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Title: The Luddites’ 200th birthday Author: Bernard Marszalek Date: Spring, 2012 Language: en Topics: Fifth Estate, Fifth Estate #386, Great Britain, labor struggle, Luddites Source: FIFTH ESTATE #386, Spring, 2012, Vol. 47, No. 1, page 4
In the waning moonlight, three bands of sullen men with ash-blackened
faces stealthed through the woods and dales of central Yorkshire, one of
the first counties in England to industrialize.
Quietly, the three groups, each traveling from different villages,
picked themselves through paths they traversed since childhood and
assembled in a clearing near their target. Though they passed outlying
cottages, no dogs betrayed them.
The villagers all round brought in their animals that night. A quick
count to assure themselves that their numbers, over a hundred, could do
the job quickly and thoroughly and they were off again, now as a solid,
intense phalanx.
A few more yards down from the meadow to the river and across and they
were in front of a red brick structure — their target: a recently built
textile mill with power looms.
The bolt securing the gate delivered the entrance with one well-directed
blow of an Enoch, the enormous sledgehammer the half-dozen men each
carried, and which was named after the blacksmith who fashioned them. A
few more blows to the front entrance and they were in.
Each knew his task and they quickly dispersed throughout the three
floors. The huge and heavy hammers did the most effective destruction,
but the pikes, the axes and the smaller hammers contributed to the
devastation of the mill.
The men could hardly contain their glee at their work, but they remained
silent as they tasked methodically and efficiently. The wood and metal
machines shattered under their blows with surprisingly little sound. No
one lived nearby, but even if the splintering of wood and cracking of
metal was heard that night by the sleepless, they knew enough to turn
over and forget they heard anything.
The mill owner lived on a splendid, wooded estate over a mile away. He
would hear nothing at all until morning and then only bad news. In
minutes, for that’s all it took, the proud craftsmen left the factory in
shambles. Quickly they retreated back to their homes to be in bed for
morning awakenings by the hapless authorities looking for the villains.
These machine breakers, all textile weavers, were the 19^(th) century
followers of King Ludd, their mythic leader. 2011 marked their two
hundredth anniversary.
The Luddites fought the imposition of new technology. The new weaving
machines, by producing shoddy goods, were an affront to their craft
standards. More importantly, the simple tasks of machine tending
required little skill. As a result of the new technology, families and
villages collapsed into a spiral of degradation.
The depiction above is informed fiction; the written record of the
Luddites’ nocturnal adventures is basically non-existent. The only
published account of their destructive exploits by a participant comes
from an aged villager as he remembered them as a boy fifty years
previously.
Charlotte Bronte, in her novel Shirley, fictionalized their most
catastrophic defeat, when Ludd’s redressers were ambushed at a mill and
two wreckers were killed outright and a half dozen sustained gunshot
wounds.
The Luddites burst from the Northern English meadows of Yorkshire,
Lancashire and Nottinghamshire like wild flowers in the spring of 1811,
but unlike blossoms, their span lasted 18 intense months. These men, and
only men took part in the machine destruction, were the anonymous actors
of history that historians E. P. Thompson and Howard Zinn in the past,
and Peter Linebaugh and David Roediger today, celebrate.
Before wrecking machines, the weavers and other tradespeople sought
redress of their grievances from the king and parliament, but their
victimization was ignored and so they chose a more effective course —
direct action. In the three county area, thousands of machines were
wrecked and the march of capitalist progress was temporarily stalled,
but in the end at great sacrifice to the Luddites.
Six months after the weavers started their campaign 12,000 British
troops were garrisoned in the three counties, more troops than battled
Napoleon in Spain at that time, to assure that factory-based production
could proceed without interruption.
The military occupation of the villages took its toll with daily
military patrols to harass and curtail assemblies. However the
grassroots nature of this struggle, where craftsmen knew each other and
whole communities backed their actions by maintaining complete silence,
prevented infiltration and arrests.
The central government in London threw its legislative artillery against
the populace by passing the Frame Breaking Act and the Malicious Damage
Act of 1812 decreeing machine breaking a capital offense and followed
with a campaign of yearlong ambushes, torture and judicial killings to
defeat the weavers.
Seventeen men were executed after an 1813 trial in York, many more
jailed, and hundreds were transported to Australia. The bloody
repression clamped a lid on the movement in northern England. However, a
few years later, following the example of the weavers, agricultural
workers in the south of England began smashing recently introduced
threshers. Along with the wrecking, the agriculturalists adopted the
Luddite mockery of power by creating their own mythic hero, Captain
Swing.
Given this rebellious history it is regrettable that the Luddite
heritage has been incorrectly interpreted. The Luddites were not
reactionaries naively opposed to technology in their supposed flight
from history and progress.
