09. Reinvigorating Luddism
- Robins and Webster, Ch. 2 -
Introduction
The Luddite Movement began in the early 19th Century (1800s) when secret groups of rural workers began destroying the new farm machinery brought in to Yorkshire. Many of these people were arrested and several were executed in 1813. Thereafter, the Luddite movement no longer existed.
Then and now, those in power claimed that the Luddites were an irrational anachronism because they were against what no rational person should ever be against - the progress of technology. In fact, the term Luddite or opposition to scientific and technological progress has now become so commonplace that everyone is eager to identify with progress as a law of nature.
The first problem with this pro-technology kind of thinking, however, is that it elevates technological progress into a law of nature that human beings need to conform with. Thus, it renders resistance to any technological change implausible if not impossible. Technological positivism “insulates” the world of science and technology from the rest of society making its “internal logic” the only really important issue. Technological positivism thereby ignores the fact that there may be other values besides those that are scientific and technological that we might want to fight for, such as the “capacity to enjoy, to create and to be free.” An absolute faith in technological progress does not necessarily make our lives more enjoyable, creative, and certainly not more free.
The second problem with this emphasis on technological progress as a law of nature is that it ignores the fact that technology has never been neutral. It has always been allied with, and reinforcing of, an attempt to subjugate the labour of people within a capitalist society. When new agricultural machinery made its way into Lancashire and Yorkshire in Great Britain, it was not simply about improving agricultural farming. It was about limiting the power of rural workers to establish their own destiny. It forced many of them to migrate from their homes into the urban centers to find work. The new work, both in rural agriculture and urban industries, was a form of labour that the workers no longer had any control of.
In fact, technology has always been the handmaiden of capitalism and has continually and consistently deprived working people - the vast majority of people in our society - of any say in the kind of society that they want to live in. From at least the early nineteenth-century on, the world has had to adapt to the logic of market capitalism. That adaptation began in the workplace but has extended to all areas of our lives. Now even our leisure choices are dictated by the logic of capitalism and the quality of our environment is submerged within capitalist utilitarian frameworks from which we can only with difficulty escape.
The Nature of Luddite Resistance
At such a time in our history, it behooves us to reconsider the resistance to technology that was symbolized by the Luddites and the problems that gave rise to such resistance. Resistance actually began way back in the sixteenth-century when British landowners began to enclose formerly feudal land for sheep pasturing, thereby depriving people of their individual patch of land and also the commons on which they grazed any cattle and from which they collected wood, water and perhaps game such as fish and rabbits. The peasants actually fought these appropriations in the courts where they could use the traditional common law in their defense.
Over the next three centuries, enclosures continued, mainly to reform agriculture and make it more capitalistic. During the late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century, the British peasantry was transformed into more of a labour force as tenant farming replaced strip farming and as British farmers implemented the crop rotation system. There occurred sporadic violence and opposition throughout Great Britain as these changes took place. But the last-stand took place when General Ned Lud, Captain Swing and their followers organized rural workers in the countryside to block the introduction of new farm machinery.
Now, the stereotype of a Luddite is of a violent and irrational person who doesn’t understand but tries to block progress. If you examine the Luddite movement carefully, as the historian E.P. Thompson has done, however, you get a very different picture. The Luddites were very rational and measured in their approach. They blocked the introduction of machinery but they generally targeted those farmers who were bent on transforming rural community. Their opposition was not to the machines per se but to the introduction of a new capitalist society in which they no longer had any say.
