How People Got Fed Up: Luddism

Tip

I recommend giving this article a read, it tells a story of Luddism in great details. It’s been published back in 2011 and it’s still the best article out of ones that I read when researching this topic.

Before we get to modern times and neo-Luddism–the philosophy that opposes many forms of modern technology–we need to understand what the original Luddism was. And no, it’s not what you think it is today.

Luddism was a movement of English textile workers who opposed the use of certain types of automated machinery–lace frames that allowed one worker to do the work of many without the necessary skills–because of concerns about lower wages and a lower quality of output; the market was flooded with cheaper, inferior goods such as “cut-ups,” stockings made from two pieces of fabric joined together rather than knit as one continuous piece.

It began in England in the early 1800s, during a period of increasing industrialization, hard economic times due to costly conflicts with Napoleon’s France and the United States, and widespread unrest among workers. Food was scarce and rapidly becoming more expensive, poverty entered homes where it was unfamiliar, and unemployment was a real problem.

The government repeatedly failed to intervene on behalf of the workers, and what was left was to attack the factories.

On March 11, 1811, in Nottingham–a textile manufacturing center–British troops broke up a crowd of protesters demanding more work and better wages.

That night, angry workers smashed textile machinery in a nearby village. Similar attacks occurred at first at night, then sporadically, then in waves, eventually spreading across a 70-mile swath of northern England from Loughborough in the south to Wakefield in the north.

They often smashed machines in textile factories in organized raids. “Nine hundred lace frames were smashed,” the newspaper reported. They took their name from the story of Ned Ludd, a mythical weaver who supposedly smashed two knitting machines with a hammer in a fit of rage. They used it as a pseudonym in threatening letters to factory owners and government officials, these letters explained their reasons for destroying the machinery and threatened further action if the use of “obnoxious” machines continued.

It’s important to note that the Luddites didn’t just smash any machines; they only targeted machines owned by manufacturers who were known to pay low wages, disregard workers’ safety, and/or speed up the pace of work.

Even within a single factory that contained machines owned by different capitalists, some machines were destroyed and others weren’t, depending on the business practices of their manufacturers.

The Luddites didn’t oppose the new technology per se, but rather the misuse of it; many of them were highly skilled machine operators in the textile industry, and the idea of smashing machines as a form of industrial protest did not begin or end with them.

The technology they were attacking wasn’t all that new either; Luddites often attacked stocking frames, knitting machines that had been developed more than 200 years earlier. What was new was the steady replacement of workers with it.

The terror of violence caused some factory owners to abandon their plans for automation. They reverted to manual labor or closed up shop altogether. For a time, it seemed that the Luddites were making progress in winning over machines.

But in the end, the factory owners won: they convinced the state to make “frame breaking” a treasonable crime, punishable by execution and penal transportation.

The Luddites existed for 5 years until they were suppressed by legal and military forces; government ultimately dispatched 12,000 troops to suppress Luddite activity. Dozens of workers were executed for Luddite activities, including a whopping fourteen on one brutal day in January 1813. George Mellor, the Luddite captain, was eventually convicted of murdering Horsfall, the mill owner, and hanged at the age of twenty-three.

But the idea continued to live on…

Banner sources:

• The map: Wikimedia
• The Leader of the Luddites: Wikimedia
• The Luddites hammering: Tom Morgan, Mary Evans Picture Library