💾 Archived View for beyondneolithic.life › mueller_archive › breaking_things_at_work › conclusion.gm… captured on 2023-07-10 at 13:21:50. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content

-=-=-=-=-=-=-

Conclusion

As I have documented in the preceding chapters, workers' movements of the past two centuries often had a Luddish bent: they understood new machines as weapons wielded against them in their struggles for a better life, and treated them as such. Intellectuals on both sides of the class struggle often characterized this perspective as shortsightedness, or downright irrationality. In spite of their political commitments to the working class, Marxist theoreticians often saw the capitalist development of technology as the means for creating both abundance and leisure, which would be realized once the masses finally took the reins of government and industry. These arguments continue to be made today: to take two examples, Leigh Phillips and Michal Rozworski's "People's Republic of Walmart" sees the discount retailer as the anticipation of socialist logistics, and Aaron Bastani's "Fully Automated Luxury Communism" devotes itself to speculative technologies like driverless cars and asteroid mining, with a "communist" coda at the end. Both works self-consciously pitch themselves as restoring faith in a progressive, but politically neutral, technological telos, against a left politics that is small scale and "primitivist."

It is my contention, supported by the history of thought and action in the preceding pages, that the radical left can and should put forth a decelerationist politics: a politics of slowing down change, undermining technological progress, and limiting capital's rapacity, while developing organization and cultivating militancy. Letting Walmart or Amazon swallow the globe not only entrenches exploitative models of production and distribution; it channels resources to reactionary billionaires who use their wealth to further undermine the relative position of workers by funding conservative causes like tax cuts, school privatization, and opposition to gay marriage. Letting technology take its course will lead not to egalitarian outcomes, but authoritarian ones, as the ultra-wealthy expend their resources on shielding themselves from any accountability to the rest of us: postapocalyptic bunkers, militarized yachts, private islands, and even escapes to outer space.

Decelerationist politics is not the same as the "slow lifestyle" politics popular among segments of the better-off: "ways of being," as Carl Honoré puts it in the movement's manifesto, "In Praise of Slowness," that emphasize "calm, careful, receptive, still, intuitive, unhurried, patient, reflective, quality-over-quantity." As pleasing as slow aesthetics might be, I am not content to ground my argument in claims that a particular pace of life is "a more natural, human" one, nor do I seek, as Honoré does, to give the capitalist system "a human face." The argument for deceleration is not based on satisfying nature, human or otherwise, but in recognizing the challenges facing strategies for organizing the working class. The constant churn of recomposition and reorganization, what media scholar Nick Dyer-Witheford calls "the digital vortex" of contemporary capitalism, scarcely gives workers time to get back on their feet, let alone fight. Decelerationism is not a withdrawal to a slower pace of life, but the manifestation of an antagonism toward the progress of elites at the expense of the rest of us. It is Walter Benjamin's emergency brake. It is a wrench in the gears.

This is to say, my argument is not based on lifestyle, or even ethics; it is based on politics. One of the biggest challenges facing the weak and fragmented left is how to compose ourselves as a class — how to organize diverse sectors of people to mobilize for fundamental social change. This is due to changes in the technical composition of capital that create new challenges for worker politics: the erosion of stable jobs, the use of digital technology to proliferate work tasks, the introduction of the precarious on-demand economy, the reinvention of Taylorism, the massive financial and ideological power of tech companies. Through Luddism, we can challenge some of these forces, and, as workers in the nineteenth century did, begin to discover our common goals — and our common enemies.

In this way, Luddism is not simply opposition to new machines or technologies, but a set of concrete politics with a positive content. Luddism, inspired as it is by workers' struggles at the point of production, emphasizes *autonomy*: the freedom of conduct, ability to set standards, and the continuity and improvement of working conditions. For the Luddites specifically, new machines were an immediate threat, and so Luddism contains a critical perspective on technology that pays particular attention to technology's relationship to the labor process and working conditions. In other words, 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 capitalist social relations, which can only end through struggle, not through factors like state reforms, the increasing superfluity of goods, or a better planned economy.

My argument for Luddism rests on the fact that Luddism is popular, and the principle that radical intellectuals are better off listening to what people are saying than attempting to lead their thoughts. Currently the people are practically unanimous: they want to decelerate. A Pew Research Center poll found that 85 percent of Americans favored the restriction of automation to only the most dangerous forms of work. Majorities oppose algorithmic automation of judgement in parole cases, job applications, and financial assessment, even when they acknowledge that such technologies might be effective. In spite of pop accelerationist efforts to reenchant us with technological progress, we do not live in techno-optimistic times.

