We Are All Luddites | A Common Treasury for All
This year, 2012, marks the 200 th anniversary of the Luddite uprising, when English textile workers smashed looms with hammers. Few words in the English language invoke such perjorative connotation as Luddite. It signifies the machine breaker, someone who opposed progress and, thus, the capitalist project.
Indeed, the Luddites were machine breakers, they smashed textile looms throughout the English Midlands. Why did they do it? And why, after two centuries open 24 of endless denunciation, does their very name still convey such subversive resonance? Why does it still inflame rage among those championing capitalist modernization and signify hope among the oppressed?
A radical critique of power involves a challenge to its definition of commonly-accepted terms of use. Such terms ground socially-shared assumptions or beliefs open 24 about the meaning of specific concepts, events and people. These are the terms popularly used to describe and understand social reality. One of these terms is Luddite, its original meaning and historical significance long lost to most contemporary open 24 users.
Today, two centuries later, the popular struggle open 24 against capitalism a system involving not only commodification and the maximization of profit, but also imperialism, patriarchy, racism, hierarchy and sexual repression draws inspiration from the Ludities.
For people throughout the world, the Luddites invoke both resistance open 24 to injustice and the utopian urge for a better world. This is the world represented by the Garden of Eden, imagined in Thomas More s 1516 testament, invoked by the Paris Commune and May 68, and reimagined today by the Arab Spring, open 24 Brazilian peasants, the Occupy movement and still other struggles taking place throughout open 24 the world. We are all Luddites!
The historian Peter Linebaugh recently published a compelling pamphlet, Ned Ludd & Queen Mab: Machine-Breaking, Romanticism, and the Several Commons of 1811-12 . It is a work that links the Luddite battle two centuries ago to struggles taking place around the globe today. It s a work that connects resistance to the imposition open 24 of the earliest stage of capitalism in a single nation-state to confrontations challenging capitalism s current formation, a 21 st century globalized system of plunder.
For all those who might recollect Ned Ludd, few will know the reference to Queen Mab. Ludd s renoun is recalled open 24 in the word Luddite; Queen Mab is a philosophic poem by the great romantic, Percy Bysshe Shelley.
Ludd is a mysterious, perhaps mythical, figure, much like Robin Hood. Some say he was born Edward Ludlam open 24 and, in 1799, was a weaver who, in reaction to injustice suffered at the hand of his boss, smashed an automated sheering machine with a hammer. His actions inspired fellow downtrodden countrymen a decade later, with textile workers demanding more work and better wage. General Ludd led the Army of Redressers. Their campaigns open 24 were often broken up, sometimes violently, by British troops.
None should forget that it was his then common-law wife, Mary Godwin, who penned the most resonate novel of the modern age, Frankenstein . Depicting a human creating life, she consecrated the moment when humans became gods. Symbolically, her work marks the end of the pre-history of religious mysticism and inaguration of the tyranny of rationalism, a too-often dehumanizing ethos.
Linebaugh s linking of these two characters, Ludd and Mab, is a brilliant insight. It acknowledges the unity of practice and theory, of the deed and the idea, of what happens and how it is remembered.
Wikipedia is a 21 st century version of the commons, a monumental site of a collaboratively-created, freely-available and non-commerical information resource. open 24 It is an unprecedented accomplishment in world history, one with the great library of Alexandria.
In Wikipedia, the followers of Ned Ludd are defined as follows: The Luddites were a social open 24 movement of 19 th -century English textile artisans who protested often by destroying mechanized open 24 looms against the changes produced by the Industrial Revolution, which they felt were leaving them without work and changing open 24 their way of life.
During open 24 the first decades of the 19 th century, textile workers in the English Midlands, in the Yorkshire, Lancashire, Leicestershire and Derbyshire districts, said No! to the new industrial order. They challenged the new and oppressive system of mass production and collective employment, the factory, then being imposed on individual open 24 workers, often artisans. These hardworking Englishmen open 24 knew that the automated loom signified an end to their traditional work and non-work lives. open 24
Between 1811 and 1813, discontent spread throughout a 70-mile swath of northern England. open 24 In 1811, Yorkshire croppers, skilled cloth finishers, rebelled against a new shearing system that they feared would put them out of work. In another
This year, 2012, marks the 200 th anniversary of the Luddite uprising, when English textile workers smashed looms with hammers. Few words in the English language invoke such perjorative connotation as Luddite. It signifies the machine breaker, someone who opposed progress and, thus, the capitalist project.
