Not all of our tech billionaires want to travel the space-ways, but they all share something in common (that is, aside from a propensity to dine with the late sex-trafficking financier Jeffrey Epstein). They believe that technology lays a path to a brighter future, that the progress of humanity is one and the same as the progress of machines and gizmos. — 6: 74-76
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.” — 20: 277-281
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. — 36: 504-508
Legendary IWW activist Elizabeth Gurley Flynn attempted a more precise definition in her tract: “sabotage” referred to any effort “to limit his production in proportion to his remuneration,” or in other words, “the deliberate withdrawal of efficiency by a competent worker.” Rather than argue, as Smith did, for the salutary effects of sabotage for class consciousness, Flynn argued that workers already engaged in sabotage all the time, but without having a consistent name for what they were doing. Flynn quotes a worker at the Paterson silk mill in New Jersey, where organizers debated the efficacy of sabotage during the 1913 strike: I never heard of this thing called sabotage before Mr. Boyd spoke about it on the platform. I know once in a while when I want a half-day off and they won’t give it to me I slip the belt off the machine so it won’t run and I get my half day. I don’t know whether you call that sabotage, but that’s what I do.29 As Flynn noted, “one member of the executive committee after another admitted they had used this thing but they ‘didn’t know that was what you called it!’” Flynn’s analysis of sabotage was, in this sense, eminently Marxist: rather than dictate strategy in a top-down manner, she conceptualized the actually existing tactics of workers as a fundamental component of class struggle. “We are to see what the workers are doing,” she wrote, “and then try to understand why they do it; not tell them it’s right or it’s wrong, but analyze the condition.” — 50: 710-722
There is nothing which has corrupted the German working-class so much as the opinion that they were swimming with the tide. Technical developments counted to them as the course of the stream, which they thought they were swimming in. From this, it was only a step to the illusion that the factory-labor set forth by the path of technological progress represented a political achievement.66 As Michael Löwy describes it in his study of the text, Benjamin attacks “the essential article of faith” of the Second International’s strategy: that victory for socialism amounted to a rapidly expanding balance sheet, — 62: 889-895
Rather than a natural outgrowth of history’s progression, for Benjamin, a revolutionary class has to “explode the continuum of history.” Indeed, this history is not a tale of progress, or even a succession of events, but “one single catastrophe, which unceasingly piles rubble on top of rubble and hurls it before his feet.”73 Elsewhere, Benjamin is even more explicit on this point: “Marx says that revolutions are the locomotive of world history. But perhaps it is quite otherwise. Perhaps revolutions are an attempt by the passengers on this train—namely, the human race—to activate the emergency brake.”74 Here an openly decelerationist Benjamin emerges. Technology does not lead toward a revolutionary break, nor does a revolution necessarily spur on new technological developments. Rather, Benjamin reconceives revolution as a cessation of catastrophe. It halts “progress” in its tracks. — 63: 910-918
Here Benjamin sounds similar notes as the Wobbly proponents of sabotage. Redemption from capitalism and its violence will not come from a simple appropriation of its devices. Instead, he suggests, it is borne on the backs of those sedimented experiences of the nameless people who fought against them, who broke, jammed, sabotaged—who grabbed for the emergency brake—in their circumstances. This is the raw material of future emancipation. 3 Against Automation What is automation? — 64: 929-935
Beyond the specter of nuclear annihilation, Wiener was concerned with domestic uses of cybernetics: industrial automation. Wiener thought this would be a catastrophe for workers, writing that automation “gives the human race a new and most effective collection of mechanical slaves to perform its labor … any labor that accepts the conditions of competition with slave labor, accepts the conditions of slave labor, and is essentially slave labor.” — 73: 1063-1067
After all, as Denby himself put it, “there is an expression used by miners which is as old as mechanization in the mines. It is simply this: ‘A man has no business on a machine who can’t break it down any time he wants to.’” — 81: 1181-1183
However, with the introduction of machines, and especially computer interfaces, to replace worker skill, jobs became a set of abstract instructions that workers had to cognitively interpret and understand, rather than a set of embodied tasks. — 109: 1596-1598
While acknowledging positive aspects of computers, she argued that “the immediate results of widespread implementation of much of modern technology are disadvantageous to workers and others directly affected. I think it is important not to lose sight of the current reality of conditions created by these tools.”33 The role of Processed World was not to sketch utopias or possible futures. It was to document, and thereby coalesce, the actually existing struggles in the IT sector. — 114: 1670-1674
