself worked on the shop floor. He didn't grow up in a blue-collar household, but he kind of wasn't able to go to university as he had been prepared to do. He ends up in factories, ends up working alongside laborers there, but he never sees himself as a part of that. He sees himself as someone who's going to solve the problems of the factory, and the problem of the factory is that the workers,

they're not disciplined, right? So he thinks that what he's going to do is he's going to solve this problem. And what I think is important about Taylor is I don't think he's any kind of genius. I don't even think his methods, even at the time, people thought his methods for the label of scientific management kind of fell short of being rigorous science. But what he is really perceptive about is what he did was he identified and began to systematize what I would characterize as capital's politics of technology. So for Taylor, he saw the problem of the shop floor was that at this time, management had only a limited understanding of how work within a factory was actually conducted. Workers, to a large extent, organized themselves. And because they possessed the knowledge of the production, kind of the labor process and the sort of total

organization of production, that gave workers a great deal of power, right? If management doesn't understand how something's done, they don't have the ability to force people to speed up or to do things a different way or to really have any kind of disciplinary power over workers to any kind of granular ability. So Taylor said, OK, we have to stop this. The first thing we need to do is we need to study everything about the labor process, right? We have to create a knowledge base, right? So that management understands everything down to the most minute physical movements of the workers. And once you have that, and at the same time, you want to make sure the workers don't have access to this knowledge, you have to separate the knowledge of it from the people who are actually doing the work. And then when you have that, you can isolate the work down to particular

movements, particular processes, and then you can kind of start controlling it from there. You can say, okay, well, we don't need you to make a car. We need you to pull this crank 20 times a minute. No, you should do it this way. Stand in this direction, right? Because that's the best way to do it. And in doing this, you break a form of power that workers had. You break the ability for the workers to control the labor process, and you can get them to work harder and work faster.

and you can get them to work harder and work faster. And so to me, this kind of approach is still characteristic to a large extent of how capital approaches technology in the workplace. Surveillance is huge. You want to have as much knowledge as possible of any labor process so that then you can control it and you can also reorganize it to make workers work faster and harder. If you look at an Amazon warehouse, they have taken Taylorism to the greatest heights, greater heights than Taylor himself could have even imagined because they can use digital sensors and other forms of digital tracking to really map everything that happens in these warehouses. And they're able to isolate workers from one another. They're able to completely physically control workers. If you work in a warehouse, you stand in one station, you don't even move around, right? And this is the kind of epitome of control that Taylor, in a more intuitive way, kind of sense that this is the kind of epitome of control that Taylor, in a more intuitive way, kind of sensed. This is the goal that we want to have. We want to have total control, physical control over the workers, and we want toized. And I think that these dynamics still characterize a great deal of the politics of technology in the workplace today.

in that discussion about Taylorism, like how you write, this is a quote from their book, actually, a scientific management was then less a science of efficiency and more a political program for reshaping the worker as a pliant subject and creating a quote, a complete mental revolution on the part of the working men toward their work toward their fellow men, and towards their employers. And yeah, as you mentioned, Taylor identified it and people like Jeff Bezos have taken it to these extreme grotesque levels. I would imagine unimaginable to people 100 years ago even. But yeah, thanks for sharing that history. I think it's important to sort of identify that as we move forward. And okay, but I do kind of want to spend a little bit of time here exploring

more explicitly these intersections of Marxism and technology or Marxism and industrialization. And I think most people, myself included, would think of Marxism as quite closely tied to this idea of industrialization. Marx has said things like, you know, we must tame nature. And there's a lot to unpack there. And I'm wondering, first of all, what was Marx's thoughts on technology and industrialization, this idea of like techno-determinism, this idea of, quote, the objectivity and inevitability of technology, science, and progress in general, as you write in your book, do you think those are problematic readings of Marx? And why is it important to sort of bust this myth that Marxism is inextricably linked to a form of techno-deterministic science?

