Online Encyclopedia
Luddite
| Contents |
History
The Luddites were a group of English workers in the early 1800s who protested against the changes produced by the Industrial Revolution that they felt threatened their jobs, often by destroying machines.
The original Luddites claimed to be led by one Ned Ludd, also known as "King Ludd" or "General Ludd", who is believed to have destroyed two large stocking-frames that produced inexpensive stockings undercutting those produced by skilled knitters, and whose signature appears on a "workers manifesto" of the time. Whether or not Ludd actually existed is historically unclear.
The movement spread rapidly throughout England in 1811, with many wool and cotton mills being destroyed, until the British government harshly suppressed them. The Luddites met at night on the moors surrounding the industrial towns, often practising drilling and manoeuvres. The main areas of the disturbances were Nottinghamshire in November 1811, followed by the West Riding of Yorkshire in early 1812 and Lancashire from March 1812. Pitched battles between Luddites and the military occurred at Burtons' Mill in Middleton, and at Westhoughton Mill, both in Lancashire. It was rumoured at the time that spies employed by the magistrates were involved in stirring up the attacks. Magistrates and food merchants were also objects of death threats and attacks by the anonymous General Ludd and his supporters. "Machine breaking" (industrial sabotage) was made a capital crime, and 17 men were executed in 1813. Many others were transported to Australia. At one time, there were more British troops fighting the Luddites than against Napoleon Bonaparte on the Iberian Peninsula.
In recent years, the terms Luddism and Luddite or Neo-Luddism and Neo-Luddite have become synonymous with anyone who opposes the advance of industrial technology.
E. P. Thompson's view of Luddism in The Making of the English Working Class
In his classic book on English history, The Making of the English Working Class, E. P. Thompson presented a view on Luddite history. Thompson's approach might well be taken to illustrate the view that, as often happens in history, it is the victor who writes the lines.
The Luddites are often characterised, and indeed their name has become synonymous with, people opposed to all change--in particular technological change such as that which was sweeping through the weaving shops in the industrial heartland of England. They are often characterised as violent, thuggish, and disorganised.
E. P. Thompson advances many arguments against this view of the Luddites. He aims to show that the Luddites were not, contrary to their usual portrayal, opposed to new technology; rather, they were opposed to the abolition of price defined by custom and practice and therefore also to the introduction of what we would today call the free market.
Thompson argues that the usage of free market rhetoric has become so pervasive and commonplace nowadays that it is easy to forget that the notions of the free market were invented relatively recently, in fact at about the time of Luddites. Before this time an artisan would perform work for a given price. The notion of working out how much the materials cost them, how much work they did, and how much profit they made would have been alien to them, and indeed to most people of that time, Thompson holds.
Thompson supplies a number of examples that show it was the forcible introduction of a new economic system that was being introduced that the Luddites were protesting against. For example, the Luddite song, "General Ludd's Triumph":
- The guilty may fear, but no vengeance he aims
- At the honest man's life or Estate
- His wrath is entirely confined to wide frames
- And to those that old prices abate
"Wide frames" were the weaving frames, and the old prices were those prices agreed by custom and practice. Thompson cites the many historical accounts of Luddite raids on workshops where some frames were smashed whilst others (whose owners were obeying the old economic practice) were left untouched.
Secondly, Thompson counters the view that the Luddites were thuggish. There were remarkably few Luddite arrests and executions, and yet they operated highly effectively against the forces of the state. The best explanation for this is that they were working with the consent of the local communities (or indeed were part of those communities).
Thirdly, Thompson argued that the Luddites were not disorganised. He noted that some of the largest Luddite activities involved a hundred men.
In short, Thompson feels that in caricaturing the Luddites as thugs who just wanted to smash up new technology we are simply continuing the propaganda of the time. The reality, on Thompson's view, was that the Luddites were normal people who were protesting against forced introduction of changes into their lives which they thought would be highly damaging. Looking 50 years into the Luddites' future, the diseased, poorly fed, and desperate operators in the weaving factories, and the swathe of destruction launched upon on the traditional weaving communities--some with 500 years of history--suggests to Thompson that they may have been right.
Cyborg Luddites
Recently, a number of researchers, activists, and inventors have begun to see technology as a runaway monster that can be tamed with a piece of itself. The Cyborg Luddites invent new, more personal technologies, such as body-borne computer systems, to limit the encroachment of the technologies around them. See for example, Hierarchical Sousveillance (Inverse Surveillance) in which personal recording technologies are used to shoot back (short mpg example) at the top-down one-sided hierarchy of surveillance.
See also
- Antimodernism
- Naturalism
- Reactionary
- Technophobia
- Technorealism
- Techno-utopianism
- UK topics
- Outsourcing
- Offshoring
External links and references
- "Cyborg Luddite", CYBORG: Digital Destiny and Human Possibility in the Age of the Wearable Computer, Pages 19-21 and 34, 183
- Is it O.K. to be a Luddite? by Thomas Pynchon
- Rebels Against the Future: The Luddites and Their War on the Industrial Revolution (1996), by Kirkpatrick Sale