this post was submitted on 24 Oct 2025
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The luddites were dead fucking wrong. Instead of seizing the means of production, they thought smashing them would solve their woes. It doesn't matter that the luddites were skilled machine operators with a rudimentary form of class consciousness; their understanding of the issue was idealist and therefore opposed to Marxism. Luddism is liberalism.
I see we're doing the great man theory here now on lemmygrad...
If it wasn’t Marx, it would have been someone else. Marx is not a god, nor a great man, but expecting a group of proletarian industrial workers with little to no education to magically become Marxian revolutionaries before Marx is disingenuous at best.
I wasn’t saying that Marx not being born yet prevents any sort of Marxian analysis or class consciousness, but without Marx’s, or another person akin to Marx, insights, even concepts such as “seizing the means of production” become nebulous; as no one has yet analyzed why exactly that mattered, or what the next step after that would be.
Nobody is expecting anything magical here. What's being said is that they were clearly barking up the wrong tree. Having the full depths of the analysis that Marx brought to bear was obviously not a prerequisite for realizing that it's who owns the technology that's the actual problem rather than the technology itself.