The primary targets of the Luddites were people like William Cartwright of Rawfolds near Leeds. Such men were advocates of both the new market economics and machinery. Their goal was to transform society into a competitive capitalist machine where profit making was the only principle. In the process, they had no time for the traditional values of rural community like paternalism, fair wages and prices, good neighbourliness, and charity for the poor. We should realize that, in the early nineteenth-century, people like Cartwright were not only disliked by workers, but also by other farmers and aristocrats. Their desire to impose changes on all of rural society was the problem
The Luddites particularly objected to the values of the new market society and advocates like Cartwright. This characteristic of Luddism is important to note because it makes the Luddite agenda much more understandable if one considers that the introduction of a new capitalist society was neither natural nor always progressive. Later on in the century, many in the dominant middle classes themselves rejected some of the traits of market capitalism. By 1850, the new liberalism was putting a more human and humane face on capitalism by correcting the worst features of the market. What the Luddites objected to was the amoral and immoral character of the emerging market and the lack of consultation with those whose lives it most affected.
A Comment on Feudalism
Feudal servitude is usually contrasted negatively with capitalist freedom. It is too often assumed that peasants in feudal society had no power. Nothing could be further from the truth. In feudal societies, tradition, custom and moral values have considerable force. Those in power, even kings and nobles, cannot easily change the direction of a traditional society. In Great Britain, these customary arrangements were enshrined in the common law of the land.
Now, turning peasants into wage labourers might look like giving them freedom. But it that freedom deprives them of their land, customary livelihood and traditional roles, and forces them to go to work as wage labourers in the hated factories (called Satanic mills), then the term freedom could seem very hollow.
Always, when using terms like freedom and equality, we need to ask who benefits from this freedom and equality.
The Luddites and followers of Captain Swing were neither irrational nor ignorant. They opposed the market economy with a well-articulated moral economy of their own. This alternate form of discourse has been obscured over the course of three centuries of technological boosterism; but it is re-emerging today with concerns that capitalism, science and technology are destroying our environment. Today, more than ever, we need ways of countering an agenda that seems so rational but that is destroying our planet.
From Agricultural to Global Enclosures
The first enclosures were of the British rural countryside and led to the development of a capitalist society. British agriculture was so improved by enclosures and capitalist farming that it was able to feed a growing population, including those who went into the towns and cities and who provided labour for the Industrial Revolution. Other countries, like France and Scotland saw what England achieved by agricultural improvement and sought to apply a similar technology in their own countries. In this way, improvement or development became identified with progress.
It may seem a short step from agricultural improvement to technological progress but it really is a major paradigm shift. One can make technology an engine of progress; that is a rational choice. But once one identifies technology with progress and elevates it to the status of a natural law, one caricatures the concept of progress and removes it from the “realm of the social.” That is irrational. A rational choice would be to make technology the servant of social and human progress, not to make society subservient to technological progress. Not only is this putting the technological cart before the human horse, but also it virtually eliminates the development of any potential alternatives. When this happens, the “ever-greater human knowledge and control over nature” works against humanity.
When the eighteenth-century enclosure movement transformed the English countryside, it destroyed traditional communities. The growing principle of private property and the desire to control the mode of production deprived many people of the common land that they shared for pasture. These individuals were forced to move elsewhere to pursue their livelihood. It could be argued that, in the aggregate, this development was all for the better. Eventually, the Industrial Revolution increased productivity and effected a rise in the standard of living that benefited most people.
To rely on the development principle for future progress is a much more dangerous assumption. Now a new form of commons is being transformed into private property for development. The world’s commons are being enclosed and exploited including the forests, oceans and many eco-systems that sustain us. There is no guarantee that the neo-enclosure movement will do anything other than deplete the world’s resources much more quickly than we could have hoped.
Globalization is nothing new. It really is nothing more than the extension of the principles of development to the entire globe. The primary goals are still the same as the goals of those who enclosed their land in the eighteenth-century. These are: 1) to achieve greater productivity and profit through economies of scale; 2) to commodify all aspects of life; 3) to submerge social within economic relations; and 4) to dominate and control labour. The domination of labour in the modern world has taken a particularly vicious form because of the hegemony of the machine within capitalist relationships.
