Luddite machine-breaking defended freedom and dignity alongside jobs

Evidence

Distinguishing between those movements where attacks on private property and machinery were tactics designed to force concessions from employers, and those movements energized by workers “concerned, not with technical progress in the abstract, but with the practical twin problems of preventing unemployment and maintaining the customary standard of life, which included nonmonetary factors such as freedom and dignity,” Hobsbawm linked the revolts that echoed the ideals initially recorded among the Spitalfields weavers in 1675. Hobsbawm tells us of successive generations of weavers at Spitalfields rioting in 1719 (“against wearers of printed calicoes”), in 1736, and again, in the 1760s, against machines; in 1778–80, machine-breakers appeared in Lancashire. Luddism, proper, appeared in 1802, peaked in the 1811–13 period (spinningjennys), before largely disappearing after the suppression of the farm labor machine-breakers in 1830 in the southern counties, in East Anglia, and the Midlands. More interestingly, these Luddite movements not only reflected a resistance to the machine as a tool of capitalist production on the part of workers, but also served to reveal the existence of a broader social hostility to capitalist industry: — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 232

Categorization

Category: Factual Claims

• XREF: The pre-capitalist values defended by Luddites parallel values Robinson attributes to the Black radical tradition’s African origins.

Related

• Luddite machine-breaking recurred across a century before its 1830 suppression. (similarity 0.91)
• Machine-breaking revolts spanned a century and a half of English labor history (similarity 0.90)
• Machine-breaking resisted capitalism’s assault on customary life, not machinery per se. (similarity 0.86)