“Breaking Things at Work convincingly translates Luddism into a framework for understanding a surprising range of practices. 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.”
—Jenny Odell, author of How to Do Nothing
“Forget the space age utopias of Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos. The propagandistic technophilia of capitalism is a lure. As Gavin Mueller’s sober, breakthrough book shows, these cyber-dreams are a cover story. 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. Our quaint notions of technological progress are no match for a machine that programmes the relentless imperatives of capital at our expense. 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. Nothing could be more valuable or timely.”
—Richard Seymour, author of The Twittering Machine
“A compelling examination of the ancestors of today’s accelerationists.”
—Erik Baker, Real Life Mag
“Mueller’s work is a counter-history of automation, attending to all those who have fought back at every turn, acting out of a desire to maintain as much collective autonomy over what it means to work as possible … Breaking Things at Work draws these legacies into a cumulative strategy for how we might come together to combat the daily indignities and miseries of contemporary work.”
—Clinton Williamson, The Baffler
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