From Partial Progress: The Politics of Science and Technology 
by David Albury and Joseph Schwartz
Pluto Press London 1982
pp 24-28

The Luddites

Knife wielding grudge saboteurs, who last week put a closure-doomed Blackburn textile mill out of action, have struck again. The new attack last night at Tootal-owned Vale Mill came just five days after anger at the shutdown plan was turned into a yard-slashing orgy of destruction on all the mill's 170 looms.

This inflammatory prose appeared in the Blackburn Telegraph and Argus in northern England on 9 September 1980. It could well have appeared in a Lancashire local paper 170 years earlier. Then, as now, anyone who points out that new technologies threaten mass redundancy or who questions the conventional wisdom that all new machines represent progress is immediately condemned as a `Luddite'.
The name evokes a powerful image of half-crazed men and women blindly striking out against the forces of progress, a handful of isolated, desperate people irrationally smashing
machines because they were `afraid of new things'. So damaging is the label that, even in the most heated disputes between management and labour or between right and left, agreement can always be found in the sentence: `Of course, we're not Luddites. We're not against progress.'
Twenty years ago, E. P. Thompson published his classic defence of the Luddite resistance.54 But Thompson's work, along with the work of other sympathetic historians, has not received popular acceptance. The same old anti-Luddite stereotypes can still be wheeled out to discredit resistance to technological developments. In order to see how well founded this resistance was, let us briefly review Thompson's main conclusions: Luddite actions were taken after parliamentary avenues had been exhausted; the Luddite activists consisted of some of the most skilled, highly paid workers in the textile trades; their actions were disciplined and well organised; and they enjoyed the nearly total community support necessary to maintain a complex underground organisation. In Thompson's words:

The men who organised, sheltered or condoned Luddism were far from primitive. They were shrewd and humorous; next to the London artisans, some of them were amongst the most articulate of the `industrious classes'. A few had read Adam Smith, more had made some study of trade union law. Croppers, stockingers, and weavers were capable of managing a complex organisation; undertaking its finances and correspondence; sending delegates as far as Ireland or maintaining regular communications with the West Country. All of them had dealings through their representatives with Parliament, while duly apprenticed stockingers in Nottingham were burgesses and electors. 55

The major Luddite attacks were carried out in the years 1811-17 in three areas of England: the West Riding, south Lancashire and Nottingham. Three trades were involved: the croppers, a skilled trade responsible for trimming, cleaning, pressing and shearing woollen cloth (West Riding), the cotton weavers (south Lancashire) and the framework knitters (Nottingham). The croppers were a section of the working class with a reputation among the owners for `independent' or `insubordinate' manners and who were `notoriously the least manageable of any persons employed in this important manufacture.' 56 The croppers had sufficient control over their work process to be able to impose fines on owners who attempted to avoid any of the cloth finishing procedures and, in addition, a committee of workers themselves adjudicated all complaints by the owners about the quality of the work.

Luddite demands included the gradual introduction of machinery accompanied by alternative employment; taxes of 6d per yard for machine-dressed cloth with the money going
to an unemployment fund; a legal minimum wage; controls on sweated labour of women and children; prohibitions on shoddy work; and the right to legal trade unions (a right removed by the infamous Combination Acts of 1799).

The actions of the Luddites, while terrifying to middle class onlookers of the time, developed out of a previous background of a combination of parliamentary lobbying and controlled direct action in the workplace. In the years immediately prior to the insurrection, workers in the clothing trades would maintain trade union integrity by various kinds of direct action: boycotts of workers who undersold their labour; selective thefts of their tools or fines for their behaviour; silk cut or woollen goods slashed; the `disappearance' of machine parts and the physical intimidation of blacklegs. Over the years 1803-06 the workers made repeated attempts to use existing legal statutes to control the introduction of new machines. The Yorkshire croppers spent between £10,000 and £12,000 on legal expenses during this period, at a time when a skilled cropper's annual wage was £75.

The destruction of machinery itself, beginning in 1811 after the parliamentary road had proved fruitless, was carried out in a disciplined, military manner. After one attack an observer reported:

As soon as the work of destruction was completed the Leader drew up his men, called over the roll, each man answering to a particular number instead of his name; they then fired off their pistols ... gave a shout and marched off in regular military order. 57

Stocking frame destruction was confined to wide frames which made inferior goods at lower prices; only the cheaply made goods were slashed; teams of men with special hammers were organised to break into factories; Luddite bands were financed out of trade union funds; the Luddites offered rewards to capture informers in their midst and they issued threats against imposters who, disguised as Luddites, collected money in their name or robbed isolated farms.
The Luddite insurrection was suppressed, but its existence was instrumental in helping the 1825 repeal of the Combination Acts. Luddite activists, far from being the scourge of their communities, retired into more conventional politics, becoming `the principal leaders in the Hampden Clubs which [were] formed in almost every village in the angle between Leicester, Derby and Newark.' 59

Luddism was only one episode in the history of politically-conscious machine breaking. In the 1830s a second wave of machine breaking swept through parts of the English countryside in what were known as the `Swing' riots.60 These included singular violence against threshing machines, which were opposed because their introduction deprived agricultural labourers of much needed winter employment. From 1 January 1830 to 3 September 1832 farm labourers around Norfolk engaged in 17 kinds of disturbances, which included 316 instances of fires set to corn cribs, houses and stores, 390 instances of breaking of threshing machines and 162 wages `riots'. The demands of the farm labourers were higher wages, more employment, better conditions of employment and poor relief. The introduction of threshing machines, mechanised agriculture, was the final step in the long erosion of the old pre-industrial relationships between employer and employee in English agriculture, with the labourers realising that they had no rights and would actually be permitted to starve to death in the money economy."

The labourers organised with widespread social support. Armed smugglers and poachers accompanied mass marchers and protected demonstrators and rioters. The labourers succeeded in delaying the introduction of the machines until the 1850s. In 1843 a House of Commons committee noted `at this moment, in a large part of the Agriculture Districts of the South, the threshing machine cannot be used, owing to the destructive vengeance with which the labourers resisted its introduction.' Not incidentally, the labourers won significant improvements, including wage concessions and alleviations of the Poor Law. As a worker from Norfolk testified to a 
Committee on Agriculture in 1833: `If we had never any fires our wages would not have been more than 10s a week; now they are 11s.' And the curate of Westwell, Kent said to the Poor Law Commission: `Ah, them riots and burnings did the poor a terrible lot of good." 62

The legalisation of trade unions in 1825, the growth of Chartism and, later, of socialism are often seen as the beginnings of mature class organisation, whilst the `Luddite' episodes are written off as an expression of working class immaturity. Indeed, many socialists have agreed with the nineteenth century industrialists who saw science and technology as progressive forces, and who successfully stigmatised working class critics of technology as advocating a reactionary return to an aristocratic golden past.

But from the point of view of a class-conscious politics of science and technology, the Luddite resistance represents an organised, militant opposition to the domination of science
and technology by the interests of a single class or single class fraction. The Luddite tradition needs to be reclaimed in order to overcome the monopoly presently enjoyed by capital in the development of new machines and processes. As Thompson puts it in summarising the futile legal attempts made by the framework knitters up to the year 1812 to gain some control over
the new technology:

And, in this light, the conventional picture of the Luddism of these years as a blind opposition to machinery as such becomes less and less tenable. What was at issue was the `freedom' of the capitalist to destroy the custom of the trade, whether by new machinery, by the factory system or by unrestricted competition, beating down wages, undercutting his 'rivals and undermining standards of craftsmanship. 63

These words could well apply to the 1980s.