The Luddites

[Forward Union]

What do people here think of the Luddites?

For those of you who don't know who they were, during the industrial revolution in England, as a response to the terrible conditions workers faced when moving to the cities (terrible/cramped housing, little or no sanitation, and sometimes 20hour workshifts in dangerous sometimes fatal conditions) workers would smash machines and burn down factories, sometimes even kill the bosses.

The thing is that, the leading voices in the Luddite movement were essentially primitivists. They thought that this mass migration of humans into polluted chicken coups was inherently bad and that all mechanised industry must be destroyed. (Some of them supported this because they had been skilled weavers, but now with the introduction of machines, their skills were useless) They wanted for a return to the agricultural societies they moved from.

The underlying politics were bullshit. But I have sympathy for the grassroots of the Luddite movement. I mean, look at it in context, this was 100 years before Marxism, Industry had only just begun and workers had seen no benefits from it, there were no unions or workers organisations for the people to struggle within. Workers hated their situation so much their reaction was to destroy the objects of tyranny, and although this is detrimental to the progression of humanity in the long-term, I think it goes a long way in showing the organic nature of class struggle.

The fact that they then banded together to form unions and other organisations shows a benchmark in development of strategy...

[Dros]

While their opposition to bourgoisie explotation in certain forms was commendable, they were ultimately reactionary. They wanted no industry. They were not egalitarian or socialist in any way. If anything, they supported the previous system of explotation to the new one.

[KC]

It was the first real step in the class struggle. But until they realized that it wasn't the means of production that caused such exploitation, but those that owned it (i.e. once they saw the struggle as a class struggle), is when they started becoming effective. I wouldn't say they were necessarily reactionary, as much as they didn't know how to act as they never experienced the new struggle in any form.

[Invader Zim]

For those of you who don't know who they were, during the industrial revolution in England, as a response to the terrible conditions workers faced when moving to the cities (terrible/cramped housing, little or no sanitation, and sometimes 20hour workshifts in dangerous sometimes fatal conditions) workers would smash machines and burn down factories, sometimes even kill the bosses.

I was under the impression that the Luddites tended to be artisans who attacked textile factories because these factories rendered their skills obsolite.

[Angry Young Man]

They nickname maintenace men at power stations the Luddites.

[black magick hustla]

Also, people have to understand that luddism made common sense because industrial relations were brutal.

The first years of industralization where marked with a higher death rate and terrible urban conditions. Indeed, it seemed at first that the world was going backward, rather than progressing.

[RedStarOverChina]

Invader Zim was right.

Luddites were not exactly progressive and they bitterly opposed technology.

[Organic Revolution]

Originally posted by [email protected] 18, 2007 02:14 pm
Invader Zim was right.

Luddites were not exactly progressive and they bitterly opposed technology.
Well, you do have to look at their time period to understand why. When the Luddites popped up, all they saw was death and destruction in factories and cities, and peace on the farm. I dont agree with there "smash industrial society" line, but I do think that they were a very important movement.

[Forward Union]

Originally posted by Invader [email protected] 18, 2007 06:28 pm
I was under the impression that the Luddites tended to be artisans who attacked textile factories because these factories rendered their skills obsolite.
Not entirely

"In the early months of 1811 the first threatening letters from General Ned Ludd and the Army of Redressers, were sent to employers in Nottingham. Workers, upset by wage reductions and the use of unapprenticed workmen, began to break into factories at night to destroy the new machines that the employers were using. In a three-week period over two hundred stocking frames were destroyed. In March, 1811, several attacks were taking place every night and the Nottingham authorities had to enroll four hundred special constables to protect the factories. To help catch the culprits, the Prince Regent offered £50 to anyone "giving information on any person or persons wickedly breaking the frames"

link (http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/PRluddites.htm)

[bolshevik butcher]

Originally posted by Organic Revolution+November 18, 2007 09:02 pm--> (Organic Revolution @ November 18, 2007 09:02 pm)
[email protected] 18, 2007 02:14 pm
Invader Zim was right.

Luddites were not exactly progressive and they bitterly opposed technology.
Well, you do have to look at their time period to understand why. When the Luddites popped up, all they saw was death and destruction in factories and cities, and peace on the farm. I dont agree with there "smash industrial society" line, but I do think that they were a very important movement. [/b]
This is exactly right. The Luddites were vitally important as they were probably the first movement of class conscious workers. In his pamflet workshop talks James Conolly argued that the first expression of any revolutionary class is a desire to return to the past. In the peasants case this took the form of demands for land to be owned in common, a throw back to primiative communism. For the working class, partiucalrly skilled ones desired to go back to days when they were of a more privalleged position that had been destroyed by the rise of machinery. Although ultimatley futile this was in many ways a nescessary development.

[ComradeOm]

Its inevitable that open class warfare takes its form from the material conditions of its day. In medieval times such conflict was often framed in religious or heretical terms. In the case of the Luddites it was an anti-technology stance. We should not condemn the latter for the protests but we must accept that they were, in almost every possible way, wrong.