The Alienation of the Labourer
Let us begin by assuming that labour is a creative and transforming power that gives value. Technology is simultaneously a product of human labour and an object or thing that improves human labour or productivity. Up until the nineteenth-century, it would have been inconceivable to view technology as something apart from human beings and their labour. Technology meant the tools that human beings use to labour more effectively.
Something began in the nineteenth-century that transformed this natural relationship. In market society, labour became a commodity completely subject to economic laws. Labour as a commodity is an abstraction that devalues human essence and creativity. As a commodity, a labourer becomes “estranged from himself” or herself as a complete person. Another term we can use to describe this development is alienation. If people are subject to market forces primarily, human labour becomes a force outside of oneself and something that can destroy one’s autonomy. Labour in a market society controls us rather than defines us.
This dehumanization process is greatly accelerated by technology. In a market society, we begin to view technology as something apart from, and superior to, human beings. We thereby invert the usual order of things to such an extent that human beings began lose many of their former attributes and machines began to be endowed with a power that was super-human. This inversion of consciousness can be measured by the fetishism of technology. In a primitive society, creating a fetish means endowing an object with some form of mystical or magical power. Many in modern society carry this fetishism to an extreme and excessive extent with respect to technology. Technology therefore becomes an even greater power over us and draws from some of us a reverence that was once restricted to religious beliefs.
The creation of technological gods that have power over us has become a serious psychological issue in modern times. This transformation was aided and abetted by the factories where, for the first time, machines (in Marxist terms the mode of production) appeared not only to be external to, but also to subjugate, human beings. In his essay on The Philosophy of Manufactures, Andrew Ure presented a vision of machines and factories as the ideal forms of social organization. Only by obeying the logic of the machine could people become rational and happy. Opposition to machines, or even to the modern mode of production within capitalism, was not merely irrational but tantamount to an attack on modern civilization. Ure was one of a host of writers who attacked the early trade union movement as simultaneously irrational and selfish.
The only way to overcome alienation, therefore, was to identify so closely with the advance of technology as to make its power one’s own. This helps to explain the extreme fetishism for technology among many otherwise intelligent people today. Because technological progress has so much power over our lives, it appears that we have only two choices - to oppose it or to embrace it. If we oppose it, we confront the negative spectre of Luddism. If we embrace it, we lose important aspects of our humanity and our independence. What is interesting is how difficult it is for us regard technology as simply a tool that we can direct to our own purposes. It would appear that the inner logic of technological progress has become independent from human choice making.
Capitalism and Technology
Of course, even a few moments of reflection tells us that technology is not entirely independent of social forces. The inherent dynamic of technology revolves around ever increasing efficiency. Efficiency is not something that exists for its own sake; it is a “mechanism of control and domination” in a capitalist society. Machinery and productive systems have become more and more efficient for two reasons: 1) to increase productivity; and 2) to control workers and society. In fact, these two rationales tend to converge and expand in modern technological society because increased productivity requires that people be forced to consume the products of technological advance in ever greater numbers. In modern consumer society, therefore, the concept of freedom becomes mute.
The French sociologist Gaudemar describes this ever-increasing control of the worker/consumer as the mobilization of populations. First, the rural population of England was mobilized in such a way as to be forced to enter the factories. Second, once in the factories, workers were subject to new and unnatural working rhythms that increased productivity and lessened the chance of interfering with the productivity of machines. Third, once a “pliant and co-operative workforce” was established, a new form of scientific management in the plant elevated the power of integrated systems over human workers. Both workers and managers now operated within a highly sophisticated division of labour aimed at maximizing productivity to entirely new levels. Fourth, and in some ways much more insidious, these modern plants needed to find a market for goods produced within massive economies of scale. Now, society was mobilized to effect the greater distribution and consumption of goods. A consumer society was born in the 1870s; it was made the primary economic principle of Western capitalism after World War II; and now a global consumer society is being created in the lawless conditions that resemble the early industrial revolution.
What is being described here is the “unremitting extension of capitalist hegemony,” and not simply a neutral law of technological progress. In fact, the idea of technological progress is a good example of what Karl Marx calls false consciousness within ideology. Those who control the mode of production in modern society want to espouse their values; the value we attach to progress is what allows them to increase domination and control without undue interference from the kind of people who used to be called Luddites.
The Birth of a Consumer Society
Some Marxist thinkers, such as Antonio Gramsci, point to the way that governments and capitalists have colluded to mobilize human populations in their interest. In particular, Gramsci suggests that the political adoption of Keynesian economics - providing full employment and generating consumer demand - by western governments was part and parcel of a “recomposition of culture, leisure, consumption, and social space (i.e. suburbanism)” that allowed the new plants to find markets for their goods. Politicians and capitalists still have choices that they deny to most of the people in society. They have been more than willing to interfere with the otherwise sacrosanct laws of the marketplace if they can keep technological progress moving forward.
The problem and the danger is that technological progress is designed to reward those who control or predominate in society. There is no guarantee that technological progress translates into social progress. Technological progress in the modern age is based overwhelmingly on “exchange value” or the maximization of profits. Modern capitalism is far removed from a marketplace based on “use values.”
The theorist Theodore Veblen pointed out that twentieth-century capitalism is an entirely new form of managerial capitalism characterized by impersonal bureaucracies, highly productive systems, and an extensive division of labour that includes many layers of management. Much of this management, and the goods that are produced, are characterized by enormous waste. The clearest form of waste in the modern economic system is marketing or advertising, which now can constitute as much as 90% of the cost of a product. Veblen suggests that the sole purpose of most of these costs of modern capitalism is vendibility or sales.
What Veblen is describing is a wasteful consumer society where social resources are poured into the production of goods, most of which are not needed or even useful. The salaries of many people, including the huge salaries of senior managers in North America, are based on the ability to sell these wasteful goods. Such a waste of resources might have sunk a society in the past; it can only be sustained in the present for two reasons: 1) the productive capacity of modern industry is enormous; 2) people are willing to work much harder to earn the money to purchase consumer goods. Writing in the early twentieth-century, Veblen saw no reason to think that this system would stop perpetuating itself.
Of course, we now appreciate that a consumer society doesn’t simply waste social resources but also produces a great deal of waste as a by product. Eventually, the production of waste, especially in the form of energy emissions, can have a seriously negative impact on the quality of life. Especially as the global economy transforms the world into units of consumption, that degree of waste can come back to haunt us in ways that Veblen could not easily envision when he wrote about it in 1913.
Sociality and Civility
What is perhaps most intriguing about the new global enclosure movement is the fact that it resurrects many of the old battles between the moral and market economy that were first encapsulated in the resistance of the Luddites. Global communities are being transformed as capitalism spreads its wings abroad. As we witness the distinctiveness of different societies being absorbed in a multinational corporate world, we might want to revisit the issues of technological progress and the impact of unimpeded technology on the social and natural world.
Capitalism did not develop in a social void. One of the reasons why capitalism and technology were able to conquer the world was because they inherited the sociality and civility of earlier social formations. For example, capitalism was always associated with political freedom because it emerged in a British upper and middle society that valued the negative freedoms of the individual and the good neighbourliness that was thought to occur when independent rational beings interacted with one another. During the nineteenth-century, it would have been difficult to discover any group of individuals more polite than the British middle classes. During the same period, it would have been difficult to discover any group of individuals with a greater sense of social responsibility and a sense of philanthropy than the American middle classes.
Despite the excesses of the Cartwrights and some factory owners, capitalist society never completely bought into market values at the expense of other equally important values. That is one reason why, if capitalist society was unfair and exploitative, it still was guided and controlled. In Great Britain, for example, the new liberalism put a human and humane face on capitalism. The merchants who built Canada also built hospitals and schools. Their successors created a social net that protected the very poor and weak from the worst aspects of an unbridled market economy.
