Some time ago, a group of angry people got together to figure out what to do with their anger. They had been put out of work by forces beyond their control. They didn’t like the state of things. Those in power told them to adapt or die, but the angry people decided that this was a false choice. They deserved employment. They deserved dignity. So they fought back, destructively and violently at times, drawing endless condemnation in the media, as well as measured support. But the police fought back even harder, and the burgeoning movement was crushed under the boot heels of state and industry. Today, we even make snide little jokes about the whole episode.
I could be talking about the global Occupy movement, which got its start in the streets of New York late last year. Or I could be talking about another affair, farther back in history: the brief period in the early 1800s when a group of British men waged war on their former employers–and on their employers’ machines. They were called the Luddites, after a man named Ned Ludd, who destroyed a few knitting frames after being mistreated at work, and who was also probably made up. But the movement itself was very real, and its broader aims and message still resonate now.
As Richard Corniff writes in the Smithsonian magazine, the Luddites got their start on March 11 of 1811, when British troops broke up a protest for better wages in Nottingham, which was a hub for manufacturing at the time. That evening, in retaliation, a band of workers destroyed textile machines in a nearby town. Like Mohammed Bouazizi setting himself ablaze or Adbusters calling for the occupation of Wall Street, this one incident set off an astonishing and decentralized movement. “Similar attacks occurred nightly at first, then sporadically, and then in waves,” Corniff says, “eventually spreading across a 70-mile swath of northern England from Loughborough in the south to Wakefield in the north.” Facing incipient mass revolution, the government marshaled thousands of soldiers, executed protesters, and passed legislation that made machine-breaking punishable by death. Just five years after the movement started, it effectively ended, and for a long time, erstwhile Luddites refused to identify themselves publicly for fear of retribution. The Luddites, it seemed, were obsolete.
But the word “Luddite” lives on, mostly as an insult. We use Luddites to define what we’re not: I use Twitter obsessively and download music illegally, and anyone who doesn’t, like Uncle Gary, is a “Luddite.” The idea that technological change causes unemployment is termed the “Luddite fallacy” by pompous economists. Even Karl Marx, whom you’d think would be sympathetic to these early class warriors, criticized them for their lack of sophistication: “It took both time and experience before workers learnt to distinguish between machinery and their employment by capital,” he writes in Capital, “and therefore to transfer their attacks from the material instruments of production to the form of society which utilizes those instruments.”
But we’ve got the Luddites all wrong. For starters, they weren’t really anti-technology. By the early 19th century, the Industrial Revolution was already well under way, and some of the machinery that Luddites destroyed, like the stocking frame, had actually been around for centuries. Our popular conception of Luddites is deliberately simplified: they show up to work one day, spot the shiny new gadgets that have stolen their jobs, and go apeshit. The Luddites’ industrial sabotage, though, was actually part of a broader social uprising. As Corniff writes, the British working class of 1811 faced economic turmoil, rampant unemployment and a costly, endless war. (Sound familiar?) “Machines were not the only, or even the major, threat to the textile workers of the Midlands and North,”argues Kevin Binfield in Writings of the Luddites. “Machines and the use of machines to drive down wages were simply the most accessible targets for expressions of anger and direct action.” For the Luddites, attacking their employers’ hard capital was a symbolic act of protest against a larger order, not an effort to halt technological innovation–and, contrary to Marx’s argument, not an attack solely on the machines themselves.
In the Luddites, we see the seeds of movements like Occupy–those that have few specific goals or demands but come, instead, from generalized rage at systems and processes: industrialization and the birth of modern capitalism, in the case of the Luddites; recession, political cronyism and an unhinged financial sector, in the case of Occupy. Yes, the Luddites sought higher wages, more employment, and better working conditions. But, Corniff writes, they “were neither as organized nor as dangerous as authorities believed.” They were a ragtag group of demonstrators who fought back because they had little choice. The Luddites broke machines for the same reason that Occupy Wall Street occupied Wall Street: they sought to battle intangible economic changes using physical confrontation, to make implicit class war explicit. Machinery is a symptom; recession is a symptom. Inequality is the disease.
In a 1984 essay on Luddites, Thomas Pynchon argues that they were motivated to destroy machines by two key “multiplications of effect”: “One was the concentration of capital that each machine represented, and the other was the ability of each machine to put a certain number of humans out of work–to be ‘worth’ that many human souls.” We live in a different era today, but Pynchon’s point remains valid; if anything, the concentration of capital has only grown more obscene, and our modern financial “machines” are able to put even more people out of work. In 19th-century England, you might find yourself unemployed because of a new textile apparatus in your factory. In 21st-century New York, you might find yourself unemployed because a bank used a highly complex financial instrument to bundle the value of your home into a security that was, it turned out, wholly worthless. You lost everything, but those ultimately responsible for that particularly precarious concentration of capital lost very little; meanwhile, mortgage-backed securities are much better at putting people out of work than a few measly stocking frames.
To extrapolate from Pynchon’s argument, the destruction of property was, for the Luddites, an emotional, cathartic act, not necessarily a practical one: this machine may be worth so many human souls, but not if it is just a pile of scraps. Similarly, the value of a movement like Occupy is its visceral, unapologetic politics of opposition. Pynchon even has a term for this sort of angry diehard: the Badass. “When times are hard, and we feel at the mercy of forces many times more powerful,” he writes, “don’t we, in seeking some equalizer, turn, if only in imagination, in wish, to the Badass–the djinn, the golem, the hulk, the superhero–who will resist what otherwise would overwhelm us?” That’s Occupy Wall Street: the doomed antihero. If the banks were too big to fail, then Occupy was too badass to succeed.
A few months ago, at the height of Occupy’s prominence in the media, it was fashionable (and easy) for liberal commentators to announce their hesitant support before insisting that the movement declare some kind of concrete endgame. Jane Mayer, for instance, pointed to the examples of the civil-rights and anti-Keystone XL struggles; they had real successes because they had real goals. There were myriad problems with Occupy: irresolvable internal tensions, the plague of conspiracy theorists, an unfortunate dearth of self-awareness. But the liberal insistence on “demands”–as if Occupy were holding Wall Street for ransom–always had an air of misunderstanding to it. What if the goals of your movement are too sweeping? Is “complete social transformation” really something you can politely request?
Like Camus’ rebel or Orwell’s revolutionary, the badass Luddite carries a certain dark romance–it’s no coincidence that Pynchon uses words like “djinn” and “golem,” with all the menace and magic that they conjure. That makes him the perfect hero for our hopeless times: he lays waste to the tools around him, spreads like a virus, charges headlong into failure. So I’d like to suggest a new definition of “Luddite,” one that better reflects the push and pull of the twenty-first century. Today, a Luddite might not be one who opposes technological change, but one who opposes the inevitable.
Drew Nelles is the editor-in-chief of Maisonneuve. Follow him on Twitter at @dsnelles.
