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Gavin Mueller, "Breaking Things at Work: The Luddites Are Right About Why You Hate Your Job" (Verso, 2021)
Gavin Mueller, "Breaking Things at Work: The Luddites Are Right About Why You Hate Your Job" (Verso, 2021)
ratings:
Length:
76 minutes
Released:
Apr 20, 2022
Format:
Podcast episode
Description
In Breaking Things at Work: The Luddites are Right About Why You Hate Your Job (Verso, 2021), Gavin Mueller provides a bracing and wide-ranging study of the fractious relationship between workers and technology under capitalism. Mueller traces the thought and actions of ordinary people past and present – including hackers, dockers, musicians and the titular textile workers - who have recognised that technological ‘progress’ too often comes at the expense of their autonomy and dignity. The book pushes back against visions of machine-driven utopia that have continually re-emerged on both the right and the left, arguing instead that resistance to technology is a key site of struggle throughout modernity, and that a Marxist neo-Luddism is crucial to understanding, and changing, the world today.
Gummo Clare is a PhD researcher in the School of Media and Communications, University of Leeds.
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Gummo Clare is a PhD researcher in the School of Media and Communications, University of Leeds.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Released:
Apr 20, 2022
Format:
Podcast episode
Titles in the series (100)
Martha C. Howell, “Commerce Before Capitalism in Europe, 1300-1600” (Cambridge UP, 2010): When I was an undergraduate, I was taught that merchants in early modern Western Europe were “proto-capitalists.” I was never quite sure what that meant. If it meant they traded property for money, yes. But that would make everyone who traded things fo... by New Books in Economic and Business History