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

Product Information

Those practices made their movement very strong and they were able to marshal a kind of discipline that went beyond the workers themselves and into their communities, to the point where authorities who were really keen on tracking them down really struggled to do so.

Sometimes we get this tension with technology at work that part of the labor movement just thinks you can’t challenge new technology. It is a problem in trade unions more generally that they only rarely look at the politics of technology. In 1805 French silk weavers greeted the arrival of the Jacquard loom by attempting to assassinate its inventor and destroying the device publicly in Lyon.This is crucial to pushing back against some of these narratives that I don’t think are helpful in creating the kind of politics that we want to see. The causes included the high cost of the wars with Napoleon, Napoleon's Continental System of economic warfare, and escalating conflict with the United States. This preserved the livelihoods of a particular kind of profession, gave the people in that profession considerable autonomy over how people were trained, and what the working style was like. Lud' or 'Ludd' ( Welsh: Lludd map Beli Mawr), according to Geoffrey of Monmouth's legendary History of the Kings of Britain and other medieval Welsh texts, was a Celtic King of 'The Islands of Britain' in pre- Roman times, who supposedly founded London and was buried at Ludgate.

Historian Eric Hobsbawm, in a reevaluation of the Luddites’ motivations for machine breaking, describes them as “collective bargaining by riot.Perhaps we have, or still are, identified with someone we admire, but don't yet realize that we've outgrown their influence. As Sale describes it, the Luddite rebellions were never simply against technology, but “what that machinery stood for: the palpable, daily evidence of their having to succumb to forces beyond their control.

For Mueller, these groups are not a splintering-off or addendum to Marxism proper: rather, the autonomists imperative is Marxism par excellence. What's more important is that it's time to stop trying to fix the discomfort by trying to exert control over what cannot be controlled. Benjamin is saying, instead of assuming history is on our side, let’s throw the brake, sever the simplistic link between capitalist development and the construction of socialism, stop the process, because otherwise we’re going to be taken for a ride. You’re abusing the copy machine, or you’re using the grill in the back of the kitchen to make your own food. We should not revel in the productive powers of the machine, but wonder at how it is so consistently used as a weapon in class struggle from above.

Instead, you want to look for the struggles themselves: the actual things that people are doing to organize themselves with and against technology, to compose and organise themselves in struggle. And because their rebellion occurred during the early days of the advent of mass production, the Luddites have become synonymous with an irrational fear of inevitable progress. For years the Luddites roamed the English countryside, practicing drills and manoeuvres that they would later deploy on unsuspecting machines. This affected their political strategy, how they interpreted Marx, and their perception of capitalist technology and development. Although the proceedings were legitimate jury trials, many were abandoned due to lack of evidence and 30 men were acquitted.

If you look at a successful movement, it takes a lot of different ingredients and people who are well positioned within certain kinds of firms, who have a lot of information about how processes run, how the companies are organized. Technology brings enormous power, which is often why we like it, but we also need to be wary of who is benefiting from such power, because it is rarely workers. And though there are plenty of people who have taken to scoffing derisively whenever the presence of General Ludd is felt, there would be no need to issue those epithetic guffaws if they were truly directed at nothing. The etymology of the word, as I am using it from the Greek, is to change into something higher or greater. The Falmouth magistrates reported to the Duke of Newcastle (16 November 1727) that "the unruly tinners" had "broke open and plundered several cellars and granaries of corn.In 1956, during a British Parliamentary debate, a Labour spokesman said that "organised workers were by no means wedded to a 'Luddite Philosophy'. Satirists of the day were quick to label the celebrants dangerous radicals and partisans for outdated machines. Unearthing inventive moments of resistance from the factories and docks to the free software movement, Mueller's account of the past bears directly on our view of the future: what it is, where it occurs, and to whom it belongs. I opened an overhead cabinet too hard, it broke a clock, said clock smashed onto the top of my newly-repaired shoulder, still in a sling.