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OrwellwasRight

(5,170 posts)
Thu May 4, 2017, 02:37 PM May 2017

Turns out, the Luddites were right!

This is a great article that explain that Luddites' reputation as anti-technology is totally made up. Just another example of the winners writing history. It is so relevant to the fight over trade policy today. The Right and the neoliberal Democrats keep saying, essentially, "get over it, shitty jobs are the way of the future." And labor keeps saying, no, we get to make rules about who benefits from trade and globalization and technology, except that you keep making rules that benefit capital and not labor."

http://portside.org/2017-05-02/luddites-have-been-getting-bad-rap-200-years-turns-out-they-were-right

Luddites Have Been Getting a Bad Rap for 200 years. But, Turns Out, They Were Right

Excerpt:

The Luddites were not opposed to the idea of using machines to make things more efficiently or be more productive. They just thought if you’re going to make more money because you’re more productive, you need to kick some of that money back down to the workers. The merchants were really not of that opinion….

[The Luddites] tried to bargain with the factory owners [arguing for minimum prices, a textile tax to support workers pensions, or phased introduction of new machines], but that didn’t go over at all. When the Luddites got to their wits end, they basically started going in and smashing and breaking machines, saying, this is all we got left. We’re going to destroy the means by which you produce this dislocation in our lives.

* * *

Of course, very wealthy factory owners had a lot of sway with the [British] Parliament, who sent in 14,000 soldiers to flood the northern counties where the Luddites were doing this smashing. They passed a new law specifically targeting frame-breaking giving it the death sentence. They worked really, really hard to infiltrate rings with spies.

It took some time. The Luddite uprising lasted for about a year, but the government did eventually break the back of it by putting several dozen Luddites to death; very public trials, very rapidly done. Special gallows would hang several of them at once. They shipped another couple dozen off to Australia. They even hung a 16-year-old boy who had done nothing more than been a lookout. That really put an end to it.


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