Yeah, I mean, what I would characterize Marx's own perspective on technology is he's like with many other things. Once you start digging down and reading his thoughts on things more widely and how they evolved over time, there's some ambiguity there. You can find a kind of Promethean Marx, right? This taming of nature, that there's a kind of trajectory to history that technology sort of guides along and produces in this way. But the mistake comes from when we want to attach our politics to such a perspective. You have other statements in Marx that I find really intriguing. He has this statement in Capital where, by the way, he has some not particularly kind remarks for the Luddites themselves. But he also has a really interesting remark, said, well, you could write a whole history

of technologies developed since 1830, that purely from the viewpoint that these are weapons against the working class. It's like, oh, that's really interesting, right? This doesn't fit very easily into the idea that technology is, you know, sort of necessarily creating the conditions for a socialist society. This seems to suggest that when you look at the politics of class struggle, that technology is, you know, a part of that and is not a neutral force. It doesn't seem clear to me that you can actually, you know, just sort of appropriate it, right? And so this to me is, this is the way that I think that is useful to think about Marx if we want to think from the realm of politics. Rather than get these kind of broad historical sweeps, right, we need to think about the class struggle. What is technology doing from that perspective? How is it shaping the terrain

of how workers kind of rebel, create spaces of autonomy, organize themselves, produce practices of solidarity, all the things that create a kind of strong workers' movement that can offer a political challenge to the rule of capital? And to me, if that's your perspective, then we have to take a different perspective on technology, that we can't rely on the dialectic of history or something like that to kind of lead us to a good outcome. I think in some ways it was easier or maybe felt more appropriate in the 19th century and even the early 20th century

to feel, you know, this kind of palpable sort of change, right, an emergence from a sort of regressive past into a kind of future of modernity that perhaps socialism would be a part of. I think that the history since then, you know, I don't think we have such easy kind of frameworks to rest upon. I think if we want to create a good society, an alternative society, then we have to fight for it. And to fight for it, we need to identify what helps us build our side and what are the weapons leveled against us. And I think to a great extent, we can identify a lot of technologies is actually quite detrimental to the project of building a working class movement,

a project of building more egalitarian social relations and a project of crafting a society where people feel like they have a place and have a say and have an ability to contribute and have an ability to meet their needs. Those are the big questions, I think, if you want to be a socialist or if you want to be a Marxist. And I don't think that relying on technological progress really gets us to the answer of any of those things, right? And I think it's easy, or it's certainly possible, to point to all manner of technological developments that get us further from this.

There's a term that the Luddites use that I think is really nice when they were kind of deciding on which kinds of machines they were going to target. They described them as machines hurtful to commonality, right? That they were sort of a kind of toxic presence from a social perspective, right? And I think this is actually a really kind of useful framework a social perspective, right? And I think this is actually a really kind of useful framework to take here, right? Now, I'm not a primitivist. I don't think the Luddites are primitivists either. I'm not saying, you know, we have to abandon industrial society. We have to, you know, go Ted Kaczynski cabin in the woods. I don't think that is possible or

desirable, right? But I do think that we have to develop this kind of critical perspective on technologies. We have to really evaluate them from what our goals are, what kind of struggles are happening in our current moment, and really, you know, take a close look at some of these things. And also, we have to really consider the kind of society we're building. If we need to move to a society of lower carbon emissions, then I think technology is a huge part of answering that kind of question, those kind of questions around that problem. And so I don't think we can be naive about these things. I don't think we have the luxury of someone in the 19th century to think that it's all going to work

itself out. I think now is the time we have to really kind of ask these hard questions and come to very sort of deliberate conclusions about them. You're listening to an Upstream Conversation with Gavin Mueller, author of Breaking Things at Work, The Luddites Are Right About Why You Hate Your Job. We'll be right back. Can't let myself be the same Let perceptions be such harm Kill confusion by killing options Burn old bridges to stay warm

Can't kill the planet from the grave Can't live a life on the edge of the storm Kill confusion by killing options Burn old bridges to stay with I'm sick of emotions from the state of the inside Watching things crumble, letting all things slide They're a temporary waste of time If there's really such a thing as a waste of time Can't let myself be restrained

Can't live my life off the odds of a start Kill confusion by killing options Burn no bridges to stay alive Can't keep running from the pain Let my perceptions be subdued Kill confusion by killing options Burn no bridges to stay alive I can't let myself be restrained I can't live my life on the edge of the storm

Can't get used to bad killing options Burned open just to stay awake Can't let myself be so restrained Can't live my life on the edge of a stone Kill confusion by killing options Burn no bridges to stand on Now through delusion, disillusion, denial I'm gonna step to the edge

