by Ned Ludd
November 2011 to January 2013 is the 200th anniversary of the Luddite uprisings: a great opportunity to celebrate their struggle and to redress the wrongs done to them and their name. But why would a group of Earth First! activists, concerned primarily with protecting wilderness, be interested in a 200-year-old uprising based on a labor dispute involving textile workers in England? The conventional answer is that Luddism is an anti-technology, primitivist philosophy and that it has a tendency towards direct action, but the truth about its significance is both different and deeper.
The Luddites were not primitivists, and the opposition between capitalist, technocratic progressivism and a supposedly primitivist Luddism is a sterile argument, framed in terms which suit the techno-progressivists. The portrayal of the Luddites as people opposed to all technology and progress is a history written by the victors. It is ironic that while the ideology of progress through technology has hardened into a rigid dogma, which must condemn the slightest criticism as “anti-science,” in fact, the Luddites opposed only technology “hurtful to Commonality” (i.e. to the common good). They were involved in a struggle for workers’ rights that focused on particular machines that were destroying their trades and livelihoods, and they destroyed those machines whilst leaving others alone. The crucial significance of Luddism is that, almost uniquely amongst radical movements, it addresses both the technological and social aspects of domination, and it is vital that we hold both of these together. Continue reading