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Luddites were good actually
Yeah, but they teach us he was bad without explaining why he did what he did aside from a vague "He hated machines"
I was led to believe the luddites were like the Amish and they had like, a religious opposition to technology.
Working as intended.
No, it was a targetted movement where they believed the technological advances were replacing good jobs with little benefit to the community. I don't know the details but I believe they accepted new technologies when it was displacing dangerous labour. I imagine it's not dissimilar to discussions we're having right now about more or less the same issues!
Yep, and they didn’t destroy machines belonging to owners who weren’t dicks. It was against using new tech to immiserate artisans, not against the new tech itself. It may have been bad tactics, but the motivations were good.
Apparently they just didn’t want their labor replaced with machines so they’d be out of the job, but the propaganda (“tHeY jUsT oPpOsE pRoGrEsS”) is the story that survived within the imperial core.
So there is actually a strong analogue here with actors and writers not wanting to be replaced with LLM chatbot or image-generative AIs. Adam actually is a Luddite, in a sense, and it seems weird to me that some cringelib is clamoring for something that will replace them as well, they just don’t know it yet.
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there never actually was a Ned Ludd he's a folk story
luddites are reactionary according to marxbut what is happening here with the unions is seizing AI tech for the benefit of workers, not the corporations. the contract explicitly allows writers to use it as they wish, but cannot be pressured by corporations to use it to meet quotas. it is explicitly not luddite, and is in fact what marx suggests to do with emerging technologies. i fully expect writers to use ai to make their jobs easier going forward and to have something to bounce ideas on without having their jobs endangered.
I don’t think this is a fair assessment. from the quote Tachanka posted, Marx is just saying Luddism is bad tactics. Is there other info to say that Luddism is reactionary, or am I misunderstanding what you mean by reactionary?
Being a Luddite is my whole schtick, please tell me I can keep posting pictures of hammers (I have a lot of hammers)
well the luddites were by definition reactionary as they were acting in reaction to the advent of capitalism by resisting it and trying to maintain their feudal rights
they did however have a valid point about how they had a better deal under feudalism but I imagine that Marx was criticising them for not having the imagination to see that the machines would have been good if they were the owners of the machines and rather than fight the machines they should have took them
Ok, that makes sense to me. Of course, by the same logic, modern labor unions trying to claw back conditions they lost in the 80s are also reactionary, even while doing harm reduction and building labor power which might help in a future revolution.
I think of ‘reactionary’ as synonymous with ‘anti-communist’ but that’s only really the common connotation because of our context.
As long as I can keep posting 🔨
yeah I actually don't think reactionary is necessarily always bad.
reactionary is sometimes incorrectly used in place of counter-revolutionary
YOU DID NOT HAVE A REAL JOB ANYWAY! THE BAZINGA TECH IS LIBERATING NO MATTER WHO OWNS AND COMMANDS IT AND IF YOU DON'T LIKE IT YOU'RE A LUUUUUUUUUHDIIIIIIITE
:ludd-shining:
Can we get a:
TL;DR We shouldn't destroy the machines, we should seize them from the ruling class.
Enoch's hammer agrees
The enormous destruction of machinery that occurred in the English manufacturing districts during the first 15 years of this century, chiefly caused by the employment of the power-loom, and known as the Luddite movement, gave the anti-Jacobin governments of a Sidmouth, a Castlereagh, and the like, a pretext for the most reactionary and forcible measures. It took both time and experience before the workpeople learnt to distinguish between machinery and its employment by capital, and to direct their attacks, not against the material instruments of production, but against the mode in which they are used.