I've been walking for miles Was a very temporary waste of time It's a real and such a thing as a waste of time Can't live my life outside the way, can't live by myself, just be so tired Kill confusion by killing options, burn no bridges to stay warm Can't live myself, be so scared, can't live a life on the edge of the storm Kill confusion by killing options Burn down bridges to the ground

That was Burn No Bridges by Grey Matter. Now back to our conversation with Gavin Mueller. about the role of sabotage in furthering class struggle or as a tool of guerrilla class war, sabotage, breaking things at work, this tactic of the Luddites. The role of sabotage is absolutely a theme that weaves itself throughout the book as well. And really starting from the Luddites, but moving in all sorts of different directions to the international workers of the world who expanded the concept of sabotage to actually really interestingly to include making higher quality commodities. So maybe you can touch on that a bit. But yeah, just this idea of breaking things at work, like what is the significance of sabotage as a form of class war from below? And what role does it have,

if any, in our world today? Yeah, I think sabotage is something that is frequently engaged in practice in militant worker movements. It's often a disavowed one, right? Because it's illegal, disavowed one, right? Because it's illegal, right? Even the IWW, some of their people wrote some really interesting tracts on sabotage that you just referenced in your question. And the IWW had to kind of come out and say, oh, actually, we don't agree. We don't agree with this, right? Because they were afraid they would get in trouble, right? But I think one of the things that I'm really interested in in sabotage is it's not an end in of itself right the goal is not to break machines that breaking machines is a means to something else i think one way to view it as a kind of enacted politics right oftentimes we

think of politics in terms of oh a position or a debate or something you have to articulate and i think that's you know not the whole picture, right? If we're looking at the workers' movement, workers aren't always given a platform to say what they want and say what they mean, or those words aren't always recorded, right? Or heeded or listened to, and that includes by the organs of the workers' movement, right? The radical parties or trade unions, right? They're not always listening very carefully to what workers are saying. But when you do something like this, to me, it enacts a kind of politics. It shows that something is wrong, that something is identified as a problem and something that's being addressed directly by the workers themselves, right? And I think another kind of issue that makes me

interested in sabotage, and this is, I would say, this goes to kind of the contemporary sort of anti-capitalist movements. And I would say here, Andreas Malm is probably the most prominent voice on this. There's what we might call a lack of militancy compared to past iterations of anti-capitalist movements, right? That we have a lot of ideas of alternatives, we have some kind of beginnings of some organizations, we have quite a lot of really good and interesting analysis, but it doesn't always kind of translate into the will or capacity to face down threats in a kind of sustained way, right? And so part of my interest in sabotage is that it's a practice that both constructs militancy and it deepens it. When I think about times where you learn who your comrades are at work and how to organize with them, how to work

with them, it's often those moments where everyone's in danger of getting in trouble when you're doing something you're not supposed to do. So to me, sabotage is actually a practice where you create solidarity. You can't break something at work completely on your own. You have to have comrades or you have to have at least people who are complicit with it. And this is where we might start to see forms of solidarity and forms of militancy that could be valuable to our movements. But you're right, the Wobblies were very creative in their theorization of sabotage. They really kind of sat down and any kind of little chink in the armor of capital they would kind of seize upon, any little piece of struggle, they were really good at drawing that out. So they said,

well, you know what? They actually, the sabotage as improvement, there was another component of this. They reframed sabotage as something that capitalists would engage in when they, for instance, produced inferior products. So these tracts were coming out in the first couple decades of the 20th century. And one huge issue was how toxic a lot of the food that was being industrially processed was at the time. Straight up, stuff was being adulterated to levels that were poisonous. So they said, well, this is a kind of sabotage, right? When the capitalists cut corners to give you inferior products or products that harm you, that's a type of sabotage too. And we can kind of do a sort of counter-sabotage.

We can make things better than they want us to. We can put more time into it. In some ways, this is a kind of perverse sort of method of slowing down, right? Spending more time per good to make them as good as they can be. And that in a way is this kind of sabotage because you're sapping the productivity of the capitalists. You're kind of draining a little bit of surplus value away from capitalist accumulation, right? So I really enjoy the Wobblies and how sort of like creative and how kind of expansive their notion of social struggle is. And I think that there's quite a lot

useful to get from their work. What came to mind for me was especially, yeah, the sort of sabotaging the sabotage that the Wobblies were doing. But you focused a lot on sort of the role of the worker in sabotage. And it brought up for me, as much as I fucking hate this, this word to describe people like from the consumer side as well, like sabotage from the consumer side. And a few years ago, I got really fascinated with this broad community from places like Tumblr and really like early on with like Crimethink and other sort of loose collectives and organizations of promoting scamming and shoplifting as a response to the injustices of capitalism. And there were zines like evasion and scam that were circulated among like communities that provided like advice and ideology and like a sense of community for like a generation of alienated people looking to sort of remove themselves from the system.

