gemini://beyondneolithic.life:1965/mueller_archive/breaking_things_at_work/nights_of

In the second decade of the nineteenth century, the British Crown faced a problem. Discontented weavers, croppers, and other textile workers had begun a protracted insurgency against property and the state. At issue were new types of machines — the stocking frame, the gig mill, and the shearing frame — that could produce and finish cloth using a fraction of the labor time previously required, transforming a skilled profession into low-grade piecework. Wages plummeted and hunger began to set in. Communities of thousands were threatened by the upheaval.

Some of these technologies had floated around England and France for centuries, repeatedly drawing the anger of workers. Croppers had been targeting gig mills, in particular, for years: as the eighteenth century came to a close, several mills in Leeds had been publicly destroyed. (Subsequent investigations by authorities tellingly failed to find any witnesses to the events.) In some cases, weavers successfully appealed to prior government decisions protecting their livelihoods from technology. However, after just a few years, the situation was rapidly changing. Parliament's preoccupation with the wars against Napoleon meant it had little patience for the demands of unruly craftsmen. The new Combination Laws, which outlawed trade union activity, severely limited collective action by textile weavers. Mill owners saw an opportunity, and redoubled their efforts to introduce machines and reduce wages. As tensions intensified, a new strategy emerged.

Between 1811 and 1812, hundreds of new frameworks were destroyed in dozens of coordinated, clandestine attacks under the aegis of a mythical leader called "Ned Ludd." In addition to their notorious raids, the so-called Luddites launched vociferous public protests, sparked chaotic riots, and continually stole from mills — activities all marked by an astonishing level of organized militancy. Their politics not only took the form of violent activity but was also enunciated through voluminous decentralized letter-writing campaigns, which petitioned — and sometimes threatened — local industrialists and government bureaucrats, pressing for reforms such as higher minimum wages, cessation of child labor, and standards of quality for cloth goods. The Luddites' political activities earned them the sympathies of their communities, whose widespread support protected the identities of militants from the authorities. At the height of their activity in Nottingham, from November 1811 to February 1812, disciplined bands of masked Luddites attacked and destroyed frames almost every night. Mill owners were terrified. Wages rose.

The weaver insurrection threatened to link up with other underground anti-government currents, such as the Jacobins — indeed, at least one Luddite signed his letter with the name of the recently deceased republican writer Thomas Paine. Parliament was now sufficiently interested. It dispatched soldiers across the country to quell the violence and passed new legislation that made frame breaking a capital offense. The poet Lord Byron gave his first speech to Parliament denouncing these measures leveled against the Luddite "mob." "You may call the people a mob, but do not forget that a mob too often speaks the sentiments of the people," he warned. As if to acknowledge Byron's point, small mill owners were increasingly afraid to implement the machines. This also meant that owners of the larger workshops that continued to use frames knew they were likely targets.

William Cartwright was one such owner, and he was prepared for the inevitable Luddite attack. On the night of April 9, 1812, the Luddites had launched a daring raid on the massive Horbury mill complex owned by Joseph Foster, assembling a force of hundreds to successfully wreck and burn the building, after detaining Foster's sons without bloodshed. Cartwright wouldn't be so easy a mark. He had fortified his mill and holed up inside with several militia members. When, on April 11, the Luddites descended on his factory and began to smash apart the door with hammers, he and his men opened fire. After a gun battle, the Luddites retreated, leaving behind two wounded men who later succumbed to their injuries. In spite of intense surveillance and investigation, none of the attackers were identified, even after a series of assassination attempts on mill owners (one successful) at the end of April.

Yet eventually the spies and crackdowns had their effect, and in January 1813 authorities identified, arrested, and executed several suspected Luddite higher-ups. The most pronounced phase of machine breaking rapidly subsided. But the movement lived on in the underground, bolstered by a powerful mythology and its storied confrontation with the detested state. Sporadic outbreaks of machine breaking continued for years. It was this quality Lord Byron captured in "Song for the Luddites," his 1816 encomium to the movement, which portrayed it as heroically doomed, but successful at laying the groundwork for future emancipatory struggles. The blood shed by the Luddites was "the dew / Which the tree shall renew / Of Liberty, planted by Ludd!" This mythological, subterranean character has carried forward to our own time; as E.P. Thompson says, "To this day Luddism refuses to give up all its secrets."