Luddism is not only popular; it also might just work. Carl Benedikt Frey, the economist who sparked panic with his claim that 47 percent of jobs would evaporate by 2034, has recently acknowledged the Luddite wave. "There is nothing to ensure that technology will always be allowed to progress uninterrupted," he writes. "It is perfectly possible for automation to become a political target." He notes a variety of Luddite policies from the left: Jeremy Corbyn's proposed robot tax, Moon Jae-in's reduction of tax incentives for robotics, and even France's "biblio-diversity" law that forbids free shipping on discounted books, to better preserve bookstores from competition with Amazon. History is full of reforms against the worst tendencies of technological development such as these, which will be an important component of the coming deceleration.

One of the most promising developments at the moment is the surge in militant organizing within Silicon Valley, which continues the Luddite tendency incubated within hacker culture. For instance, Google employees successfully pressured the company to abandon the Pentagon's AI initiative, Project Maven. Actions included software engineers' defiance of their superiors by refusing to work on the project. The victory inspired workers at Salesforce, Microsoft, and Amazon to organize against their companies furnishment of AI and data processing capabilities to US immigration enforcement authorities. These struggles are led and consolidated by organizations like the Tech Workers Coalition that hearken back to the Vietnam War–era organizations Computer People for Peace and Science for the People, which sought to seed the scientific and engineering communities with militants opposed to war and capitalism. The hashtag #TechWontBuildIt has become a slogan for developers who reject working on harmful technologies, a new strategy of refusal. It is a capacious slogan: rather than fantasize about technological marvels, we can envision all the horrors workers might refuse to produce, and the creative methods they might employ to disrupt this work.

Engineers and programmers at tech companies have a privileged place in the workforce, as their in-demand skills make them difficult to fire, granting them more room to advocate for themselves against management. But workers organizing inside Big Tech have deliberately expanded into the more precarious sectors of these corporations, supporting actions to unionize cafeteria workers at Facebook and security staff across the Bay Area. At Google, full-time employees agitated around the company's exploitative use of temporary workers, a remarkable show of solidarity that led the company to raise its minimum standards for pay and benefits. We may be seeing the composition of forces within technology companies that push them into less destructive and exploitative directions.

Beyond the tech industry, Luddite politics could link up with a number of emerging critical intellectual and political struggles. Here, movements to address the environmental crisis loom especially large. In spite of a few prominent voices that claim that current production and consumption patterns can continue in carbon-neutral ways by deploying new technology, it is increasingly clear that fundamental changes to the economic system are necessary if we are to have any hope of avoiding catastrophic climate change. Green Luddism could be an alternative to the dead ends of technological solutionism and back-to-nature primitivism: a search for slower, less intensive, less estranged, more social methods of meeting our needs. Alyssa Battistoni offers an exemplary sketch of "a low-carbon society oriented toward the flourishing of all" centered on care work: "teaching, gardening, cooking, and nursing," all low-emission activities, conveniently involving workers who are increasingly involved in workplace struggles. And environmental historian Troy Vettese's ambitious call for "natural geo-engineering" looks to Cuba as a model for a fossil fuel– free and rewilded globe that would also raise living standards for the vast majority of earth's population.

Here is where Luddism might articulate with interest in the politics of degrowth. Degrowth originates in a critique of modernist developmental schemes for the global South, which presumed that Third World nations were required to follow a development template matching that of the industrialized North. As economist Serge LaTouche puts it, "the idea of de-growth was, in a sense, born in the South, and more specifically in Africa." The failure of development in the economic sense, coupled with resentment over its Eurocentric devaluation of local customs and knowledge, had led African intellectuals to seek other options. Aligned with these concerns, LaTouche notes, was a recognition of imminent ecological crisis: "The growth society was not just undesirable but unsustainable!" Degrowth shares with Luddism an acknowledgement that liberation is not tied up with endless accumulation of capital, and, further, that well-being cannot be reduced to economic statistics. As environmental scientist Giorgios Kallis and his coresearchers describe it, "Degrowth is not only about down-scaling energy and resource use, but also about an overall project of exiting economism, that is, decolonizing the social imaginary and liberating public debate from prevalent discourses couched in economic terms, privileging growth." And degrowth is not primitivism: in LaTouche's formulation, it could mean a return to "a material output equivalent to that of 1960–70."

