#gavin mueller

[reitoeii]

[emptyanddark]

"Instead of imagining a world without work that will never come to pass, we should examine the ways historical struggles posited an alternative relationship to work and liberation, where control over the labor process leads to greater control over other social processes, and where the ends of work are human enrichment rather than abstract productivity. furthermore, these struggles point toward the only vehicle for a liberation from capitalism: the composition of a militant struggling class that attacks capital in all its manifold domination, including the technological".

Breaking Things at Work: The Luddites Are Right About Why You Hate Your Job by Gavin Mueller

[notsoterriblymisanthropic]

Rather than assuming that emerging technologies open up new horizons for a kind of post-capitalist utopia, instead of being the kind of infrastructure that progressive people want to adopt as our own, that we need to understand technology as produced for capitalist goals, and so we actually have to think critically about technology and politicize it. And to go one step further, this questioning is already something that people are doing in their workplaces. People are already at work, in the home, and in everyday life, enacting all sorts of practical criticisms against technology. Whether it’s ridiculing the latest iPhone online, posting photos of destroyed smart scooters on Instagram, or hacking and sabotaging the equipment that’s causing them trouble at work, we can see critical and even antagonistic perspectives on technology coming from everyday people. My perspective on left politics is that you have to pay attention to what people are already doing, instead of just telling them that what they should be doing. Oftentimes, people have already settled some questions for themselves, and it’s the intellectuals who have a bit of catching up to do.

Breaking Things at Work, an interview with Gavin Mueller

[roseproductivity]

The Conscious Withdrawal of Efficiency

Gavin Mueller’s Breaking Things at Work talks about the power of the worker residing in their special knowledge of how to be productive. They can then flex that by choosing to be productive or not. A rejection of productivity is thus a form of strike. Wobbly Elizabeth Gurley Flynn wrote a pamphlet on worker’s sabotage (available online!) and in it defines sabotage as “the conscious withdrawal of the workers’ industrial efficiency” and also as “an unfair day's work for an unfair day's wage.“ Productivity in this light is not a goal but instead a tool, wielded by the worker to achieve her goals. Productivity for productivity’s sake is a relinquishment of the power the worker has to choose productivity, so that mindset is always of benefit to the capitalist class.

[judgingbooksbycovers]

Breaking Things at Work: The Luddites Are Right About Why You Hate Your Job

By Gavin Mueller.

[roseproductivity]

the diminishing returns of productivity culture

Xerox Ad, c. 1980 This is the midweek edition of Culture Study — the newsletter from Anne Helen Petersen, which you can read about here. If you like it and want more like it in your inbox, consider subscribing. In 2006, Karen Ho was an anthropology student at Princeton. She wanted to study the culture of Wall Street, and she understood that the easiest way to gain real access was to work there herself. She had virtually no qualifying experience, but because she was a student at Princeton — one of the handful of schools that Wall Street firms deem acceptable in their search for the ‘best of the best’ — she was able to finagle a low level position. With time, she built enough connections and trust that dozens of bankers agreed to sit with her for an interview. The resultant book,

Anne Helen Petersen addresses emotional reliance on productivity and worker rebellion against automation. Interesting timing since I am currently reading Breaking Things at Work: The Luddites Are Right about Why You Hate Your Job by Gavin Mueller which covers this exact topic.

[michaelsmosey]

Online interactivity has been limited to a few large sites oriented toward advertising and shopping. Scrolling through your feed — the word itself conjures a pig’s trough — feels more like flipping through channels than surfing the web of yore.

Gavin Mueller; No Alternative

[driftglazz]

“In the face of rampant suburbanization and slash-and-burn urban renewal, [Jane] Jacobs emphasized the attractions of urban life in all its diversity, revealing the support networks that lent resiliency and quality of life to neighborhoods otherwise deemed undesirable. She was also a fierce critic of the monumental architecture of public housing, in favor of the historic charms of low-density buildings. Jacobs’s once-revolutionary ideas are now liberal urbanist common sense: pedestrian traffic, mixed-use development, a heterogeneous mix of architectural styles, businesses, and people...

However, as urban sociologist Sharon Zukin has pointed out again and again, Jacobs’s aesthetic insights can’t make up for her avoiding of class realities. Lambasting “planners” while ignoring the far more powerful real estate developers...

As Zukin remarks, “What Jacobs valued — small blocks, cobblestone streets, mixed-uses, local character — have become the gentrifiers’ ideal. This is not the struggling city of working class and ethnic groups, but an idealised image that plays to middle-class tastes.” In the absence of true diversity in income and ownership, a simulacrum can be easily substituted. In my “up-and-coming” neighborhood in Washington, the superficially eclectic mix of bars and restaurants are owned by the same developer.

Zukin points out that Jacobs’ fondness for buildings ran roughshod over the actual people who made up the neighborhood. A line from the excellent gentrification documentary, Flag Wars, set in my hometown of Columbus, Ohio, makes the point clearly: “I just feel bad for the houses,” intones a somber yuppie, as he gazes upon the dilapidated buildings in which his neighbors reside. Moved by this sympathy, he and his cohort of gentrifiers pressure their poorer neighbors by anonymously reporting housing code violations.”

and

“The median price of a home in 2000 was around $150,000. In 2009, it was over $400,000. Home values went up over 10 percent in the last year. If you’ve got a $400,000 house, you just made more than the median income of a black family, just for belonging to the propertied class.

Tying up your assets, your middle-class future, in home values does something to people. It alters their interests. It sutures a professional class, of liberal and even progressive beliefs, to the rapacious capitalist expansion into the city. The people who move to gentrifying areas tend to have liberal, tolerant, cosmopolitan sympathies. But they are aligned materially with reactionary and oppressive city restructuring, pushing them into antagonism with established residents, who do nothing for property values. Behind every Jane Jacobs comes Rudy Giuliani with his nightstick.”

The extent to which Jacobs frames planning in any American city cannot be overstated. And this bleeds into new urbanism movements in zoning, city policy and finance, and the environmental movement via sustainability ideas. This article points out pretty clearly the role that police play in protecting property and financial investments, and the way that individual-level decisions (which can be quite "rational") can easily and quickly put white/liberals' values into conflict with their interests, if that makes sense. And that happens b/c of the capitalist system we live within.