In spite of Byron's efforts, history has not been kind to the Luddites. Their militant opposition to machines has meant that their legacy has been understood as a kind of technophobia. 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. Critics of technology find themselves either performatively disclaiming the Luddite legacy or professing their unbecoming sympathies. "I'm not a Luddite," insists technology writer Andrew Keen while explaining his antipathy toward social media, just as "Luddite confessionals" have become an established essay genre, encompassing educators, musicians, and even information technology professionals.

The Luddites' association with technophobia has itself garnered them vocal sympathizers. In 1984, Thomas Pynchon dryly inquired whether it was "O.K. to be a Luddite," and the nineties saw the so-called neo-Luddite movement, which brought together sundry social critics with radical environmentalists in a loose coalition opposed to contemporary technologies. While their manifesto specified that they did not oppose technology as such, the neo-Luddites' opposition to everything from genetic engineering to television, computers, and "electromagnetic technologies" belied a debt to anti-civilization anarcho-primitivist politics. Odd tics, such as an identification with Unabomber Ted Kaczynski and the subsequent flirtations of leading figure (and author of an evocative history of the Luddites) Kirkpatrick Sale with secession movements, give off a distinct odor of crankishness.

It is the nature of myths to contain an element of flexibility and indeterminacy in their application. Indeed, the Luddites assumed a mythic character in their own time: they invoked the name of an imaginary king. The construction of a mythos, tied to a collective subject, is part of what has made the Luddite struggle a common turn of phrase 200 years after the fact. As media theorist Marco Deseriis argues, the rhetorical power of the Luddites lay in their articulation of otherwise loosely connected struggles into a set of linked practices and narratives, what he calls an "assemblage of enunciation": "a network of pragmatic actions and semiotic expressions that are connected but also enjoy relative autonomy." The function of the "improper name" of Ned Ludd is, according to Deseriis, "precisely to eschew fixation by incorporating a plurality of usages that cannot easily be reduced to one."

After all, the Luddites were not the first instance of an organized attack on industrial manufacturing: stocking frames, specifically, had been targeted for decades, and the British Parliament had passed an act protecting the machines in 1788. The wealthy and powerful understood machines as a method to accumulate power, and so too did the toiling classes over whom they wished to exert it. And so destruction and sabotage accompanied the introduction of machines wherever they were introduced. Marx notes the protracted hostility to wind- and waterpower stretching back to at least the 1630s. Industrial machines inspired a special ire, as they not only disrupted traditional ways of life, but brutally ground down their workers. London's massive Albion Mills, the probable inspiration for William Blake's line about "dark Satanic mills," was burned to the ground in 1791 — possibly at the hands of its workers, who cheered the blaze from the riverbanks of the Thames while ignoring authorities' pleas to help fight the fire. Satirists of the day were quick to label the celebrants dangerous radicals and partisans for outdated machines. 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. After the brief flourishing of the Luddite rebellions, destruction of machines and factories continued in France, in the United States (where a number of textile factories went up in flames, likely from arson), and throughout Silesia and Bavaria.

In light of a history rife with workers destroying machines, why do the Luddites cast the longest shadow? It is not only because they knew how to spin a good yarn. After all, the Crown doesn't muster a military force of thousands to destroy a myth. The Luddites loom large because of the power of their struggle, both in literature and in their historical accomplishments. While E.P. Thompson has sought to rescue the Luddites from "the enormous condescension of posterity" through an act of radical sympathy, he still acknowledged that militant reactions against industrialism "may have been foolhardy. But they lived through these times of acute social disturbance, and we did not." I admire Thompson's ability to comprehend the Luddites from within their specific conjuncture, rather than from a point of view that sees them as a mere speed bump on the road to our inevitable present.

But we can go further. History has a shape, but it is not one that is foretold, still less one forecast by the tools and technologies at hand. Instead, the shape of history, as Marx argued, is wrought by the struggles of those who participated in it. That the Luddites were ultimately unsuccessful is not itself an indictment: final success is a poor criterion for judging an action before or during the fact. And, as I hope to demonstrate, Luddism was not altogether pointless. Our history is the Luddites' as well, and their insight — that technology was political, and that it could and, in many cases, should be opposed — has carried down through all manner of militant movements, including those of the present. There is much to learn from this tradition, even among the most technophilic current-day radicals.

The Luddite opposition to machines was, it must be said, not a simple technophobia. As Sale notes, many of the Luddites were weavers or other skilled textile workers who operated their own complicated tools. Their revolt was not against machines in themselves, but against the industrial society that threatened their established ways of life, and of which machines were the chief weapon. To say they fought machines makes about as much sense as saying a boxer fights against fists. 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."

