They've been remembered as machine-smashers who tried to stop the future with a hammer — but historian Eric Hobsbawm called what they were doing "collective bargaining by riot."
In this episode, Prof. Gavin Mueller (University of Amsterdam), author of Breaking Things at Work, walks through who the Luddites actually were: skilled textile workers in England's Midlands, organized under the mythical banner of King Ludd, fighting to preserve their wages, their working conditions, and the quality of their craft against machines introduced without negotiation. Mueller and Hobsbawm both make the case that this was a rational response to an existential threat, not an irrational rejection of progress.

ABOUT OUR GUEST
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).
KEY TOPICS COVERED
- Who the Luddites were, and the guild economy of England's Midlands textile industry
- The stocking frames and gig mills that triggered the resistance
- Wages, child labor, and declining product quality as core grievances
- The King Ludd mythology and how it enabled decentralized, leaderless organizing
- The Combination Acts, and why forming anything resembling a union was illegal
- Guilds vs. unions: the structural difference between the two forms of worker power
- Historian Eric Hobsbawm's rehabilitation of the Luddites as "collective bargaining by riot"

CHAPTERS
- Introduction — 0:13
- Guest Introduction: Gavin Mueller — 1:13
- About the Book: Breaking Things at Work — 1:50
- Why the Luddites? — 8:44
- The Luddite Movement — 11:36
- Guilds vs. Unions — 21:36
- Hobsbawm & Rehabilitating the Luddites — 25:49
- Outro & What's Next — 32:27

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ABOUT NOTIONS OF PROGRESS
Notions of Progress is a podcast tracing how the idea of progress has been understood, contested, and reimagined from antiquity to the age of artificial intelligence. Marshall Madow, an independent researcher and the show's host and scholar-curator, holds an MA in History from Cambridge University, where his thesis examined Georges Sorel's epistemology of myth, and an MSc from Oxford University's Saïd Business School in Complexity Science and Leadership. Rather than prescribing a position, the podcast surfaces scholarly debate — examining how thinkers from Hesiod to Hayek, from Plato to contemporary philosophers of technology, have understood what it means for humanity to move forward, at what cost, for whom, and by whose definition.

TRANSCRIPT
Full transcript available at notionsofprogress.com

#Luddites #LaborHistory #GavinMueller