Aa Breaking Things at Work: Gavin Mueller on the Luddites and Labor Resistance
They've been remembered as machine-smashers who tried to stop the future with a hammer. Historian Eric Hobsbawm called what they were actually doing something else: "collective bargaining by riot." In this episode, Prof. Gavin Mueller of the University of Amsterdam walks through who the Luddites really were — skilled textile workers in England's Midlands, organized under the mythical banner of King Ludd, resisting machines introduced into their trade without negotiation. The stakes outlive the nineteenth century. Mueller's account raises a question that keeps returning: what separates a rational defense of livelihood and craft from a reflexive refusal of the future? Asked directly whether the Luddites lost, Mueller offers no easy verdict — maybe, he says, it is too early to tell.
Overview
Episode 17 opens a three-part conversation with Prof. Gavin Mueller — the first guest interview of the Hellenistic arc — built around his book, Breaking Things at Work. This installment covers the Luddites themselves: guild-trained textile workers in England's Midlands whose wages, working conditions, and product quality came under threat from newly introduced machines like the gig mill and stocking frame. Mueller traces their turn from petition to sabotage, the mythical King Ludd structure that let the movement organize without a leader who could be arrested, and Eric Hobsbawm's later argument that the response was rational rather than reflexive.
Key Moments from the Conversation
1. “Collective Bargaining by Riot”
Mueller draws directly on Eric Hobsbawm's 1952 essay "The Machine Breakers," which reframed Luddite machine-smashing as a form of negotiation rather than blind destruction. With legal organizing closed off by the Combination Acts, Mueller explains, sabotage became the only leverage available — an escalation, not an eruption. Hobsbawm's own formation as an orthodox Marxist historian, Mueller notes, initially cut against this reading, since that tradition treated mechanization as an unstoppable productive force. Setting that assumption aside to work as a historian let Hobsbawm see the Luddites' actions as calculated rather than irrational.
2. King Ludd and the Leaderless Movement
Mueller describes how the Luddites organized under the banner of a fictional figure — King Ludd, or Ned Ludd — issuing letters and proclamations in his name rather than any real leader's. The structure served a practical purpose: the 1799–1800 Combination Acts made it a hanging offense to swear any oath of collective solidarity, so a movement built around a myth, rather than an identifiable chain of command, could act without producing a leader who could be arrested and used to dismantle the whole effort.
3. A Dispute About Craft, Not Just Wages
Mueller identifies quality, not only pay, as a central grievance: the new machines produced weaker, shoddier goods, undercutting a trade the guild-trained weavers took real pride in. That distinction matters for how the episode situates the Luddites inside the history of progress rather than outside it — their resistance was a dispute over who progress served and by what standard, not a rejection of mechanization as such.
Guest Spotlight
Gavin Mueller is an Assistant Professor of New Media and Digital Culture at the University of Amsterdam, where he also teaches Marxist Theory for the Critical Studies MA at the Sandberg Instituut. He holds a Ph.D. in Cultural Studies from George Mason University. He is a Contributing Editor at Jacobin and a member of the editorial collective of Viewpoint Magazine. He is the author of Breaking Things at Work: The Luddites Are Right About Why You Hate Your Job (Verso, 2021), the book at the center of this episode, and Media Piracy in the Cultural Economy (Routledge, 2019).
For Further Reading
Primary Sources
Gavin Mueller, Breaking Things at Work: The Luddites Are Right About Why You Hate Your Job (Verso, 2021) — the book at the center of this episode.
Further Context
E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York: Vintage, 1966).
Eric J. Hobsbawm, "The Machine Breakers," Past and Present 1 (February 1952).
Kevin Binfield, Writings of the Luddites (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015).
Peter Linebaugh, Ned Ludd and Queen Mab: Machine-Breaking, Romanticism, and the Several Commons of 1811–12 (Oakland: PM Press, 2012).
Questions to Consider Based on This Episode
If a resistance movement fails to stop the technology it opposes, does that outcome settle whether the resistance itself was rational?
What is lost when a movement is remembered primarily through its most dramatic tactic — machine-breaking — rather than through the grievances that provoked it?
Where is the line between defending an existing way of work and refusing progress altogether — and who gets to draw it?
Connection to Notions of Progress
Notions of Progress exists to surface the debates embedded in the word "progress" rather than settle them. The Luddites present one of the idea's oldest tests: when a new technology arrives, whose account of advancement wins, and at whose expense? Mueller's reading — built on Hobsbawm, Thompson, Binfield, and Linebaugh — situates the Luddites as participants in that argument, not opponents of it. The next two installments carry the same question forward, from Marx's own ambivalence about machinery through today's debates over surveillance capitalism and artificial intelligence.
Listen & Subscribe
Website — notionsofprogress.com
Email: marshall@notionsofprogress.com
Theorizing the Machine: Professor Gavin Mueller on Marxism, Taylorism, and Cybernetics pt 2