Machine breaking was only one technique among many that the Luddites deployed, reserved for use against the most intransigent factory owners as part of a wider strategy to increase worker power. Weavers invoked King Ludd in their attempts to collectively bargain for piece rates that would allow them to survive, and in their petitions to government authorities for redress. One letter sent to the Home Office in 1812, signed "Ned Lud's Office, Sherwood Forest," stated that "all frames of whatsoever discription the worckmen of which Are not paid in the current Coin of the realm will Invarioably be distroy'd," while vowing to protect the frames of compliant owners.

Historian Eric Hobsbawm, in a reevaluation of the Luddites' motivations for machine breaking, describes them as "collective bargaining by riot." For Hobsbawm, "The value of this technique was obvious, both as a means of putting pressure on employers, and of ensuring the essential solidarity of the workers." Machine breaking was one weapon among many, but it was also a technique for something else: forging a shared communal struggle. Hobsbawm views this practice as entirely appropriate for the early nineteenth century. "In those pre-socialist times the working class was a crowd, not an army," he writes. "Enlightened, orderly, bureaucratic strikes were impossible."

Here, Hobsbawm suggests the most important element of the Luddites: his analysis reorients the discussion away from the movement's quixotic outcome and toward an emphasis on *class composition*. The concept of class composition, an effort to grasp class in both its economic and political dimensions in tandem, was developed by Italian theorists like Raniero Panzieri, Sergio Bologna, and Mario Tronti to account for the new forms of resistance exhibited by the youthful "mass workers," deskilled by the introduction of new machinery into factories. Class composition, then, is a rebuke to the notion of class as a preexisting empirical category — an idea you might encounter in a basic sociology textbook, where you simply look at someone's job or income and determine their class. Rather, class in the Marxist sense is forged through struggle itself. As the writers of 1970s journal "Zerowork" put it, "For us, as Marx long ago, the working class is defined by its struggle against capital and not [merely] by its productive function."

In Hobsbawm's estimation, the working-class activity of the Luddites has to be understood in terms of its existing technical composition; indeed, workers had not yet been organized into a disciplined mass, but were instead a mélange of laborers working in their own homes and shops, often with their own tools. Physically separated and without established organizations, they often related to bosses according to individualized contracts, and so it was impossible for them to engage in the kinds of militancy we associate with trade unions made up of mass workers. But Hobsbawm suggests something further: that through machine breaking itself, the Luddites *composed themselves as a class* by creating bonds of solidarity.

This is not exactly to use, in the Hegelian version of Marx's analysis, the vocabulary of an empirical "class in itself" transforming into a politicized "class for itself" — terms never deployed by Marx himself. As historian Salar Mohandesi notes, while writers such as Thompson have used this vocabulary to explain class beyond a vulgar economic reduction, it leaves little room for the sudden emergence of struggle and ties these struggles too closely to a discrete cultural way of life. Instead, we can think about the actions of the Luddites, and other machine breaking, as *practices of political composition*. Workers are organized and exploited according to their technical composition; they then develop the forms of struggle necessary for overcoming their divisions and fighting their exploitation.

In the case of the Luddites, these were largely independent workers resisting their incorporation into the factory while fighting for the preservation of other elements of their way of life and their communities. They could not compose themselves in the way mass workers might, and they did not limit their struggle to the workplace. Instead, the class composed itself around a collective mythical subject — King Ludd — and forged practices of secrecy and community-wide solidarity in order to keep the struggle alive and protect its direct participants. These practices extended into secret oaths, bonds of confidentiality — authorities struggled to get Luddites to inform on their comrades — and literary practices such as writing songs, poems, and letters. The organized attack on and destruction of factory machinery was not an isolated strategy, but was the very texture of struggle, the tissue holding together the weavers as a class. It was a practice of solidarity.

