Against the Luddites

#

Luddism does not deserve to be rehabilitated. It was a medieval throwback, reactionary and primitive, a pre-Marxist labor convulsion closer in spirit to the Khmer Rouge’s fantasies of agrarian restoration than to the universalist solidarity of Eugene Debs. The contemporary effort to recast the Luddites as thoughtful critics of technology gives modern anxieties about AI a historical pedigree they do not deserve. The movement was a violent defense of guild privilege, male supremacy, and craft hierarchy against the leveling forces of industrial modernity. They could have fought for equality and justice; they chose instead to fight to remain the petty bosses of their own towns rather than cede that authority to the owners of factories.

The rehabilitation of Luddism is a vice signal. Anyone genuinely concerned with workers’ dignity has Marx, Debs, and Martin Luther King to hand, organizers who championed equality across lines of skill, race, and gender. The choice to reach past all of them for a movement of guild enforcers who beat women in the streets is made because of the violence and reaction, not despite it.

An Elite Movement

#

The Luddites did not represent the working class. Cambridge historian Richard Jones examined oral testimonies, trial documents, Parliamentary papers, and Home Office reports. He concluded that Luddism was “far from a genuinely pan-working class movement.” The Luddites were “a relatively ’elite’ group, whose role had traditionally been protected by legislation regulating the supply and conduct of labour.” In an industry employing a million people, the movement never exceeded a couple of thousand. Jones put it bluntly: “these were not downtrodden working class labourers. The Luddites were elite craftspeople.”¹

The Yorkshire croppers, the vanguard of Luddism in the West Riding, had to complete seven-year apprenticeships before they could practice their trade. After seven years, Jones notes, “they tended to feel that they were owed a living.” For the genuinely unskilled and dispossessed, displacement by machines was already old news; they had little reason to join a movement defending privileges they never possessed.

The Nottinghamshire framework-knitters ran the same racket. Among their core grievances was the employment of “colts,” workers who had not served the seven-year apprenticeship. They objected to “unapprenticed youths” and to the new wide frames, which produced cheaper goods that anyone could operate.² Every Luddite complaint presupposed a closed guild system in which access to the trade was rationed by the incumbents.

The Exclusion of Women

#

The machines the Luddites smashed did something that, by any measure of human equality, should have been celebrated. As Daron Acemoglu has documented, they “replaced the scarce and expensive factors, the skilled artisans, by relatively cheap and abundant factors, unskilled manual labor of men, women, and children.”³ The Luddites treated this as an outrage.

Violence against women was endemic to the skilled textile trades, of which Luddism was the most dramatic expression. A petition from Glasgow cotton manufacturers, preserved in parliamentary records, states:

“In almost every department of the cotton spinning business, the labour of women would be equally efficient with that of men; yet in several of these departments, such measures of violence have been adopted by the combination, that the women who are willing to be employed, and who are anxious by being employed to earn the bread of their families, have been driven from their situations by violence.”⁴

When the firm of James Dunlop and Sons built spinning machines small enough to be operated by women and employed female spinners, the women “were waylaid and attacked, in going to, and returning from their work; the houses in which they resided, were broken open in the night. The women themselves were cruelly beaten and abused; and the mother of one of them killed.” The firm was forced to dismiss all female spinners and hire only men.

In 1810, the Calton association of weavers formally resolved “that no new female apprentices could be taken except from the weaver’s own families.” In 1833, male cotton spinners struck against female spinners at Dennistoun’s mill in Calton, “using violent means to drive them from the workplace.”⁵

A nationwide meeting of spinners in 1829 passed a resolution restricting the trade to “the son, brother, or orphan nephew of spinners, and the poor relations of the proprietors of the mills,” excluding women entirely. A demand that only your sons and nephews be permitted to practice the trade is an inheritance claim, not a workers’ demand, closer in spirit to the family that passes down ownership of a car dealership than to any form of labor solidarity. As Marianna Valverde has observed, “the spinners’ masculinity and craft were completely intertwined.”⁶

The Luddite cause was inseparable from the cause of male monopoly over skilled labor. To rehabilitate Luddism without confronting this is to celebrate a movement that beat women in the streets for daring to earn a living.

Marx and Engels Saw Through It

#

Marx and Engels understood Luddism as primitive, misdirected resistance, a stage to be transcended, not celebrated.

In the Communist Manifesto (1848), Marx and Engels placed machine-breaking at the very earliest, most confused stage of proletarian development. Workers at this stage “direct their attacks not against the bourgeois conditions of production, but against the instruments of production themselves; they destroy imported wares that compete with their labour, they smash to pieces machinery, they set factories ablaze, they seek to restore by force the vanished status of the workman of the Middle Ages.” They remain “an incoherent mass scattered over the whole country, and broken up by their mutual competition.”⁷

The phrase to dwell on is the vanished status of the workman of the Middle Ages. Marx saw the Luddites as men trying to restore feudal craft privileges by force, a reactionary project dressed up as resistance.