I thought it was an interesting sort of compliment. You have workers sabotaging from the inside, and then you have communities of people on the outside who are also ideologicallyine called Processed World that was, I believe, popular in the 90s in San Francisco. And I'm wondering, maybe you can talk about that resource and also spaces like the anti-work subreddit and how these sort of inform our conceptions of work and resistance during our modern neoliberal period. Yeah, I mean, one thing I really like about things like Process World, but also this anti-work subreddit that you mentioned, and in some ways, these things go back to the Wobblies as well, is I like these things because these are people who are, they're not credentialed academics whose job it is to sort of like work out ideas and theorize and publish, right? That there are people who are workers who are dissatisfied, engaged in struggles, perhaps, and are working things out for themselves.

And this is, to me, one of the greatest parts of Marxism is that, and I say this has a credentialed academic, is the tradition of the organic intellectual, is a kind of product of class struggle, not a sort of minted from the university system. So if you are, I think if you take Marxism seriously, right, you open yourself to this much wider intellectual world. You're not just talking to people

who hold a lot of degrees. You're talking to people who have really interesting experiences and fascinating perspectives who are working things out for themselves. And so it's a very vibrant kind of conversation to be a part of. And things like the zines like Processed World, which came out of the sort of rise of the sort of disenchanted office worker. They were located, as I think you mentioned, in the Bay Area. Or things like the anti-work subreddit, which really caught fire during the pandemic when

people really felt burnt out and unappreciated at work. You have these spaces for people to voice their concerns, to find other people who also share this perspective. So you kind of push back against the feeling of isolation. And they're also really interesting places for sharing techniques, right? So Processed World, they had kind of letters to the editor section where people could write in and talk about their experiences at work. And they also had a lot of things about, you know, pranks you could play in the office or ways that you could slack off or ways that you could even sabotage office equipment to get yourself more downtime. If you look at the anti-work subreddit, you find a lot of similar

conversations, right? You find people voicing their dissatisfaction. You find people coming to a kind of critical perspective and even a politicized perspective. And you also find a lot of skill sharing. One thing that I found a lot of that I'm kind of interested in was people who were finding new ways to get around surveillance that is frequently becoming a part of work from home. So now that people aren't always required to go into the office, you have, if we think back to Taylorism, surveillance is a paramount part of worker discipline. You have these kind of productivity suites and tracking of your behavior and your activity

while you're at work, right? And so people share these techniques for getting around that surveillance. Oh, well, if you put your mouse on top of an. They, you know, oh, well, you can, if you put your mouse on top of an analog watch, every time it ticks, it moves the mouse a little bit. And so it looks like you're online. And you can, you know, go take a nap. So I love, I love things like that. Because to me, these are the kind of places where you really start to see the kinds of things that we want to see, right? The kinds of germination of those sort of dissatisfaction or feelings of exploitation or oppression move a little bit more towards the

space of politicization and resistance. And I think that anyone who's interested in growing movements and growing political challenges should pay very close attention to these kinds of places. And not just to sort of like, oh, I need to intervene and, you know, say, you know, go into the subreddit and say, oh, you should join an org. I mean, maybe that's one thing you can do. But also to really to listen. A big part of my book is to uncover a kind of technologically critical part of the socialist movement that wasn't listened to in its time and is not always listened to today. And I think that's the main thing I would say to go into these places as an equal to say, I want to hear what you're saying. I want to learn from you and learn from what's going on

in your neck of the woods, right? And start having a conversation from that perspective. And just one last thing on Processed world, I think it was either, I forget if I read this in the book, or if it was one of the interviews that you did when I was researching my questions. But you mentioned, I think how people would literally just go out and hand it out on the streets in the Bay Area. And I just love the idea of, you know, handing out these like zines that I assume a lot of people probably didn't even look at them. But there's some people who probably like it just changed their lives and changed their perspectives in such dramatic ways. I'm going to read a quote here from the book.

