WORLD WORLDWIDE FRANCE News Journal Update - (en) France, UCL AL #337 - Culture, Read: Kirpatrick Sale, "The Luddite Revolt" (ca, de, fr, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

 The arrival of steam engines would upset the social relations of the whole of

society and lead to a series of revolts by weavers. The Luddite movement started
in 1811, became widespread in December and ended in April 1817. ---- In the
meantime, the break-ups of trades multiplied. Craftsmen, opposed to the use of
the new steam engines, came to destroy the machines and instill terror among the
owners of factories. ---- The machines meant the arrival of a less qualified
workforce, hence a reduction in wages and an impoverishment of the population.
Linked to this, a collapse in the quality of productions and therefore an attack
on the reputation of their profession.
The Luddite revolt aimed above all to preserve wages, jobs and trades. She
started in a market affected by the crisis. The peasants abandoned their
countryside to swell the flood of the destitute in the cities.

Luddism is not a spontaneous and uncontrolled reaction of violence against
machines. The technical innovations allowing this increase in production caused a
large-scale social imbalance. The revolt denounced a technology, the
dispossession by machines, but for all that can we make a plea against industrial
capitalism? A critique of technological misdeeds?

Sale's story invites us to build bridges with more recent acts of rejection of
machines. This is the thesis that underlies his work. Can we follow it there? Can
we consider the Luddites as enemies of technology? No. Should we see in this an
incomprehensible refusal of progress? Neither.

To affirm that "For the Luddites, alienation is there first, in the
materialization of technique, in the destitution of experience, in the evacuation
of humans" seems to me to be going a bit too quickly. The Luddite revolt remains
a popular revolt, a time of class struggle. I will have more reservations about
transhistorical extrapolations than anything can justify.

Dominique Sureau (UCL Angers)

Kirpatrick Sale, The Luddite Revolt, Editions de l'Échappée poche, January 2023,
328 pages, 13 euros.

https://www.unioncommunistelibertaire.org/?Lire-Kirpatrick-Sale-La-revolte-luddite
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