The term Luddite is mostly used as an insult. It suggests someone who is backwards-looking, averse to progress, afraid of new technologies and, frankly, not particularly smart. But Brian Merchant claims that the Luddites weren't like that at all. They were organized, articulated their demands, understood very well how factory owners used machines to replace them, and were very deliberate in destroying those machines.
Their pitiful reputation is the result of a deliberate smear campaign by the elites of their time, who attempted (successfully, as it turned out) to discredit their coherent and justified movement. In his book “Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech,” Merchant credits the Luddites not as the hapless, head-in-the-sand idiots with whom they have become synonymous, but rather as the first union organizers. Longing for the halcyon days of yesteryear, when we were more in touch with nature, is not Luddism, writes Merchant; This is pastoralism – something completely different.
AND Luddites
In the past, weavers worked at home with hand-operated looms (i.e. machines). The whole family helped make fabric; They worked on their own schedules and spent their free time and meals together. Master weavers completed an apprenticeship for seven years to learn their craft. This is how it worked in the north of England for centuries.
In 1786, Edmund Cartwright invented the loom. Now, instead of needing a master weaver to make cloth, an untrained child could operate a loom. Anyone who could afford these “automated” looms (they still required some human supervision) could house a lot of them in a factory and bring orphans from the poorhouse to supervise them all day long. The orphans were able to produce much more cloth much more quickly than before, and the owners did not have to pay the seven-year-olds what they had paid the master weavers. In the early 19th century, factory owners did just that.
The weavers based in Nottinghamshire, the land of Robin Hood, clearly didn't like the fact that factory owners were using these automated looms to save their labor, their training – in fact, their entire way of life. They attempted to negotiate fair wages with factory owners and enact protective laws to limit the impact of the automated looms and protect their rights and products. But Parliament was having none of it; Instead, Parliament – somewhat unsettled by the French Revolution – passed the Combination Acts in 1801, making unionization illegal. So the workers used what they saw as their only remaining legal recourse; They started destroying the automatic looms.
Advertising
The aristocrats in the House of Lords told them they didn't understand that this automation would make things better for everyone. But it didn't improve the situation for anyone the Luddites knew or saw. They watched as factory owners grew richer, their own families grew thinner, and markets were flooded with substandard clothing made by child slaves working in unsafe conditions. So they continued to break the machines even after the House of Lords made it a capital offense in 1812.
Merchant tells his story through the experiences of selected people. One of these is Robert Blincoe, an orphan whose memoirs of abuse during his ten years working in a factory probably inspired Dickens' Oliver Twist. Another is Lord Byron, who, like other Romantic poets, sympathized with the Luddites and spoke (nicely but in vain) on their behalf in the House of Lords. George Mellor, another character Merchant spends time with, is one of the main candidates for a real General Ludd.
Edward Ludd himself does not qualify as he was mythical. Supposedly he was an apprentice in the cloth trade who smashed his master's equipment with a hammer in 1799. He became the figurehead of the movement as the various looters across northern England broke machines and left notes signed with his name. In contrast, George Mellor was one of the Luddites' finest writers and organizers. He had spent the requisite seven years learning the trade of cloth finisher and by 1811 was ready to get to work. The West Riding of York, where he lived, was home to wool weavers for centuries. But now greedy factory owners were using machines and children to do the work he had mastered in his youth. After begging the owners and the government for over a year and then resorting to machine breakdown, there was no change and no hope in sight.
Eventually, Mellor led a raid in which a friend was killed and he freaked out. He murdered a factory owner and was hanged along with 14 of his comrades (only four were involved in the murder; the rest were killed for other Luddite activities).
Even as their bodies still practically swung from the gallows, the aristocracy and press were already undermining and reshaping the history of the Luddites, portraying them as deluded and narrow-minded men who smashed machines they could not understand – rather than as strategic grassroots activists of the labor movement were. This misrepresentation is largely due to the fact that they are still remembered today.
Comments are closed.