Nowtopian

The Luddite Tribunal held at Oakland’s Tamarack Cafe on November 9, 2023. (l to r) Brian Merchant, Safe Street Rebel, Wendy Liu, Paris Marx, and Veena Dubal.

I’ve been called “Luddite” from time to time, though I have always refused the category of “technology” as having any particularly useful reference point. Criticizing technology, or more to the point, a particular way of organizing work, of organizing activities that exploit nature in more or less dramatic ways, leads quickly to isolation and to questions about one’s sanity. It is quite unusual to suggest that the “techno-sphere” we assemble together should be subject to democratic decision-making. The ideological system that relegates such concerns to the margins, and insists that the only people capable and worthy of addressing what technologies we should adopt, how work should be organized, what our relationship to nature ought to be, are those with the capital—and the commitment to profit as the motivating principle—was invented at a specific historic moment. The power of capitalists was dramatically seized at the expense of the earliest organized working-class critics of automation: derisively and falsely “remembered” as the Luddites.

This matters now because over the past few decades anyone who objected to the rise of Amazon, Google, Facebook, Apple, or any of a number of other massive companies, are generally dismissed as “luddites” standing in the way of inevitable progress. There has been two centuries of refining this line of argument, starting at its point of origin among the textile workers in England at the beginning of the 1800s, the ones who broke into the new factories to wreck various machines they saw as destroying their ability to live from the work they did. Their movement of organized property destruction, alongside efforts to establish rights for workers to shape the introduction of new machinery and new ways of organizing work, was brutally suppressed by extensive state violence, including the wide use of capital punishment for anyone associated with this movement.

Brian Merchant (left), Veena Dubal after she smashed an iPhone, and Paris Marx clapping behind.

Brian Merchant has recently published an excellent history of the Luddites, the protagonists of the original revolt against technology, which Merchant makes clear was not so much a revolt against technology as a refusal to lay down and die before the unrestrained power of the owners of capital. His book, called Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech (links to this and the other eight books I mention are listed at the end), presents a very well-written, compelling, detailed account of the social conflict that erupted in England at the beginning of the 19th century, pitting the earliest “start-up founders” against a wide range of workers, starting with the textile workers who saw their skills being mechanized, and their work being degraded as they were forced into the new-fangled factories that the most rapacious entrepreneurs of the period insisted would be the new way to work.

Artisans, hatmakers, shoemakers, bricklayers, small shop owners, and farmers joined the cause. So did coal miners and railroad workers, whose industries were on the rise due in part to the technology and automation—because the Luddite movement was not about technology; it was about workers’ rights. Luddism started as a tactical strike against the technologies of control, but had exploded into a greater expression of the rage against a system where the privileged few with access to the right levers could lift themselves up at the expense of the many. (p. 143)

The real Luddite movement was, of course, multifaceted, complex, and driven by a range of grievances and demands. The Luddites as most of us know them, moronic machine smashers, are in fact inventions. They’re the myth invented by their critics, not the well-organized, strategic, and morally empowered force that contested the rise of the factory and the entrepreneurial manager in the 1810s. (p. 305) … Entrepreneurs, factory operators, and executives have been chasing that fantasy ever since. In the twenty-first century, Amazon touts plans for fully automated warehouses, high-tech companies aspire to “dark” factories—factories emptied of humans and automated to such an extent that they can be run without the lights on—and robotics and enterprise software firms pitch a battery of automation services and products to clients afraid of being left behind. Now, as then, we’re made to believe that we are in an uncomfortable but necessary transitional period, right before technology will inevitably solve all our woes. (p. 320) … Ever since the Luddites, wage-earning workers have been, in one form or another, at the whims of an overseer who deploys technology to control the division of labor. That, above all, is what entrepreneurs and the state won, when the Luddites lost. (p. 321)

I appreciated Merchant’s willingness to break into his historic narrative at numerous points along the way to underscore the contemporary manifestations of the same kinds of struggles. Rather than leaving us with the impression that the Luddites were some kind of primitive, pre-modern people who were merely lashing out at life changing under their feet, we instead come to understand that the conflict they fought is a conflict we’re still fighting. The harsh brutality of workplace conditions in an Amazon warehouse is just a contemporary example of the vicious and violent regime created in the factories that were the founding institutions of the early Industrial Revolution.

It wasn’t just a lack of Covid safety, or even worker safety, per se. It was the combination of punishing conditions, lack of benefits, constant surveillance, and stagnant pay. It was breaking your back to keep up with the robots while the man who owned the operation broke records for making so many billions of dollars. The man who is, if he is not already, on his way to becoming the biggest factory boss in history—Jeff Bezos. (p. 379) … This relentless, technologically dictated pace of work is ultimately driven, just as it was in the Luddite days, by an entrepreneur exercising a more audacious will to profit than anyone else, and an openness to implementing systems that others might deem too inhumane, in order to realize those profits. (p. 380)

In another pandemic book, Alessandro Delfanti dives deeply into the modern labor process in Amazon warehouses (The Warehouse: Workers and Robots at Amazon). As an Italian he has roots in the bottom-up analyses of workers research organizing pioneered by radical Italian workers decades ago. He talks to workers not just in the U.S. but also Amazon workers in Piacenza, Italy, an area where “fulfillment centers” for many modern corporations are situated to serve the Italian and European markets. He comes to intimately understand the dehumanizing banality of the structure of work there:

Continue reading General Ludd to General Intellect