It is just this point that labor historian Peter Linebaugh seizes upon in his pamphlet "Ned Ludd and Queen Mab." In thinking about the politics of machine breaking as a form of solidarity — a means of class composition — Linebaugh knits together a host of disparate yet contemporaneous struggles connected to the onslaught of primitive accumulation of the early nineteenth century. Capitalism was erected on a series of enclosures spanning the globe, a disruptive process of ordering and disciplining life and the means to sustain it. "The world was being enclosed," he writes. "Life was being closed off, people were being shut in." The Luddites, fighting against the enclosure of their skills by "Machinery hurtful to Commonality," occupied only one front in a massive global struggle breaking out along a cotton commodity chain that stretched across the ocean, encompassing simultaneous rebellions by indigenous peoples and slaves in the New World. In these rebellions, attacks on productive technology were a common tactic. Insurgent Creeks destroyed the looms of their accommodationist peers that represented the new forms of trade accompanying the encroachment of the plantation economy. And in the plantation fields, where the cotton originated, slaves broke their tools so often that owners "bought extra-heavy implements in the hope they would survive rough handling," thereby reducing the plantation economy's productivity. As Linebaugh argues, "The destruction of farm implements by those working them on American plantations belongs to the story of Luddism, not just because they too were tool-breakers, but they were part of the Atlantic recomposition of textile labor-power." There is, he suggests, a germ of a shared endeavor in these aligned struggles against a common foe.

The rehabilitation of the Luddite legacy may be an important part of contemporary historiography, but what relevance does it have for struggles against capitalism? Here we should turn to Marx, capitalism's greatest analyst and critic, and other radical writers living through the momentous technological changes in production during the nineteenth century.

Machine breaking bewildered and frustrated many nineteenth-century bourgeois observers. Andrew Ure, whose 1835 "Philosophy of Manufactures" provided Marx with much of his knowledge of factory machines, declared that "cotton-spinners in particular have been so blinded by prejudice and passion" that they could not see the immense economic improvement of the nation brought about by stocking frames. Political economist David Ricardo, another influential figure in Marx's thought, initially argued that the introduction of machines was a general good, though later he was forced to admit that "the substitution of machinery for human labour, is often very injurious to the interests of the class of labourers."

But what did Marx himself say about technology? The history of Marxist thought and politics is littered with controversy over this question. The floridness of Marx's writing and the inaccessibility of his dialectical presentation have produced a host of ambiguities for Marxist theories of technology, further complicated by the way his project has been taken as doctrinal gospel rather than as setting up a wide-reaching agenda for radical inquiry. Viewed as a whole, it is difficult not to detect a distinct ambivalence in Marx's writing on technology.

There is evidence for a technophilic Marx. The old man was certainly fascinated by technology, writing about and researching it extensively, sketching new inventions as part of his study. Sometimes an enthusiasm for technology is thought to be an expression of begrudging admiration for the bourgeoisie, often joined by a larger claim that capitalism is a necessary stage on the path to socialism. After all, the "Communist Manifesto," written during the revolutionary year of 1848, declares:

In fact, Marx refers to these modern productive forces as "the weapons with which the bourgeoisie felled feudalism to the ground" — weapons that, once wielded by the proletariat, will be "turned against the bourgeoisie itself." This seems to indicate that Marx believed that the technologies developed by the bourgeoisie could be the groundwork for a future socialism, once the workers are in charge.

In later writing, Marx distinguishes between the social relations of production (the way human beings relate to one another, through class antagonism) and the technical relations of production (the way human beings relate to machines). In making this distinction, many have assumed that Marx bracketed technology off from the exploitative class system at the heart of capitalism, therefore suggesting that a socialist society would consist of a victorious working class's assumption of the mantle of an intact capitalist productive system. Marx's most technologically determinist passage from his preface to "A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy" seems to go even further. Here, he suggests that an exploitative class system will actually impede technological development, provoking revolution:

> At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production or — this merely expresses the same thing in legal terms — with the property relations within the framework of which they have operated hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution.

But while many readers of Marx have interpreted "productive forces" as the equivalent to technology, MacKenzie points out that human labor power — including its skills, abilities, techniques, and, most importantly, its conscious application — is also a force of production. If productive forces are understood correctly, as an "assemblage" of technology and people, what is fettered is not technological development itself, but a relationship between worker and machine in which the worker has conscious agency.

As Mackenzie rightly states, the "Preface" isn't Marx's most developed thinking on technology. A number of other commentators, in particular the technophilic authors associated with post-operaismo such as Antonio Negri and Carlo Vercellone, point, instead, to the so-called "Fragment on Machines" from the "Grundrisse", Marx's notebooks on which he worked in preparation for writing "Capital". In the "Fragment," Marx seems to sketch a future of fully automated production, "an automatic system of machinery," perhaps even a Fully Automated Luxury Communism driven by a "general intellect" — an assemblage of accumulated technical knowledge that could be an anticipation of the digital networks of the internet. According to Marx, the development of the productive forces reaches a level in which "it is the machine which possesses skill and strength in place of the worker, is itself the virtuoso." In this arrangement, the worker "merely transmits the machine's work, the machine's action, on to the raw material — supervises it and guards against interruptions."