Rather than revolutionize government bureaucracies, she observes, “automated decision-making in our current welfare system acts a lot like older, atavistic forms of punishment and containment. It filters and diverts. It is a gatekeeper, not a facilitator.”53 Even well-meaning government employees succumb to a system that fragments and rationalizes their labor process. Where social workers once tracked individual cases, familiarizing themselves with their charges and gaining valuable context for judging courses of action, automated systems fragment cases into tasks to be handled, bereft of history or context. The result is, as one caseworker puts it, dehumanizing: “If I wanted to work in a factory, I would have worked in a factory.” — 124: 1822-1827
As I have documented in the preceding chapters, workers’ movements of the past two centuries often had a Luddish bent: they understood new machines as weapons wielded against them in their struggles for a better life, and treated them as such. Intellectuals on both sides of the class struggle often characterized this perspective as shortsightedness, or downright irrationality. In spite of their political commitments to the working class, Marxist theoreticians often saw the capitalist development of technology as the means for creating both abundance and leisure, which would be realized once the masses finally took the reins of government and industry. These arguments continue to be made today: to take two examples, Leigh Phillips and Michal Rozworski’s People’s Republic of Walmart sees the discount retailer as the anticipation of socialist logistics, and Aaron Bastani’s Fully Automated Luxury Communism devotes itself to speculative technologies like driverless cars and asteroid mining, with a “communist” coda at the end.1 Both works self-consciously pitch themselves as restoring faith in a progressive, but politically neutral, technological telos, against a left politics that is small scale and “primitivist.” It is my contention, supported by the history of thought and action in the preceding pages, that the radical left can and should put forth a decelerationist politics: a politics of slowing down change, undermining technological progress, and limiting capital’s rapacity, while developing organization and cultivating militancy. Letting Walmart or Amazon swallow the globe not only entrenches exploitative models of production and distribution; it channels resources to reactionary billionaires who use their wealth to further undermine the relative position of workers by funding conservative causes like tax cuts, school privatization, and opposition to gay marriage.2 Letting technology take its course will lead not to egalitarian outcomes, but authoritarian ones, as the ultra-wealthy expend their resources on shielding themselves from any accountability to the rest of us: postapocalyptic bunkers, militarized yachts, private islands, and even escapes to outer space.3 Decelerationist politics is not the same as the “slow lifestyle” politics popular among segments of the better-off: “ways of being,” as Carl Honoré puts it in the movement’s manifesto, In Praise of Slowness, that emphasize “calm, careful, receptive, still, intuitive, unhurried, patient, reflective, quality-over-quantity.”4 As pleasing as slow aesthetics might be, I am not content to ground my argument in claims that a particular pace of life is “a more natural, human” one,5 nor do I seek, as Honoré does, to give the capitalist system “a human face.”6 The argument for deceleration is not based on satisfying nature, human or otherwise, but in recognizing the challenges facing strategies for organizing the working class. The constant churn of recomposition and reorganization, what media scholar Nick Dyer-Witheford calls “the digital vortex” of contemporary capitalism, scarcely gives workers time to get back on their feet, let alone fight.7 Decelerationism is not a withdrawal to a slower pace of life, but the manifestation of an antagonism toward the progress of elites at the expense of the rest of us. It is Walter Benjamin’s emergency brake. It is a wrench in the gears. This is to say, my argument is not based on lifestyle, or even ethics; it is based on politics. — 138: 2029-2058
Luddism, inspired as it is by workers’ struggles at the point of production, emphasizes autonomy: the freedom of conduct, ability to set standards, and the continuity and improvement of working conditions. — 141: 2064-2065
My argument for Luddism rests on the fact that Luddism is popular, and the principle that radical intellectuals are better off listening to what people are saying than attempting to lead their thoughts. Currently the people are practically unanimous: they want to decelerate. A Pew Research Center poll found that 85 percent of Americans favored the restriction of automation to only the most dangerous forms of work.8 Majorities oppose algorithmic automation of judgement in parole cases, job applications, and financial assessment, even when they acknowledge that such technologies might be effective.9 In spite of pop accelerationist efforts to reenchant us with technological progress, we do not live in techno-optimistic times. — 141: 2071-2077