Luddites article

[admice]

http://thebaffler.com/past/a_nod_to_ned_ludd

 

I liked this.

 

Not sure if this goes in this forum, so please move if appropriate and sorry.

[admice]

And this guy's art: http://www.loubeach.com/

[alanjjohnstone]

These two blog posts on the Luddites may interest you http://socialismoryourmoneyback.blogspot.com/2013/01/blood-for-blood-says-general-lud.html http://socialismoryourmoneyback.blogspot.com/2011/05/lord-byron-and-luddites.html

[admice]

yes thanks. Last one so very heavy.

[Anonymous]

alanjjohnstone wrote:

These two blog posts on the Luddites may interest you http://socialismoryourmoneyback.blogspot.com/2013/01/blood-for-blood-says-general-lud.html http://socialismoryourmoneyback.blogspot.com/2011/05/lord-byron-and-luddites.html  

 They were reactionaries. It is what Marx called Lumpen proletariat because capitalism was a more advanced system than Feudalism, and capatlism was a revolutionary system. It was similar to the case of the Utopian socialists. In our times we do not have to destroy the machineries or the means of productions, we must expropiate them from the hands of the expropiators

[alanjjohnstone]

i have to disagree. They were a legitimate expression of the class struggle of their time. To term them as lumpenproletariat is to do them an injustice. The description of them as simply machine wreckers is a common misconception. See this Smithsonian article. http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history-archaeology/What-the-Luddites-Really-Fought-Against.html It explains –  “…Despite their modern reputation, the original Luddites were neither opposed to technology nor inept at using it. Many were highly skilled machine operators in the textile industry….Luddites themselves “were totally fine with machines,” says Kevin Binfield, editor of the 2004 collection Writings of the Luddites. They confined their attacks to manufacturers who used machines in what they called “a fraudulent and deceitful manner” to get around standard labor practices. “They just wanted machines that made high-quality goods,” says Binfield, “and they wanted these machines to be run by workers who had gone through an apprenticeship and got paid decent wages. Those were their only concerns.” 

[Anonymous]

alanjjohnstone wrote:

i have to disagree. They were a legitimate expression of the class struggle of their time. To term them as lumpenproletariat is to do them an injustice. The description of them as simply machine wreckers is a common misconception. See this Smithsonian article. http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history-archaeology/What-the-Luddites-Really-Fought-Against.html It explains –  "…Despite their modern reputation, the original Luddites were neither opposed to technology nor inept at using it. Many were highly skilled machine operators in the textile industry….Luddites themselves “were totally fine with machines,” says Kevin Binfield, editor of the 2004 collection Writings of the Luddites. They confined their attacks to manufacturers who used machines in what they called “a fraudulent and deceitful manner” to get around standard labor practices. “They just wanted machines that made high-quality goods,” says Binfield, “and they wanted these machines to be run by workers who had gone through an apprenticeship and got paid decent wages. Those were their only concerns.” 

 I also disagree with that point of view. In the Communist Manifesto is well expressed that workers used to destroy machinery because they were opposed to the development of capitalism

[alanjjohnstone]

Sorry but i still disagree. Reactionary and Lumpen-proletariat are not the words ever used by Marx in this regard. Try a re-read of Capital Chapter 15 , section 5 , to read where Marx sympathies lay. He describes how “History discloses no tragedy more horrible than the gradual extinction of the English hand-loom weavers, an extinction that was spread over several decades, and finally sealed in 1838. Many of them died of starvation, many with families vegetated for a long time on 2½ d. a day.”Marx says “.. it is with the advent of machinery, that the workman for the first time brutally revolts against the instruments of labour.”And he adds that it was also “the most powerful weapon for repressing strikes, those periodical revolts of the working-class against the autocracy of capital…It would be possible to write quite a history of the inventions, made since 1830, for the sole purpose of supplying capital with weapons against the revolts of the working-class. ”http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch15.htm#S5  “It is not my intention here to go into the history of overwork in England since the invention of machinery. The fact is that as a result of these excesses there broke out epidemics whose devastating effects were equally threatening to capitalists and workers; that the state, against tremendous resistance from the capitalists, was compelled to introduce normal [working] days in the factories (later imitated in greater or lesser degree all over the Continent)”  [Perhaps my reading is wrong but i think he means the “Luddite” excesses forced the hand of Parliament.] http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1861/economic/ch26.htm If you mean the Luddites were reacting then it is true but reactionary, no. To say because they were not actually factory workers as yet but owned their means of production doesn’t make them working class, it does include them in the labouring class or the toiling class. To lose your livliehood in these days meant penury and starvation so i don’t accept it was a mindless act to smash those machines that were causing the threat.  Perhaps Luddism should be seen as a drastic form of collective bargaining. 