The goal of process world was therefore to investigate what tendencies existed and, when possible, to spark the initial fires of worker resistance through a mixture of irreverent humor and detailed analysis of the experience of work. By providing a forum, one of Processed World's most important interventions was simply to alert atomized would-be agitators of one another's existence. Said one anonymous letter writer, I don't think I've been this grateful since I was first taught how to read. And I was in high school in the 90s, but being in the Bay Area in the 90s and just the feeling of desperation and being alone. And I, you know, was into punk music and had a little bit of a community, alternative community that helped me get through the sort of

alienation of suburban Bay Area 90s life. But I would imagine that getting handed a copy of Process World would have been life altering for me at that age. Yeah, I mean, that's a great story, a great connection to make too. I mean, to me, you know, sometimes there's a debate of counterculture draws attention away from actually doing antagonistic politics. But I think these two things go together, right? Like a vibrant counterculture is often connected to sort of a vibrant sort of political community. And it has a strong kind of functional role, right? I mean, the experience we have are precisely, I mean, these things have only gotten worse, right? I mean, being alone has skyrocketed in the past few years, you know, we're sort of emerging from this kind of social isolation

lockdown period, but people are still not connecting. And I think that this is another thing that we need to take serious, you know, as offering an alternative, right, is that processed world is really smart, but it's also really funny. And things like punk music, you know, oftentimes, like very perceptive and very political, but it's also, you know, fun and interesting and, you know, aesthetically satisfying in those ways. And I think these these two things, I'm always interested when when someone's able to pull off like a really good unity of those two things. the danger of sort of, I guess, what Murray Bookchin called like a lifestyle anarchism, which is shallow politics based on maybe individual acts of shocking people are making statements like that. But I don't know, I think that a lot of that countercultural stuff can lead to a lot of really nuanced and important political and ideological perspectives that move from simply just being sort of a lifestyle kind of thing. All right, so I want to maybe take the conversation in a

slightly different direction here. We had an episode recently on fully automated luxury communism, and you brought it up in the book. And I'm just curious, like, what are your thoughts on this idea of fully automated luxury communism? Is it possible? And is it even desirable? Yeah, well, I mean, I think the sort of staying power of this term, which kind of originates as like a tongue in cheek meme, is the fact that there is something desirable. I mean, there's something appealing about this vision, right? To say that actually technology will lead us into a post-scarcity world where we won't have to work as much, right? I mean, this is to me like what the word communism means, right? That from each according to their

ability to each according to their need, our needs are met, and we don't have to spend all of our time doing things that don't matter to us, but that we can spend our time on the things that are important to us. And so I think there is, you know, that's the appeal there. I think the problem of it is that I don't think full automation is actually possible. And I don't think that it's technology that's going to get us there. And so my concern of this fully automated luxury communism is it sort of leaves out what to me is the most important part of how do we get to this beautiful utopia, which is politics, right? How do we actually create the serious challenge that's needed, right?

This is a huge, we're calling for a massive kind of transition that would reshape our social lives from top to bottom. And I think that we have to think seriously about what it would kind of take to get there. But I also just don't think that full automation is something that we'll ever really get to. There's always going to be work that needs to be done. And even in highly automated systems, there still remains work to be done. I mean, we can think about, you know, when you ask people, what is most important to you? What do you want to spend your time doing? A lot of people say they want to spend their time with their families. They

want to spend their time with their friends, the people that they care about and that care about them. Well, a lot of care is also kinds of work, right? And those things are not going to go away, right? I really avoid trying to speak in sort of like about human nature or human universals. But one thing that does seem to be universal for every person is that we require other people to take care of us at various points in our lives, in the early parts of our lives, and the ends of our lives, and at many other points in between. And that kind of care is work. Sometimes it's very hard work. But I don't know

if machines are the solution to that. I think the solution is to make those kinds of activities more valued and more central to our society. And I think the solution is to make those kinds of activities more valued and more central to our society. And I think that this is something that's really kind of left out of a fully automated luxury communist version, where we're just in the position of a kind of consumer who's catered for, right? I think we can't adopt that position. I think we have to ask ourselves, yes, what would a post-scarcity world look like? But I think we also have to ask ourselves, what is the contribution that we can make to get to that world? And when we're in that world, what is the contribution that we continue

to make? It's not just to each according to our needs. It's also from each according to our ability. There's a sort of work that will remain to be done. And I think we need to take that kind of seriously when we want to engage in some utopian speculation. And another really interesting angle to this conversation that you talked about at length in the book is like, you can't even remove human labor from things like AI and artificial technology. Like, can you get a little bit into this dark side of automation and artificial technology and like, just the hyper exploitation and shady sort of behavior from from the people that are developing these technologies? Like, can you talk about that a little bit?