During the economic restructuring of the 1980s and '90s, the "Fragment" seemed increasingly prescient of the knowledge economy of what Italian sociologist Maurizio Lazzarato called "immaterial laborers" — those who coordinate, communicate and create, rather than simply operate machines. Machines take over physical production, while human beings focus on creativity and collaboration, educating themselves to acquire new skills and capacities. For Negri and his collaborator Michael Hardt, this self-valorizing and self-organizing character of immaterial labor implies an egalitarian future: "Immaterial labor thus seems to provide the potential for a kind of spontaneous and elementary communism." Similarly, contemporary accelerationists such as Paul Mason and Aaron Bastani continue to refer to the passage as a harbinger to a future utopia.

Yet, such a focus on this portion of the "Grundrisse" neglects key developments in Marx's concepts incorporated into the published work of "Capital". Following the recommendation of Michael Heinrich, who points out that Marx had not yet refined his concepts, let's look to the section of "Capital" where Marx returns to these questions, and where he deals more fully with the imbrication of machine and worker. Here, in Chapter 15, Marx has worked out a different theory of machines. Again, machinery appears as a weapon, but one of a different type:

But Marx's most developed writing on technology comes from an unpublished chapter of "Capital" called "Results of the Immediate Production Process," which he had once intended as the conclusion of the first volume. Here Marx contrasts two ways that capital controls the production process, with implications for the technology involved. The first, "formal" subsumption, "is only formally distinct from earlier modes of production … either when the producer is self-employing or when the immediate producers are forced to deliver surplus labour for others." In formal subsumption, independent craft laborers, such as the weavers who made up the Luddite rebellions, work for capitalists, who own the means of production. However, control over the labor process is delegated to the workers, who carry on as they had when they themselves owned their tools. "Technologically speaking," he writes, "the labour process goes on as before, with the proviso that it is now subordinated to capital."

Under the second form, "real" subsumption, capital restructures the labor process itself by introducing machines and other technologies: "A complete revolution takes place in the mode of production itself, in the productivity of the workers and in the relations between workers and capitalists." Here, as Marx describes, "the *labour process itself* is no more than the instrument of the *valorization process*. " In other words, the practices and technologies of work center on the production of exchange value for profit, without any necessary connection to the usefulness of the goods, still less any "progress" in the quality of life for the worker, who is "a mere means of production." As sociologist Nicholas Thoburn puts it, technology is thus "a means of consolidating a particular form of the extraction of value. The forces of production thus had capitalist relations immanent to them." Marx lists some of the more destructive aspects of real subsumption: "production for production's sake," overproduction, and the creation of a surplus population unnecessary to existing production.

At times, Marx appears to imply that formal subsumption is a historical stage prior to real subsumption. This would mean that there is a kind of telos to technology of production of which any kind of Marxist politics must take heed. But a careful reading, both of Marx and history, reveals that there is no necessary passage in production from one to another. In the communist theory collective Endnotes' summation, "If the categories of subsumption are applicable to history at all, this can therefore only be in a 'nonlinear' fashion: they cannot apply simplistically or unidirectionally to the historical development of the class relation." Philosopher Patrick Murray argues that "Marx considers the possibility of a distinct historical stage of merely formal subsumption but finds no evidence of one"; instead, as Marx states of formal subsumption, "it is a particular form alongside the developed mode of production which is specifically capitalist." Jan Breman's ethnographic work on the interpenetration of the formal and informal sector in Gujarat, India, is one chief example. There, the formal sector of really subsumed factories and mills relies upon the informal sector for inputs like bricks and raw materials, just as the advanced technology of Silicon Valley is built with rare earth metals mined "artisanally" by children using primitive tools.

A teleological perspective that sees formal and real subsumption as subsequent "stages" of capitalist development presumes that capitalist development tends inexorably toward real subsumption, and therefore deskilling and automation, and that any kind of communism would be of the fully automated variety. It thus imposes a postwork futurism on Marx that his mature work does not support. In fact, it was Marx's political and intellectual rival, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, who treated mechanization as inevitable and ultimately desirable. Exhorting workers to be "more attentive to the teachings of destiny," he insisted that while the immediate effects of capitalist technology would be disastrous, in the end it would lead to greater productivity and abundance: "The guarantee of our liberty lies in the progress of our torture."

