At What Point Ought Communication Technology Have Frozen Forever?

[JackRiddler]

53. Please read this good short article about the real Luddites ...

Ideologically they were closer to Bernie Sanders than John Zerzan.

The Luddites were working class people who rose up against inhuman conditions of labor. They broke machines to effect labor stoppages at a time when strikes were not just illegal, but a cause for military massacres on domestic soil. It shows the continuing power of capitalist ideology today that everyone knows the name but most don't know the story. The Luddites were brave and innovative pioneers of the modern workers movement. If we had not been collectively misled about our history, today's 99 percent would be identifying more closely with them than with most of the aristocratic, slave-holding "founding fathers." Instead people who sacrificed their lives in the struggle for dignity and human rights are defamed as mindless barbarians attacking "progress" and "technology." It's no different than when the teachers and firefighters and union workers of Wisconsin are called thugs for defending their livelihoods against attack.

What the Luddites Really Fought Against
The label now has many meanings, but when the group protested 200 years ago, technology wasn't really the enemy

* By Richard Conniff
* Smithsonian magazine, March 2011


Read more: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history-archaeology/What-the-Luddites-Really-Fought-Against.html#ixzz1xmP1Ppc1

(snip)

Despite their modern reputation, the original Luddites were neither opposed to technology nor inept at using it. Many were highly skilled machine operators in the textile industry. Nor was the technology they attacked particularly new. Moreover, the idea of smashing machines as a form of industrial protest did not begin or end with them. In truth, the secret of their enduring reputation depends less on what they did than on the name under which they did it. You could say they were good at branding.

The Luddite disturbances started in circumstances at least superficially similar to our own. British working families at the start of the 19th century were enduring economic upheaval and widespread unemployment. A seemingly endless war against Napoleon’s France had brought “the hard pinch of poverty,” wrote Yorkshire historian Frank Peel, to homes “where it had hitherto been a stranger.” Food was scarce and rapidly becoming more costly. Then, 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 nightly at first, then sporadically, and then in waves, eventually spreading across a 70-mile swath of northern England from Loughborough in the south to Wakefield in the north. Fearing a national movement, the government soon positioned thousands of soldiers to defend factories. Parliament passed a measure to make machine-breaking a capital offense.

But the Luddites were neither as organized nor as dangerous as authorities believed. They set some factories on fire, but mainly they confined themselves to breaking machines. In truth, they inflicted less violence than they encountered. In one of the bloodiest incidents, in April 1812, some 2,000 protesters mobbed a mill near Manchester. The owner ordered his men to fire into the crowd, killing at least 3 and wounding 18. Soldiers killed at least 5 more the next day. Earlier that month, a crowd of about 150 protesters had exchanged gunfire with the defenders of a mill in Yorkshire, and two Luddites died. Soon, Luddites there retaliated by killing a mill owner, who in the thick of the protests had supposedly boasted that he would ride up to his britches in Luddite blood. Three Luddites were hanged for the murder; other courts, often under political pressure, sent many more to the gallows or to exile in Australia before the last such disturbance, in 1816.

(snip)

As the Industrial Revolution began, workers naturally worried about being displaced by increasingly efficient machines. But the Luddites themselves “were totally fine with machines,” says Kevin Binfield, editor of the 2004 collection Writings of the Luddites. They confined their attacks to manufacturers who used machines in what they called “a fraudulent and deceitful manner” to get around standard labor practices. “They just wanted machines that made high-quality goods,” says Binfield, “and they wanted these machines to be run by workers who had gone through an apprenticeship and got paid decent wages. Those were their only concerns.”