[Hit The North]

We should not condemn the latter for the protests but we must accept that they were, in almost every possible way, wrong.

Not at all. From their own material class interest they were completely right.

[Vanguard1917]

The Luddites were early 19th century displaced artisans. They attacked industrial progress because such progress was making their position in society redundant. Artisans and small producers were being displaced by the advance of industrial capitalism and large-scale production. That strata of society was increasingly being drawn into the ranks of the industrial proletariat (a historical process which Marx and Engels describe well in the Communist Manifesto). This was a fundamentally progressive change, increasing the social weight of the working class.

The Luddites tried to resist this change, sometimes with admirable courage and resolution. But, in truth, they represented the past and their demands were essentially conservative: i.e. they were trying to conserve the status quo - trying to protect the present from the future. It was only with the rise of the industrial working class that a progressive critique of capitalism was starting to be put forward in society.

[ComradeOm]

Originally posted by Citizen [email protected] 19, 2007 11:44 pm
Not at all. From their own material class interest they were completely right.
Are you a 19th C small artisan? If not then there is absolutely nothing of value in a political programme that consists primarily of the smashing of mechanised looms

[Hit The North]

Originally posted by ComradeOm+November 20, 2007 06:58 pm--> (ComradeOm @ November 20, 2007 06:58 pm)
Citizen [email protected] 19, 2007 11:44 pm
Not at all. From their own material class interest they were completely right.
Are you a 19th C small artisan? If not then there is absolutely nothing of value in a political programme that consists primarily of the smashing of mechanised looms [/b]
No, but if I was a 19th century small artisan, it would be of utmost value to me - it would be a matter of survival, of defending my class interest. People behave on the basis of their own material interests not the interests of history.

[AGITprop]

Originally posted by Citizen Zero+November 20, 2007 11:07 pm--> (Citizen Zero @ November 20, 2007 11:07 pm)
Originally posted by [email protected] 20, 2007 06:58 pm

Citizen [email protected] 19, 2007 11:44 pm
Not at all. From their own material class interest they were completely right.
Are you a 19th C small artisan? If not then there is absolutely nothing of value in a political programme that consists primarily of the smashing of mechanised looms
No, but if I was a 19th century small artisan, it would be of utmost value to me - it would be a matter of survival, of defending my class interest. People behave on the basis of their own material interests not the interests of history. [/b]
you are right but on the broader scale of society, theyre actions were not helping increase advancement.

[Organic Revolution]

Originally posted by Ender+November 28, 2007 05:01 pm--> (Ender @ November 28, 2007 05:01 pm)
Originally posted by Citizen [email protected] 20, 2007 11:07 pm

Originally posted by [email protected] 20, 2007 06:58 pm

Citizen [email protected] 19, 2007 11:44 pm
Not at all. From their own material class interest they were completely right.
Are you a 19th C small artisan? If not then there is absolutely nothing of value in a political programme that consists primarily of the smashing of mechanised looms
No, but if I was a 19th century small artisan, it would be of utmost value to me - it would be a matter of survival, of defending my class interest. People behave on the basis of their own material interests not the interests of history.
you are right but on the broader scale of society, theyre actions were not helping increase advancement. [/b]
That was their society at the time... What they saw was the downfall of society with the buildup of machines.

[Jesus Christ!]

Originally posted by [email protected] 18, 2007 05:07 pm
While their opposition to bourgoisie explotation in certain forms was commendable, they were ultimately reactionary. They wanted no industry. They were not egalitarian or socialist in any way. If anything, they supported the previous system of explotation to the new one.
" As the Liberty lads o'er the sea
Bought their freedom, and cheaply, with blood,
So we, boys, we
Will die fighting, or live free,
And down with all kings but King Ludd!"

Sounds pretty anti-oppression to me

[chimx]

"In the early months of 1811 the first threatening letters from General Ned Ludd and the Army of Redressers, were sent to employers in Nottingham. Workers, upset by wage reductions and the use of unapprenticed workmen, began to break into factories at night to destroy the new machines that the employers were using. In a three-week period over two hundred stocking frames were destroyed. In March, 1811, several attacks were taking place every night and the Nottingham authorities had to enroll four hundred special constables to protect the factories. To help catch the culprits, the Prince Regent offered £50 to anyone "giving information on any person or persons wickedly breaking the frames"

Actually their reason for attacks looks like the use of unapprenticed workers, which is something that guilded artisans would have hated. Luddism wasn't a class struggle in the sense that it was a proletarian movement against capital. It was a reaction to downward social mobility that occurred to the petit-bourgeois during the rise in industry and unskilled labor.

Honestly, during the very early 19th century, the artisan class was the class that was the most revolutionary because they were the ones with the most to loose. It was artisans that smashed up machines, organized strikes, rose up in cities (Lyons for example), and were even the ones to first hoist up the black flag over their movement (symbolizing the death of their labor) that would later be taken up by anarchists.