It comes as no surprise that this spurious interpretation arose as a
reaction to the technological imperative that dominated the US by the
middle of the 20^(th) century: automation took off in the 1950s,
displacing thousands of workers; engineering sequestered the popular
imagination in the 1960s with the race against the Soviets for space
exploration; and in the 1970s, petrochemical-based research seized Wall
Street investors like a passion.
The dark side of this technological enthusiasm — unemployment,
pollution, and misdirected federal funds — coupled with the rising fear
of nuclear war, laid a heavy pall shrouding all contemplation of a
better future. The ensuing universal foreboding generated, among some,
hostility to all technology.
In this caldron of anxiety, the Luddites were resurrected from historic
obscurity to serve as emblematic rebels against technology by writers
such as Kirkpatrick Sale in his 1995, Rebels Against the Future.
Neo-Luddism arose in a shutter of fear for a technological future that
some mistakenly imagined had exact historic precedents.
However, the weavers did not take up their Enochs to blindly attack
technology. Some machines, innocent of the charge of capitalist
banditry, were spared and others were adapted for use in cottages and
small workshops.
Their hammers, tools themselves, were raised not simply to smash the new
world taking shape around them, but also to re-fashion it. Technology
per se was not their target. Their target was the intention behind its
introduction. In contrast to the greed of the capitalists, the weavers
attempted to reassert their “commonality,” as they termed their social
solidarity and coherence, as the shaping force for a new society that
would incorporate mechanical advances as tools to their benefit.
The skilled textile workers had no illusions about reclaiming the tempo
of their grandparents’ lives — a fabled Golden Age of small-scale
capitalism. Through the centuries, cottage industrial life was no idyll.
The previous era may have been more humane (even though the whole family
worked, they worked together), but only a few master craftsmen had any
real control over production. The weavers and other textile workers had
little leverage, since they had to depend on contracts with merchants.
Work was still drudgery in the cottages.
So what was the trajectory of their insurrection, so devastatingly cut
short? What greater relevancy, beyond symbolism, do they hold for us?
At first sight it would seem questionable that they hold any lessons for
us. After all, technology dictates our life choices in a way the
Luddites would have considered a nightmare. We, like the weavers two
hundred years ago, face an epic struggle to transform technology to
serve our needs.
To delve a little deeper, there can be little argument that, unlike many
of us, the Luddites had a more lavish palette of significant social
experiences to draw upon. The rich oral continuity that defines
traditional societies was theirs. Pre-industrial village life sustained
communal practices, rituals, and festivals brought song, dance and
follies of all kinds.
It is this social complex that the workers carried with them as their
heritage, what they referred to as their commonality, that served as a
foundation for their resistance to attacks from the capitalists.
What appeared on their horizon was a beast not clearly perceived, but
sensed as both forceful and evil. Their old compacts with the king, that
protected their ancestors in a limited way from capitalist expansion of
machine production for over a century, were dust and no new compacts
would be considered. They were at the mercy of the rising bourgeoisie,
no longer limited by traditional restrictions on their quest for wealth
and power, and who, consequently, speedily disabused themselves of a
moral center.
Doesn’t this sound familiar? Like the Luddites, we, too, are on the
precipice of an ominous future of technology gone out-of-control, in a
precise meaning of the phrase. Two examples, suffice: synthetic biology,
from bio-fuels to GMO foods, and nano-engineering.
And, like the Luddites, we are becoming aware that we face a momentous
transformation on every level of existence. For us, the eco-catastrophe
we face obviously is greater, but we can’t discount that village life —
the weavers’ environment — was threatened from one side by industrial
agricultural and on the other by industrial manufacturing.
When facing our prospects for overcoming the economic, environmental and
political challenges we are at a disadvantage compared to the Luddites.
They lacked our sophisticated technical resources, but they did possess
deep bonds of trust, forged over generations of communalism, while we
stand atomized, alienated and closed down, fearful of every encounter.
Their defeat, probably foredoomed, nonetheless was a great historic
loss. If in one time-warping leap they had adapted the new technology to
reclaim the old village life on a new basis of greater freedom and
leisure and thereby created a truly human society, today we would not be
enclosed by the logic of technology as it expedites the capitalist
addiction to endless growth. Instead, we could be living a life based on
social and individual fulfillment.
There is some faint hope for us moderns since it is true that
catastrophes tend to break old habits of isolation and spontaneously
evoke solidarity, as if out of the ether. However, waiting on heavenly
disasters is no solace. Hopefully, the pre-revolutionary uprisings in
North Africa and Europe, and the Occupy movement in the U.S. may temper
this bleak appraisal. The “Politics of the Squares” — the instant
mobilization of previously apolitical masses, the quickly organized
support systems to maintain continuity in public squares and spaces, the
meticulous concern for unhindered speech and more — is historically
unprecedented on this world scale.
These events should assure us that to fight for a better life by
reviving trust from its long slumber, releases deep reservoirs of desire
to reclaim and secure our common humanity.