[lbo-talk] Luddism: "Collective Bargaining by Riot"

Yoshie Furuhashi furuhashi.1 at osu.edu
Sat Oct 16 15:16:18 PDT 2004



>>>Eubulides wrote:
>>>>Please don't perpetuate the stereotype of the Luddites!
>>>They half deserve it for focusing on the machines and not the
>>>social relations.
>>>Doug
>>Would you rather that they had simply killed the capitalists?
>Huh? The only choices are breaking machines or breaking capitalists?
>Doug

Why did the Luddites choose machine-breaking (i.e., sabotage) as their means? Because, under the conditions of early industrial capitalism, manufactories were small and scattered through different regions, making large-scale strikes impractical. Eric Hobsbawm called it "collective bargaining by riot." And they did win wage and usage concessions and reduction in food prices that they could not have won otherwise. See Kevin Binfield, ed., _Writings of the Luddites_ (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004): <http://campus.murraystate.edu/academic/faculty/kevin.binfield/luddites/LudditeHistory.htm>. -- Yoshie

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