The story is told to discourage workers from resisting the march of capitalist progress, lest they too end up like the Luddites. The Luddite rebellion lasted from 1811 to 1816, and today (as Randall puts it), it has become “a cautionary moral tale”. The army was sent in to break up and hunt down the Luddites. The factory owners won in the end: they succeeded in convincing the state to make “frame breaking” a treasonous crime punishable by hanging. They only banded together once factory owners began using these machines to displace and disempower workers. It wasn’t the invention of these machines that provoked the Luddites to action.
Similarly, the power loom had been used for decades before the Luddite uprisings. As historian Adrian Randall points out, one machine they targeted, the gig mill, had been used for more than a century in textile manufacturing. Many of the technologies they destroyed weren’t even new inventions. Third, the Luddites were not against innovation. The bosses, on the other hand, wanted to drive down costs and increase productivity. The Luddites wanted technology to be deployed in ways that made work more humane and gave workers more autonomy. Luddism was a working-class movement opposed to the political consequences of industrial capitalism. As historian David Noble puts it, they understood “technology in the present tense”, by analysing its immediate, material impacts and acting accordingly.
Smashing machines was not a kneejerk reaction to new technology, but a tactical response by workers based on their understanding of how owners were using those machines to make labour conditions more exploitative. Even within a single factory - which would contain machines owned by different capitalists - some machines were destroyed and others pardoned depending on the business practices of their owners. They targeted those owned by manufacturers who were known to pay low wages, disregard workers’ safety, and/or speed up the pace of work. They were intentional and purposeful about which machines they smashed. The contemporary usage of Luddite has the machine-smashing part correct - but that’s about all it gets right.įirst, the Luddites were not indiscriminate. They took their name from the apocryphal tale of Ned Ludd, a weaver’s apprentice who supposedly smashed two knitting machines in a fit of rage. The Luddites were a secret organisation of workers who smashed machines in the textile factories of England in the early 1800s, a period of increasing industrialisation, economic hardship due to expensive conflicts with France and the United States, and widespread unrest among the working class. It wasn’t until I learned the true origins of Luddism that I began sincerely to regard myself as one of them. It’s the kind of self-effacing thing you say when fumbling with screen-sharing on Zoom during a presentation: “Sorry, I’m such a Luddite!” A brief - and accurate - history of LuddismĮven among other social scientists who study these kinds of critical questions about technology, the label of “Luddite” is still largely an ironic one. It’s time we reconsider the lessons of Luddism. Our circumstances today are more similar to theirs than it might seem, as new technologies are being used to transform our own working and social conditions - think increases in employee surveillance during lockdowns, or exploitation by gig labour platforms.
The coronavirus pandemic is boosting the big tech transformation to warp speed This all-or-nothing approach to debates about technology and society is based on severe misconceptions of the real history and politics of the original Luddites: English textile workers in the early 19th century who, under the cover of night, destroyed weaving machines in protest to changes in their working conditions. To be a Luddite is seen as synonymous with being primitive - backwards in your outlook, ignorant of innovation’s wonders, and fearful of modern society.