Yeah, I mean, the reason right now that we're living through this sort of golden age of AI is because there are massive amounts of data that can be fed into machine learning systems that can then recognize patterns and come up with these kinds of responses, right? And what this requires to create an AI system is you have to both feed it data, but you can't just feed it raw data. A lot

of times this data has to be input in laborious ways. So if you've ever done a CAPTCHA when you had to log into a website where you had to identify, oh, this is a stop sign, this is a crosswalk, what you're actually doing is you're contributing to a training set for autonomous cars, right? These are usually attached to Google in some way. So you've helped Google in a tiny way, you've helped their self-driving car program identify stop signs a little bit better. Well, it turns out that CAPTCHAs is not enough to actually fully train these car systems. So what they do is you have to hire people who are essentially spending eight hours a day doing this incredible drudge work of tagging images and saying, here's a crosswalk, here's a car, here's an address sign,

and doing that full time. And the tech companies that are involved in this are very good because of the powers of the internet. They can set up shop anywhere in the world, including extremely impoverished places. So they actually have companies now that specialize in setting up these AI training shops where people will tag images or input data or do these other kind of forms of click work or micro work. And they're people who live in slums or even refugee camps that are being exploited in these ways. And of course, the companies say,

oh, what a great thing that we're doing for these people. They wouldn't have work otherwise in these refugee camps, and now they can spend all their day sort of tagging images, right? And so this is actually, we always have to consider the fact that these automated systems are never fully automated. There's always forms of work. And often on the one side, people will talk about, well, yes, we need technicians. We need to kind of design these things, right? And computer programmers,

this is a job of the future still, right? This is a really desirable profession. But you also need people on the other end. You need people to sort of maintain these systems and you need people to do extremely degraded forms of work to kind of train these systems or to do other forms of piecework that the machines are not able to do themselves. And so this is what we could call the dark side of AI and the dark side of automation is the fact

that you're creating massive workforces of really poor paying and really dissatisfying, menial, degrading kinds of labor. And I don't think that if we're in the business of liberating the working class from their oppression, this is something that we should get behind, right? This is something we absolutely need to be critical of. Absolutely, yeah. So what I really took from your book is not some kind of a priori rejection of technology, but really an underscoring of a need for appropriate technology and understanding technology as a tool that can be wielded as a weapon from above, or as a tool for liberation from below. And that the Luddites view technology not as neutral, but as a site of class struggle. And you end the book with a call for the radical left to, quote, put forth a decelerationist

politics, a politics of slowing down change, undermining technological progress, of slowing down change, undermining technological progress, and limiting capital's rapacity while developing organization and cultivating militancy. And yeah, I'm wondering, well, first of all, if you can unpack what you mean by deceleration and why Luddism is well-suited to serve as a challenge to capital and perhaps what lessons, yeah, that the radical left can take from the Luddite rebellion. Yeah. So, I mean, decelerationism is, you know, this is my sort of little pithy critique of accelerationist politics that we just, all the trends that are happening in society, we just need to kind of accelerate them and then we'll sort of burst through into some kind of new formation. I think it's, you know, not very appealing. One conclusion I've come to,

right, an argument I make in the book is that if technology is this kind of weapon to sort of break up existing forms of organization and existing kind of practices that workers engage in, then maybe we need to, rather than speeding up that process, we need to slow it down. We need to let people get a foothold to not have everything changing around them, not have a constant recomposition of workforce, but to slow things down a bit so that organization, which necessarily is a sort of slow and messy process, can kind of catch up to it, right? I mean, and what could that mean in a practical way, right? In a less abstract way? I mean, we already see, I mean, this could come in reformist forms. So you have all sorts of regulations that have been put in place to protect some of the most abusive aspects

