"What's a Luddite?"

[Orwellian_Ghost]

All too often we have seen the particularly wrong and oppressive categorization of "Luddite" much as it is purposefully (mis)used by the Techno-Utopians, Globalizers and Corporate Savages to marginalize anyone who would dare question the status quo.

So then, "What's a Luddite?"

Luddite:

The knitting machines which provoked the first Luddite disturbances had been putting people out of work for well over two centuries. Everybody saw this happening -- it became part of daily life. They also saw the machines coming more and more to be the property of men who did not work, only owned and hired. It took no German philosopher, then or later, to point out what this did, had been doing, to wages and jobs. Public feeling about the machines could never have been simple unreasoning horror, but likely something more complex: the love/hate that grows up between humans and machinery -- especially when it's been around for a while -- not to mention serious resentment toward at least two multiplications of effect that were seen as unfair and threatening. One was the concentration of capital that each machine represented, and the other was the ability of each machine to put a certain number of humans out of work -- to be "worth" that many human souls.

It was open-eyed class war.

The Luddites, they did not call themselves that, were a movement against The Corporation. A social movement that recognized root causes of corporatism and took action to preserve their communities. They saw quite clearly what was staring them in the face.

Of course the folks involved and the term itself has been purposefully distorted and misrepresented to the point that it has become the most powerful swear word of capital (now that 'commie' has, for the moment, lost it's charge)) and the oppressor class has determined for you that a Luddite is a "mindless, destructive, resister of progress." All of this is of course patently false.

Both the left and the right told the same lie about the historical luddites, that they were primitivist and backward looking, as if those skilled weavers at the dawn of industrial modernity were against the future rather than its foreclosure by immiseration, factory discipline and the gallows.