In Episode 17, Gavin Mueller traced the Luddites back to the guild economy of England's Midlands — skilled workers organizing to defend their wages, their working conditions, and their craft. In Part 2 of this conversation, Mueller follows that struggle forward into the century that reshaped it: Karl Marx's own conflicted relationship with machinery, the split inside the socialist movement over what to do about it, Taylorism as a system of workplace control invented before it ever needed a machine, the apocalyptic automation panic of the Technocracy Movement, and Norbert Wiener's cybernetics — the discipline that first tried to warn organized labor what was coming.

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 three-part conversation, and Media Piracy in the Cultural Economy (Routledge, 2019).

KEY TOPICS COVERED
– Marx's own ambivalence toward machinery — from real curiosity about new technology to the dark, almost gothic language of Capital describing workers “crushed” and made “appendages” of the machine
– Why Mueller argues the common read of Marx as a straightforward “technological determinist” oversimplifies his actual position
– The split between an “orthodox” Marxism — the SPD, later the Bolsheviks, a science of historical inevitability — and a “heterodox” tradition Mueller traces through figures like William Morris
– The Fabian Society as a competing, non-Marxist strand of socialism built on persuasion rather than class antagonism
– Taylorism as, first and foremost, a theory of shop-floor power — developed before it was ever attached to a specific machine or technology
– Frederick Winslow Taylor's own unusual biography, his congressional testimony, and how his ideas outlived his career
– The Technocracy Movement's vision of automation as an unstoppable, apocalyptic inevitability
– Norbert Wiener's cybernetics, and his overlooked attempt to warn UAW president Walter Reuther that automation threatened the labor movement
– How Wiener's warning intersected with civil rights-era debates about automation and the future of Black employment
– Mueller's read on why his book resonates with technology workers today

CHAPTERS

00:00 Welcome Back: Picking Up the Conversation
01:31 Mueller's Project: Connecting Luddites and Marxism
05:38 Marx's Own Ambivalence Toward Machinery
10:41 Bridging Back to the Luddites
16:35 Orthodox and Heterodox Marxism
23:57 Taylorism as a Theory of Control
31:43 The Technocracy Movement
36:30 Cybernetics and Norbert Wiener
41:25 Contemporary Echoes: From the '60s to Now

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ABOUT NOTIONS OF PROGRESS
Notions of Progress is a podcast tracing ideas of progress from antiquity to the age of artificial intelligence. Hosted by Marshall Madow — an independent researcher whose MA in History (Cambridge) examined Georges Sorel's epistemology of myth, and whose MSc (Oxford, Saïd Business School) focused on Complexity Science and Leadership — the show surfaces the debates rather than settling them, tracing how thinkers from Hesiod to Hayek, Plato to Peter Haff, have understood what it means for humanity to move forward, at what cost, and for whom.
TRANSCRIPT
Full transcript available at notionsofprogress.com

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