Marx himself makes some dismissive remarks about the "crude form" of the revolts of the Luddites. "It took both time and experience before the workers learnt to distinguish between machinery and its employment by capital, and therefore to transfer their attacks from the material instruments of production to the form of society which utilizes those instruments." But one of the cornerstones of Marx's own view of radical practice, and what made him reluctant throughout his life to make programmatic and tactical arguments about a future egalitarian society, was his conviction that communism was "not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself." Rather, communism is "the real movement which abolishes the present state of things." It is this perspective of Marx — not as a designer of a future society, nor even as a theoretician of the necessary grounds for socialism, but as a cartographer of proletarian struggle — that we should hold on to in our present moment. The struggles against machines *were* the struggles against the society that utilized them, and, moreover, these struggles had a number of important effects on the composition of the working class. In keeping an eye on our future technological society, we've taken it off the one thing that mattered above all else to Marx: what kinds of struggles people were making against capitalism, and the knowledge and experience these struggles have bequeathed to us.

I offer an example. Historian Michelle Perrot documents the manifold resistance to industrialization in France, where weaver struggles played out differently than in Britain, the site of Marx's investigations. Perrot argues that opposition to mechanization of the labor process, which included slowdowns, absenteeism, and sabotage, was a crucial component of resistance to a "producerist" vision of society and its work ethic. Workers encountered mechanization as both the extension of toil and the imposition of an entire worldview that valorized it. The legacy of this resistance has left a mark on French culture ever since. "Always ready to praise idleness, the French populace has a taste for games and wastefulness that has been deplored by employers and economists alike," she comments wryly.

According to Perrot, the weavers' opposition to mechanization was not total opposition to industrialization, as workers often adopted elements of new cotton-spinning technologies to suit their work processes. For example, English weavers complained that bosses refused to implement "racks," devices that accurately measured productivity, and therefore secured workers' piece-rate wages. What workers bitterly opposed was "industrial concentration" that demolished their way of life by undermining the autonomy they possessed in small-scale home-based manufacturing, which "paced its activities according to its needs" so that workers controlled the hours and intensity of their work.

Remarkably, the widespread popular resistance to mechanization in France succeeded, for a time. Factories went bankrupt, and home-based production predominated, though capitalists never fully conceded defeat, and they ultimately prevailed in erecting factories after a series of economic crises crippled the weavers. Other industries, such as sheep shearing, could only mechanize with assistance from the state. Perrot reminds us that the introduction of technology was, as Marx described it, a weapon in struggle: "Mechanization took place not merely because of technical or economic necessities but because of conflicts of authority." Because this entrenched resistance was rooted in a style of work that did not separate the production of goods from the reproductive activities of the household and neighborhood, it greeted all manner of reorganization of daily life, from the advent of mass housing to streetlights, with hostility. Workers went on strike (or simply stopped showing up), took frequent breaks and even got drunk on the job. The entire community of Houlme rioted when the dinner hour was reduced to thirty minutes. Police were required to force textile workers to move to new "modern" accommodations closer to factories. Protests often incorporated community rituals, such as charivari, where effigies of offending authorities were paraded through towns and burned. Struggle against capitalism was thus not only a fight in the workplace but overflowed into a politicization of technology in everyday life. For instance, "in 1848, the Paris insurgents destroyed lampposts, symbols of the eye of the police."

We can find echoes of the French craft workers' opposition to machines as instruments of toil, rather than the liberation of work, in the writings of William Morris, the English designer and socialist. Morris believed, as the poet Clive Wilmer puts it, that "under capitalism, machines were primarily used to increase production, thereby increasing the worker's drudgery." Rather than churn out endless quantities of cheap goods, society should focus on goods' quality, which would not only reduce workloads but make work itself more pleasant. While he favored the use of machinery to reduce working hours, Morris's ideal of socialism was similarly qualitative, consisting of what he called "worthy work," which "carries with it the hope of pleasure in rest, the hope of the pleasure in our using what it makes, and the hope of pleasure in our daily creative skill."

