______________ _JPD} It's Time to Break Work Before It Breaks the Planet ·· ;~VlUEL!:ER ~ :.- 1 1: ._'..,J1JiitS \'.'r~E RIGHT . . AEOUT ·_v,· ,y YOU HATE YOUR JOB I Br eaking Things at Work: The Luddites W ere Right About Why You Hate You r Job by Gavin Mueller (Verso, 2021) BY ROBERT OVETZ W ork is once again becomi ng a ce n- tral issue of our day. Althou gh work controls most of our waki ng hours and underscores every major crisis to- day-from the pandemic, climate cat~ ,s- trophe, and police terror to sexual ha- rassment, wealth concentration, precarious jobs, and mental health-al- most no one talks about its central role in these crises. Work not only dominates our lives but is central to the system of capitalism, which is the root of these crises. Our failure to make any progress on any of these issues is what makes Gavin Mueller's new book Breaking Things at Work indispensable. Because work under capitalism has broken so many aspects of life, it only makes sense that it's time to break work. In his short, accessible book on the history and pres- ent of the resistance to and refusal of work, Mueller has convincingly argued that to move past capitalism we need a strategy to resist, refuse, and break work's domination of life. The first half of Mueller's book pro- vides a lesson in the history of several anti-work movements not found in mainstream labor history. He scans a wide terrain beginning with the early- 19 th -century Luddites of England, who smashed weaving machines as a pro- test against the technological speed- up; the early-20th-century Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), who artic- ulated the French concept of sabotage as a repertoire of resistance to work; "autonomist" Marxists in France, Italy, and the United States who advocated for the self-organization of workers; and the modern articulation of sabotage by editorial staffers at the anti-capitalist magazine Processed World published in San Francisco during the 1980s-1990s. Most importantly, Mueller concisely demonstrates how unions, leftist parties, second-wave feminism, and socialist post-work "full automators" mistakenly embraced the rising productivity result- ing from Taylorism (a management strat- e gy used to control work and increase ;:,1 cduc tivity throu gh the use of assem- b!·; li nes or algori thms) and the idea of rcbo tstaking our jobs so we can kick ha ck and relax in a post-work world of consu mer abundance. Mueller is right on target when he shows how unions' decis i on to embrace automation in ex- change for tying wages to productivity increases laid the groundwork for short- term gains and the long-term defeat of the labor movement in the past half cen- tury. Abrogating control over work for higher wages placed a critical terrain of class struggle entirely under the prerog- atives of capital, leading to the outcomes we know so well today: the dual paradox of too little work for the many and too much work for others. Mueller also traces the lineage from Lenin's state capitalism of the 1920s to the romantic notions of the full automa- tors who believe that the path beyond capitalism is to seize the tools of increas- ingly automated capitalist production and continue cranking out ever-more consumer goods. He rightly picks a fight with the full automators' new-found discovery, recycled from the ideas of Andre Gorz and Herbert Ma reuse, of the dream of carrying on capitalist abun- dance in a post-capitalist world. What they miss, Mueller observes, is that ro- bots are not going to relieve us of our jobs as much as they are going to change them. While some jobs will be- come obsolete, new jobs will be creat- ed. The new technology will transform the rest of our work, including unwaged reproductive labor. Mueller also reminds us that the opposite can happen. Al (ar- tificial intelligence) can fail or be defeat- ed by the workers, as in the hilarious story of Flippy, the much-touted hamburger-making robot that debuted in 2018 and was removed from the job after one day. Mueller insists that the era of big data-driven Al is already here and ubiquitous throughout work and life. Philosopher Michel Foucault's panopti- con (mass surveillance from a central location) has spread so rapidly from gig work and Amazon that it can now be found in all areas of work. No areas of work, from doctors, professors, and law- yers to unwaged "digital piecework;' such as self-checkout lines, predictive analytics in policing, and the gamifica- tion (turning work into an online game to increase competition) of various as- pects of life such as dating apps, have escaped the impact of algorithms. The panopticon is not merely a privacy- invading device but what economist Harry Braverman called "a weapon of control" which Mueller explains, "pro- duced a real-time record of the labor process in the form of data." Mueller sets aside the aspirations of the full automators to instead draw on autonomist Marxist class composition theory, which offers an understanding of the organization and control of work and the need for worker self- organization to overcome it. Mueller uses the theory to argue that data- driven Al is merely the latest strategy of capital, "a weapon of class war• used to "decompose" previous cycles of class struggle to reorganize work by sub- NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2021 I DOLLARS & SENSE I 29