of social media, right? So it wasn't too long ago that there were no laws against, say, revenge porn. And now that's very clear. You can't do those kinds of things, right? There's other kinds of things as well, right? I mean, one kind of tendency that's promoted by the most technologically advanced sectors of capital is, right, old technology is obsolete, right? You need to replace things constantly. And this is opposed to the idea that, you know, you should have things that last a long time, so it creates waste. But it also is opposed to the idea that you should be able to fix things when they don't work properly or update them. And there's actually a movement that with some success, even in the US, which is not always the friendliest place for the workers' movement, which is the right to repair movement. And in part,

this is because it's a bunch of unlikely allies. A big component of this were farmers. They had tractors, John Deere tractors, and John Deere had started putting new technology into the tractors. But this technology was essentially software packages that they said would give you all sorts of real-time information to make your crops better. But in fact, part of that software was they had control over the machines. And so if you needed to fix your tractor, you actually had to get a licensed John Deere repair person to put a USB stick in your tractor to unlock it so that you could actually fix it.

So farmers, many independent farmers who don't have a lot of extra resources for these kinds of things, they've been used to fixing their own tractors. They couldn't do it anymore. So they said, well, we want to change things. And in some ways, similar to the Luddites, they had a combination of sort of appeals to political authorities, and some political authorities have started to listen. And there's legislation that's being proposed and being worked through about giving them the right to fix their tractors. But they also took some more militant direct action, and they downloaded sort of pirated

Estonian software suites to install on their tractors, so they can kind of, it's the equivalent of like jailbreaking your iPhone, so you can install third-party software on there. They did that to their tractors so that they could fix them themselves. And to me, this is a piece of thinking about, well, if accelerating technology means we have these locked up devices, it means we have these increasingly toxic social media spaces, it means we have these increasingly degraded forms of work, like let's slow things down, right?

Let's start to undermine those forms of progress. Those are not really leading in any positive kind of direction. Maybe we need to kind of come to an understanding and come to a different direction. And part of the challenge in settling on a different direction is these things seem to be changing so rapidly that we can't get a hold of them. It's a big challenge for politics, which whether you're talking about grassroots radical politics, whether you're talking about sort of reform at the legislative level, both processes move much more slowly than the latest gadgets and platforms and forms of copyright protections, et cetera, coming out of Silicon

Valley. And so that's why I say, you know, maybe we slow things down. Where does Luddism come in this? I mean, to me, Luddism breaks with the idea that technological progress or technological advancement is somehow a kind of independent process that we have to just let go and that we can't intervene in. Luddism is precisely opposed to that. It says sometimes we have machines hurtful to commonality and we need to do something about it. And I think also Luddism says that there are other values that we have. The values of technology tend to be things like efficiency, tend to be things like speed, tend to be things like concentration of wealth and these kinds of things. And so we have other

values, other values, social values, but other values at work, right? I mean, I think a lot of people out there are not necessarily opposed to doing any kind of work, but they don't want to do work that's extremely demanding, that crushes them physically. An Amazon warehouse, they burn through their entire workforce in under a year. The turnover at an Amazon warehouse is over 100%. And what that means is people physically cannot do that job for very long before they're hurt, they are damaged physically and mentally. And this isn't to say, okay, we need to give up on the idea of delivery. But maybe it's to say we can think about a slower method. Maybe I don't need my toothpaste the next day. Maybe I can give it a few days. Maybe

we can start thinking in that direction of how to have a more kind of humane world of work, which I think in many cases would be a slower kind of work. And that can start to be a path, not just to create a political challenge, but to actually start to realize a more progressive alternative of the world of work than the one in which we have today. You've been listening to an Upstream Conversation with Gavin Mueller, author of Breaking Things at Work, The Luddites Are Right About Why You Hate Your Job, published by Verso Books. Thank you to Gray Matter for the intermission music. Upstream theme music was composed by Robert. Upstream is a labor of love. We distribute all of our content for free and couldn't keep things

going without the support of you, our listeners and fans. Please visit upstreampodcast.org forward slash support to donate. And because we're fiscally sponsored by the nonprofit Independent Arts and Media, any donations you make from the U.S. are tax exempt. Upstream is also made possible with support from the incredible folks at Resist Foundation. For more from us, please visit upstreampodcast.org and follow us on Twitter and Instagram for updates and post-capitalist memes at Upstream Podcasts. You can also subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts. And if you like what you hear, please give us a five-star rating and review. It really helps get Upstream in front of more eyes and into more ears.

Thank you. Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh,