chat

The luddites WERE wrong though, destroying machines instead of seizing them to utilize their productivity gains to benefit the peasantry. They were petty bourgeois jet ski dealership owners in terms of where their ideology took them. They had valuable handicrafts which industrialization threatened, so they tried to destroy industrialization to protect them, benefiting no one but themselves and their direct communities which benefited from their local artisanry and i don't even know for how long because obviously they just kept building machines

Imagine an alt history Britain where the luddites seized the machinery, seized weaponry, expropriated the landowning class at gunpoint, and we got industrial communism a century early from within the heart of the British empire

In that context imo the luddites look like proto Fed shit, like if the British government had the foresight we have looking back i think it was very advantageous for the movement to focus on destroying technology to protect artisan wages, rather than the alternative of an awakening of proletarian and peasant class consciousness and solidarity, using seized machines and their output for the benefit of all

I mean, imagine the propaganda win for communism if rather than having to wistfully dream of a world in which modern industrial output could feed, clothe, and secure the lives of us all, Kropotkin only had to write about how it had already occurred within his lifetime, in the heart of the world hegemon.