Machine-breaking resisted capitalism’s assault on customary life, not machinery per se.

Evidence

One quite obvious expression of working-class anger toward the impoverishment of their social lives and, as Hammond called it, “Imagination,” is the movement to which Hobsbawm refers as the “machine breakers.” 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. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 232

Categorization

• XREF: Echoes E.P. Thompson’s moral economy of the crowd and sits alongside other accounts of why pre-industrial labor rose against machines; contradicts the textbook reading of Luddism as mere technological ignorance. — connects to: Peasant handmill resistance was economic autonomy seeking, not technological conservatism. — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology,…, 263
• DEFINE: Clarifies that early labor unrest split into tactical-protest versus customary-life-preservation movements, a distinction worth holding onto.