Morris thus differed from the many socialists of his day who advocated for increased leisure and rest in the form of reduced working hours. In his view, this was insufficient. It was not that Morris subscribed to a Protestant work ethic that valued work for its own sake. Rather, Morris's position was rooted in an understanding of Marx's dictum that the realm of freedom begins where the realm of necessity ends, and that necessity "will not be finally conquered till our work becomes a part of the pleasure of our lives" — that is, until we find our work rewarding. A fundamental element of this "attractive work" was its reliance on the development of skill in the worker, which would allow the laborer "to take a pleasurable interest in all the details of life." But such attractive work would require a dramatic rethinking of machines.

For Morris, the industrial system did not produce abundance, but existed merely for profit, and he recognized that a really subsumed productive process was irrevocably attached to "the necessity for grinding profits out of men's lives and of producing cheap goods for the use (and subjection) of the slaves who grind." Capitalism required this kind of production, but socialism did not; moreover, the factory system was not to be assumed as a given in the new society, but needed to be questioned along with every other element of the organization of work. Bereft of the needs of profits and competition, many machines would be seen for the destroyers of life and pleasurable work that previous struggles, such as those of the Luddites, recognized:

> They are called "labour-saving" machines — a commonly used phrase which implies what we expect of them; but we do not get what we expect. What they really do is to reduce the skilled labourer to the rank of the unskilled, to increase the number of the "reserve army of labour" — that is, to increase the precariousness of life among the workers and to intensify the labour of those who serve the machines (as slaves their masters).

Morris's definition of socialism as a qualitative restructuring of work and society — a top-to-bottom reconceptualization of social relations, rather than simply a more equitable redistribution of existing work and goods — placed him in diametrical opposition to another utopian of his time, Edward Bellamy. Bellamy, whose proto–science fiction novel "Looking Backward" anticipates much of the postwork and luxury communism writing of today, envisioned a world of abundance and orderliness derived from the removal of the profit motive and reapportionment of the goods of existing society, which he believed would keep the productive base intact. In his review of the book, Morris recognized Bellamy's simplistic, undialectical belief that socialism could simply take what it pleased of modernity, totally intact, while getting rid of the bad parts. It represented a "half-change" that revealed Bellamy's perspective as rooted in "that of the industrious *professional* middle-class men of to-day purified from their crime of complicity with the monopolist class."

Bellamy's utopia struck Morris the same way that bourgeois socialism struck Marx. In the "Manifesto," Marx described the "more or less complete systems" worked out by middle-class reformist socialism as a fallacious half-change that neglected the necessity of struggle: "The Socialistic bourgeois want all the advantages of modern social conditions without the struggles and dangers necessarily resulting therefrom. They desire the existing state of society, minus its revolutionary and dis-integrating elements. They wish for a bourgeoisie without a proletariat."

In its worst versions, this bourgeois socialism insists that proletarians cease political struggle in favor of putting faith in economic growth and development: that "no mere political reform, but only a change in the material conditions of existence, in economical relations, could be of any advantage to them." Giving up on militant struggle to instead push for political reforms would mean that this socialism would "in no respect affect the relations between capital and labour, but, at the best, lessen the cost, and simplify the administrative work, of bourgeois government." Or, as Morris said of Bellamy, "He conceives of the change to Socialism as taking place without any breakdown of [modern] life, or indeed disturbance of it."

Anyone who takes up the name of Marx to describe their politics must take into account that Marxism is a theory of struggle. The goal of Marx's critique of capitalism was not to provide a set of instructions for managing the economy, but to identify the contradictions and fissures, the places where social struggle would be likely to emerge. Technology is an important site of these struggles: not only is militant opposition to technology a historical fact, but it can suggest a more liberatory politics of work and technology — one that is more easily supported by Marx's work than are contemporary post-work utopias.

Instead of imagining a world without work that will never come to pass, we should examine the ways historical struggles posited an alternative relationship to work and liberation, where control over the labor process leads to greater control over other social processes, and where the ends of work are human enrichment rather than abstract productivity. Furthermore, these struggles point toward the only vehicle for a liberation from capitalism: the composition of a militant struggling class that attacks capital in all its manifold dominations, including the technological.

In the next chapter, I turn toward technology's treatment on the part of the twentieth-century organized workers' movement, including unions and labor parties. Their views largely agreed with the postwork utopians: technology was politically neutral, and could even be beneficial. Therefore, we must consult more heretical strains of Marxism among them — those who continued to question capitalist technology and valorize the anti-machine struggles of workers — if we are to provide an adequate postmortem of this disastrous strategic decision.

l — The Nights of King Ludd

Marx and the Luddites

Marxism-Morrisism