Indeed, the Luddites were machine breakers, they smashed textile looms throughout the English Midlands. Why did they do it? And why, after two centuries open 24 of endless denunciation, does their very name still convey such subversive resonance? Why does it still inflame rage among those championing capitalist modernization and signify hope among the oppressed?
A radical critique of power involves a challenge to its definition of commonly-accepted terms of use. Such terms ground socially-shared assumptions or beliefs open 24 about the meaning of specific concepts, events and people. These are the terms popularly used to describe and understand social reality. One of these terms is Luddite, its original meaning and historical significance long lost to most contemporary open 24 users.
Today, two centuries later, the popular struggle open 24 against capitalism a system involving not only commodification and the maximization of profit, but also imperialism, patriarchy, racism, hierarchy and sexual repression draws inspiration from the Ludities.
For people throughout the world, the Luddites invoke both resistance open 24 to injustice and the utopian urge for a better world. This is the world represented by the Garden of Eden, imagined in Thomas More s 1516 testament, invoked by the Paris Commune and May 68, and reimagined today by the Arab Spring, open 24 Brazilian peasants, the Occupy movement and still other struggles taking place throughout open 24 the world. We are all Luddites!
The historian Peter Linebaugh recently published a compelling pamphlet, Ned Ludd & Queen Mab: Machine-Breaking, Romanticism, and the Several Commons of 1811-12 . It is a work that links the Luddite battle two centuries ago to struggles taking place around the globe today. It s a work that connects resistance to the imposition open 24 of the earliest stage of capitalism in a single nation-state to confrontations challenging capitalism s current formation, a 21 st century globalized system of plunder.
For all those who might recollect Ned Ludd, few will know the reference to Queen Mab. Ludd s renoun is recalled open 24 in the word Luddite; Queen Mab is a philosophic poem by the great romantic, Percy Bysshe Shelley.
Ludd is a mysterious, perhaps mythical, figure, much like Robin Hood. Some say he was born Edward Ludlam open 24 and, in 1799, was a weaver who, in reaction to injustice suffered at the hand of his boss, smashed an automated sheering machine with a hammer. His actions inspired fellow downtrodden countrymen a decade later, with textile workers demanding more work and better wage. General Ludd led the Army of Redressers. Their campaigns open 24 were often broken up, sometimes violently, by British troops.
None should forget that it was his then common-law wife, Mary Godwin, who penned the most resonate novel of the modern age, Frankenstein . Depicting a human creating life, she consecrated the moment when humans became gods. Symbolically, her work marks the end of the pre-history of religious mysticism and inaguration of the tyranny of rationalism, a too-often dehumanizing ethos.
Linebaugh s linking of these two characters, Ludd and Mab, is a brilliant insight. It acknowledges the unity of practice and theory, of the deed and the idea, of what happens and how it is remembered.
Wikipedia is a 21 st century version of the commons, a monumental site of a collaboratively-created, freely-available and non-commerical information resource. open 24 It is an unprecedented accomplishment in world history, one with the great library of Alexandria.
In Wikipedia, the followers of Ned Ludd are defined as follows: The Luddites were a social open 24 movement of 19 th -century English textile artisans who protested often by destroying mechanized open 24 looms against the changes produced by the Industrial Revolution, which they felt were leaving them without work and changing open 24 their way of life.
During open 24 the first decades of the 19 th century, textile workers in the English Midlands, in the Yorkshire, Lancashire, Leicestershire and Derbyshire districts, said No! to the new industrial order. They challenged the new and oppressive system of mass production and collective employment, the factory, then being imposed on individual open 24 workers, often artisans. These hardworking Englishmen open 24 knew that the automated loom signified an end to their traditional work and non-work lives. open 24
Between 1811 and 1813, discontent spread throughout a 70-mile swath of northern England. open 24 In 1811, Yorkshire croppers, skilled cloth finishers, rebelled against a new shearing system that they feared would put them out of work. In another
No comments:
Post a Comment