There are still other points of resonance with this decelerationist schema. Take, for instance, the Maintainers, a research network that seeks to shift focus of technological discourse away from "innovation" toward the vital practices of care and repair of existing technological infrastructures. "While innovation — the social process of introducing new things — is important," state codirectors Andy Russell and Lee Vinsel, "most technologies around us are old, and for the smooth functioning of daily life, maintenance is more important." Further, the Maintainers seek to elevate and advocate for "crucial individuals who keep society's systems running": plumbers, elevator repair workers, computer code bug-fixers, safety officers. As media anthropologist Shannon Mattern notes, the Maintainers share many of the concerns of degrowth advocates — "the waste of planned obsolescence, the environmental effects of unsustainable supply chains, the devaluation of care work, the underfunding of maintenance, and so forth." And while the Maintainers often couch their efforts in the language of the mundane and humble, what they call for is nothing short of a radical break with how we encounter technology. Rather than a disruptive innovation delivered from on high by powerful capitalists, they argue for fragile socio-technical infrastructures, imbricated in the rhythms of our everyday lives and in which we have a vital stake. It is a politics that emphasizes social reproduction, rather than production, and that values a slower and more democratic engagement with technology.

The "right to repair" movement stands as a Luddish technological initiative in the interest of conservation-minded maintenance. Currently much of our digital technology is locked down by manufacturers, who claim exclusive rights to repair and refurbish the gadgets we have purchased. Apple guards access to cheap spare parts, gouging customers at its Genius Bar to the point where buying a replacement becomes the cheaper option — an obvious boon to Apple, and an obvious waste of resources. Even technologies not thought of as digital are subject to such controls. For example, proprietary software in new John Deere tractors comes with a license that requires the company to authorize the installation of any new parts. Says farmer Kevin Kenney,

You want to replace a transmission and you take it to an independent mechanic — he can put in the new transmission but the tractor can't drive out of the shop. Deere charges $230, plus $130 an hour for a technician to drive out and plug a connector into their USB port to authorize the part.

In response, some farmers are hacking their software with cracks downloaded from Eastern European forums, in an effort to keep their equipment stable, open, and able to repair. It is pure Luddism in action, a refusal to submit to techno-capitalist demands to relinquish skill and autonomy, a ripping-open of the walled gardens of code.

The right to repair movement seeks to legitimate these practices through legal reform and has earned powerful political allies such as Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren. Other organizations work along grassroots lines. In the UK, the Restart Project seeks to restore our ability to fix and tinker with our devices as we see fit, rather than succumb to market imperatives that reward disposal and overproduction. Rather than simply save consumers time and money, Restart envisions its work as altering the relationship between technology and its users through training workshops:

By bringing people together to share skills and gain the confidence to open up their stuff, we give people a hands-on way of making a difference, as well as a way to talk about the wider issue of what kind of products we want.

To be sure, these contemporary projects are vibrant, diverse, and, in some sense, incommensurate. The same is true of many of the historical movements I've discussed in this book. Luddism manifests itself differently according to context. It is not a political program that various organizations and initiatives have signed on to in advance, but something more inchoate, a kind of diffuse sensibility that nevertheless constitutes a significant antagonism to the way that capitalism operates. And it can precipitate into concrete coalitions in unexpected ways.

Effective radical politics doesn't follow from an airtight plan constructed ahead of time with a specific revolutionary subject in mind. Even victorious revolutions are haphazard things, where disparate antagonisms build up, merge, and fragment. Louis Althusser, studying Lenin's analysis of the success of the Bolshevik Revolution, argued that it was not a case where the proletariat simply became sufficiently large and organized to overthrow the state. Rather, the revolution was a "ruptural unity": "an accumulation of 'circumstances' and 'currents' so that whatever their origin and sense (and many of them will necessarily be paradoxically foreign to the revolution in origin and sense, or even its 'direct opponents')." As the cultural theorist Stuart Hall put it in his own reading of Althusser,

The aim of a theoretically-informed political practice must surely be to bring about or construct the articulation between social or economic forces and those forms of politics and ideology which might lead them in practice to intervene in history in a progressive way.

My hope is that recognizing Luddism at work in the office, on the shop floor, at school, and in the street aids the ambitions of contemporary radicals by giving anti-technology sentiment a historical depth, theoretical sophistication, and political relevance. We may discover each other through our myriad of antagonistic practices in their incredible diversity, connecting to other struggles against the concentrated power of capital and the state, pitched, in the words of Althusser, of "different origins, different sense, different levels and points of application." To do so requires no preconstructed plan, no litmus tests of what is necessary in order to be properly political, authentically radical, or legitimately left. As Marx put it in a late letter to the Dutch socialist Ferdinand Domela Nieuwenhuis, "The doctrinaire and necessarily fantastic anticipations of the programme of action for a revolution of the future only divert us from the struggle of the present." Rather, the first step of organizing disparate grievances into a collective politics requires recognizing and recovering our own radical self-activity along with that of others. Even, and perhaps especially, when it involves breaking things at work.