These value systems, however, have little to do with the laws of the marketplace. They have even less to do with the values of the more faceless modern corporations who are now beginning to exploit the globe. With respect to technological progress, social values are usually perceived as a threat or at least a hindrance. Technological development is increasingly becoming detached from the social fabric so that it can pursue its own inner logic of efficiency. As global markets and technological imperatives converge, we can expect greater and greater damage to the notion of community and to the integrity of eco-systems. As Robbins and Webster so cogently put it “Since the mid-1990s, there has been a growing awareness of the void at the heart of neo-liberalism.”
Thus, the issues that engaged the Luddites now confront us again, but in a more intense form. Modern capitalism, with technology at its side, has the power to rip apart the social fabric of nations simply by moving operations and capital to other parts of the developing world. It is simultaneously transforming that world in ways that demonstrate the amoral nature of capitalism allied with technology. Whereas early capitalism was intertwined with political freedom, global capitalism need not privilege freedom at all (with the exception perhaps of wealthy owners of private property or the means of production). Capitalism currently is thriving in nations whose citizens are not merely not free but where the very concept of free political discourse is considered to be a threat to the status quo.
Conclusion
The issue of environmental sustainability in contemporary society is the one issue that challenges the ideology of corporate capitalism and encourages us to rid our thinking of technological fetishism. The immediate danger to the environment encourages us to submerge the economy and technology within a genuine natural order. The understanding that human communities are part of complex eco-systems encourages us to reassert social values over technophilic propaganda.
The marriage of technology and capitalism took place in the nineteenth-century. The improvement in our standard of living up until the 1950s has blinded us to the dangers inherent in such an alliance. Arguably, Western societies have been engaged in “a long war of the technosphere against the biosphere, that began when the looms of weavers were removed from their cottages and housed in factories. That was when workers lost control over technology and technology became an alien force that enslaved us. Technology, and its ethic of efficiency, have been increasing their controls over us ever since.
The solution is not to reconnect with traditional ways of life and livelihood, although that predilection at least acknowledges that we face a serious problem. Most of us are not going to be able to retreat into a face-to-face community with shared spiritual values. There is a strong sense of nostalgia in the neo-ruralism of some neo-Luddites that is far too simplistic to ever be effective. We don’t need to scrap technology altogether to understand that, within the current capitalist mode of production, technology is more of a problem than a potential solution.
We don’t even need to get rid of capitalism to begin addressing the problem. What we do need are more opportunities, fora, and political and civil mechanisms that will allow us to reassert and reaffirm the fact that markets and technology exist within, and for the benefit, of human communities. At the very least, we need to redirect the pattern of the capitalist mobilization of society that has so impoverished social values and any conception of a civil society.
Unlike the Luddites, there is some reason to be more optimistic about this struggle. In the first place, it is a global struggle rather than a local struggle. Information can flow outside of hegemonic channels to society generally. The variety of cultural perspectives on these issues will enrich debate and provide multiple alternatives to the capitalist technological fusion. Finally, two-thirds of the world has existed largely outside of orbit of modern capitalism except in the form of colonies or countries producing raw materials. They have not yet been brainwashed into believing that ever increasing consumption brings happiness.
The notes presented here are for the AK NATS 1760.06 “Science, Technology and Society” course offered in the Fall/Winter Semester of 2001/2002 by the Atkinson College of York University, Toronto, Canada and taught by John Dwyer. The lectures are based on the following texts:
- Martin Bridgstock et al, Science, Technology and Society: An Introduction (Cambridge University Press, 1998), ISBN 0-521-58735-2
- Kevin Robbins and Frank Webster, Times of the Technoculture: From the Information Society to the Virtual Life (New York, Routledge, 1999), ISBN 0-415-16115-0
- Albert H. Teich, Technology and the Future (New York, St. Martin’s Press, 2000), ISBN 0-312-01885-1
For more about John Dwyer, visit: http://www.sayitagain.com/ivorytower/