Engels went further. In The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845), he argued that pre-industrial craft workers “were not human beings; they were merely toiling machines in the service of the few aristocrats who had guided history down to that time.” The industrial revolution, for all its horrors, stripped away this comfortable illusion, “forcing them to think and demand a position worthy of men.”⁸ The order the Luddites wanted to restore was itself a form of servitude, one whose bars were harder to see.

In Capital, Vol. 1, Marx made the critique structural. “It took both time and experience before workers learnt to distinguish between machinery and its employment by capital, and therefore to transfer their attacks from the material instruments of production to the form of society which utilises those instruments.” The Luddites had not learned this lesson. They attacked the machine and left the system untouched.

Elsewhere in the same chapter, Marx was explicit: the Luddite phase had to be superseded. The destruction of machinery was the first instinctive reaction of workers who had not grasped that their enemy was the social relation wielding the machine. Trade unions and political organization represented the maturation that machine-breaking could never achieve: workers learning to target the system rather than its tools.⁹

Even Hobsbawm, the most sympathetic Marxist to touch the subject, conceded the point. “Collective bargaining by riot” is a generous description of Luddite machine-wrecking, but bargaining by riot is pre-political by definition.¹⁰

Restoration, Never Revolution

#

The Luddites fought to preserve a hierarchy that benefited them, a hierarchy built on seven-year apprenticeships, guild monopolies, the exclusion of women, and the exclusion of the unskilled. They demanded the restoration of a vanishing past.

The croppers wanted Parliament to ban machines that had existed since the sixteenth century and to enforce the Statute of Artificers (1563), which mandated seven-year apprenticeships and restricted entry to trades. Parliament repealed the Statute in 1814, two years after the height of Luddism; even the Tory government of the era recognized it as obsolete. The framework-knitters invoked the authority of the Company of Framework Knitters, a guild body chartered in 1657, to justify their demands. The entire framework was pre-modern: traditional wages, access, and hierarchy.

We have seen what happens when those who yearn for a return to the past are given power. When the Khmer Rouge seized Cambodia in 1975, they emptied the cities and drove the population into the rice fields in pursuit of an agrarian Year Zero. The scale of violence is incomparable to anything the Luddites had the power to do, but the ideological shape is the same. It is the simple call to smash the instruments of modernity, return to a simpler, purer social order. The Luddites wanted to restore the medieval craftsman; the Khmer Rouge wanted to restore the agrarian peasant. Both treated the people empowered by modernization as threats to be suppressed. The reactionary romanticism and the hatred of the leveling effects of new productive forces are the same impulse.

Eugene Debs, by contrast, never demanded the restoration of the artisan’s workshop. He organized across skill, gender, and racial lines. The IWW’s founding convention in 1905 identified the craft union as the central obstacle to working-class solidarity. The AFL’s craft unions were the direct organizational descendants of the guild mentality the Luddites had fought and killed to preserve: apprenticeship requirements, restricted entry, jealous guarding of trade boundaries.¹¹ The IWW set out to organize all workers regardless of skill, trade, race, or sex. Its founding was an explicit repudiation of everything the Luddites stood for.

We can either destroy the means of production or seize them, and we cannot do both.

Conclusion

#

The rehabilitation of the Luddites is an intellectual project that succeeds only by omission. It requires ignoring who the Luddites were (a small elite of privileged male artisans), what they wanted (the restoration of guild monopolies), and what they did (beat women, burned factories, and murdered a mill owner). It requires ignoring that Marx and Engels, the tradition’s own founders, saw Luddism as precisely the kind of confused, backward-looking, pre-political rebellion that had to be overcome before a genuine workers’ movement could emerge.

If automation concentrates wealth and displaces workers, the answer is to change who owns the machines and how their gains are distributed, not to smash them. Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams, in Inventing the Future (2015), reject the anti-technology nostalgia they call “folk politics” and argue for universal basic income, a shorter work week, and collective ownership of automated production.¹² Aaron Bastani’s Fully Automated Luxury Communism (2019) goes further: automation, renewable energy, and synthetic biology make a post-scarcity world materially possible, if their fruits are collectively owned rather than privately hoarded.¹³ Both ask who should own the future, not whether the future should be allowed to arrive.

The legitimate grievance in Luddism, that workers deserve a say in how technology reshapes their conditions, does not need the Luddites as its vessel. That idea has better champions.

Sources

#