[ALB]

alanjjohnstone wrote:

“It is not my intention here to go into the history of overwork in England since the invention of machinery. The fact is that as a result of these excesses there broke out epidemics whose devastating effects were equally threatening to capitalists and workers; that the state, against tremendous resistance from the capitalists, was compelled to introduce normal [working] days in the factories (later imitated in greater or lesser degree all over the Continent)” [Perhaps my reading is wrong but i think he means the “Luddite” excesses forced the hand of Parliament.] http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1861/economic/ch26.htm

I think by "excesses" he meant factory-owners overworking their workers by making them work too long for the good of their health. And that he meant "epidemics" in the literal sense of cholera, tryphoid, etc outbreaks that spread due to the weakened health of the over-worked workers and from which members of the ruling class died too. Doesn't he describe the struggle for the "normal" working day being that of the workers in trade unions aided by Tory landowners who wanted to get their revenge on the free-trader Liberals for abolishing the Corn Laws? I don't think he could have been talking of the Luddites who had been defeated a decade or so before and who, anyway, were independent producers who owned their own means of production (hand looms, etc) rather than waged factory workers (even if that's what they became when finally driven out of business by competition from factories owned by capitalists who employed more productive machinery).Also, that's one reason why I think the word "lumpenproletariat" is not applicable to them either: they weren't (yet) members of the "proletariat", but independent handicraft producers struggling to try to stop becoming "wage slaves" which they rightly saw as an indignity. The other reason is that I don't think we should call any of our fellow workers "lumpenproletariat" even if Marx did.

[alanjjohnstone]

You are probably right but i'll still argue that the Luddites were just as part of a working class as any self-employed painter and decorator or electrician is today – sub-contracters,  alienated and exploited, subject and vulnerable to the whims of the capitalist market.  For instance, today the ILO estimates there are 300 million home-workers ranging from IT specialists to the more menial. 

[alanjjohnstone]

General Ludd’s Triumph: The guilty may fear, but no vengeance he aimsAt the honest man’s life or estateHis wrath is entirely confined to wide framesAnd to those that old prices abate.These Engines of mischief were sentenced to dieBy unanimous vote of the Trade;And Ludd who can all opposition defyWas the grand Executioner made. Let the wise and the great lend their aid and adviceNor e’er their assistance withdrawTill full fashioned work at the old fashioned priceIs established by Custom and Law.Then the Trade when this arduous contest is o’erShall raise in full splendour its head,And colting and cutting and squaring * no moreShall deprive honest workmen of bread. *Squaring referred to all forms of what was considered unfair practice by the masters.

[alanjjohnstone]

apologies for the formatting of the above poem

[ALB]

alanjjohnstone wrote:

General Ludd’s Triumph:His wrath is entirely confined to wide framesAnd to those that old prices abate.[….]Till full fashioned work at the old fashioned priceIs established by Custom and Law.

Does this not confirm that this was a movement of independent producers seeking to prevent machine-produced products undercutting theirs rather than a movement of propertyless wage workers? In fact the latter would probably, rightly or wrongly, have been on the machine-owners' side as work in their factories provided them with paid employment.Still, it is always good to see a group put up a last-ditch fight even if doomed to fail, like the miners 30 years ago and the P&O ferry workers not long after, rather than just roll over and die (or take to alcohol).

[Author]

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