The lessons of the Luddite revolt

“The various Luddite armies operating between 1811 and 1812 were so well organized and disciplined, so effective in their attacks — causing more than one hundred thousand pounds of damage — that they emerged as one of the most vigorous and threatening uprisings the country had ever seen.” — Kirkpatrick Sale

Studying historical insurrectional movements should become a reflex for anyone who aims to sustainably transform the current social, economic and technological order. Through this writing, we collectively reappropriate the history of struggles, we try to learn from the mistakes and successes of our predecessors in order to learn from them in order to organize an effective response against the machine world.

Here we are interested in the English machine-breakers of the early 19th century who initiated an antitech revolt that, had it been equipped with a specific objective and a global strategy to achieve it, might have been in a position to stop the industrialization of the country. This spontaneous insurrection, which sowed trouble between 1811 and 1813 in the region of Manchester, Leeds and Nottingham, opted for the sabotage of machines and the destruction of factories as a mode of operation. We will not go back to historical details here (for that, see our file). In this text, the aim is to analyze the strategy and tactics of the Luddites in order to identify the strengths and weaknesses of their movement. The following quotations are all taken from the book The Luddite Revolt: Machine Breakers in the Age of Industrialization published in 1995 by the writer Kirkpatrick Sale and recently translated by Éditions L'Échappée by Celia Izoard.

⚠ Warning : the Luddite revolt was a violent and therefore clandestine movement. We remind you that ATR is an uncovered, legal and non-violent movement. To understand this essential distinction between open combat and clandestine warfare, read our article on the subject.

Strengths

• Materialist analysis : textile workers joining the Luddite rebellion were right to target mechanical looms. Because the introduction of machines was going to do much more than lower wages and put thousands of workers out of work. The entire social order that had prevailed for centuries was to be annihilated in a few decades by the acceleration, at the end of the 18th century, of enclosures — private land ownership replaced communal ones — and by the rise of machinery. The Luddites had made the correct diagnosis, the destruction of their communities was the consequence of the new industrial means of production and not of their capitalist use (as Marx thought). The Luddites were therefore on the right track but, as we will see later, they lacked strategic thinking.

“In a few generations, England saw the disappearance of an entire world based on community life, a high degree of self-sufficiency, a simple system of local exchanges and barter, a rich heritage of numerous trades, and a web of customs and traditions of mutual aid that existed alongside the hustle and bustle of the markets.”

• Self-criticism and improvement : it seems that the spontaneity and disorganization that characterized the initial Luddites' sabotages quickly gave way to better coordinated actions, proof that the Luddites were analyzing their actions a posteriori and were learning from it to increase the effectiveness of their movement.

“Those who had carried out spontaneous and isolated actions in the spring, realizing that they had little effect, had opted for stronger coordination during the summer, with a military protocol learned in the army and in the militia, in order to start a massive and vigorous campaign in the fall.”

• Bullying : Luddites sent threatening letters, often signed “General Ludd” or “Ned Ludd” or “King Ludd”, to factory owners using machines to replace their workers. Spreading panic in the opposite camp in order to push them to make mistakes or manipulate them more easily is a tactic well known to political and military strategists.

• Safety culture and “moral integrity” : it is probably one of the great qualities of Luddites to have managed to remain united despite attempts at division (especially large amounts of money offered in exchange of information). The insurgents managed to maintain secrecy and thus prevent the authorities from retrieving valuable information about their organization, structure, modus operandi, etc. To integrate a group of Luddites, the new ones had to take an oath, a kind of rite of passage — a practice that, in modern and primitive societies alike, makes it possible to strengthen ties between members of the same community. The Luddites also seem to have used codes and passwords to protect themselves from spies. For sabotages, they covered their faces with a bandana or blackened them with soot; on other occasions they dressed up as women.

“After two months of clearly unstoppable Luddism, of a duration and intensity never seen before in Nottingham, what bothered the authorities the most was their failure to break the secrecy that concealed the perpetrators of the actions.”

Kirkpatrick Sale makes this other observation:

“As the American sociologist Craig Calhoun wrote, all English popular movements were based on the strength of “traditional communities” and Luddism “arises directly from the rootedness” of people “linked to each other, as well as to the rest of the population with whom they live, by relationships of reciprocity.”

• Machines are being targeted, not individuals : at least initially, the Luddites did not target factory owners. This strategic choice most likely contributed to popular sympathy for their movement. On the other hand, violence against people may have contributed to the division of the movement between reformists and revolutionaries (see below).

• Search for material power : as the Luddite movement evolved, “small bands called Men of Ludd” went “around the region” to take “money, food and weapons from the rich.” There were “hundreds of successful and unpunished Luddite raids.” This shows that Luddites understood that in order to face repression and resist over time, they had to increase. their material resources.

Weak spots

• Absence of a revolutionary objective: the Luddite resistance lacked a clear and unique objective to be effective. Kirkpatrick Sale notes:

“During all these years, there was never any tangible proof of the existence of any large-scale revolutionary organization and nothing indicates that local groups and occasional delegates were ever at work. All of this suggests that there was probably no solid revolutionary objective.”

• Lack of strategy : this point complements the previous one. The Luddites lacked a theoretical basis and strategic planning to consolidate a revolutionary base and ensure the survival of the resistance over time. This shows once again that a horizontal organization has a tendency to disintegrate quickly due to the lack of structure and solid theoretical background (Sale estimates that Luddism lasted barely 15 months).

“What Luddism became in the summer of 1812, what it was forced to become because it had failed to achieve its goals, following the failure of previous strategies and the intransigence of its enemies, was a kind of caricature, an attempt by its radical minority to cling to the classical patterns of revolution for lack of a revolutionary base on which to rely. For the more Luddism fails to formulate what it is and to define its objectives, the less successful it is in developing strategies that would allow it to give shape to its insurrectional aim and to the particular tactics required here and now, according to the specific needs of the situation. This failure leads Luddites to fall back on strategies borrowed from other places and times that worked for other goals, other targets, and other populations.”

• Lack of political awareness : a sign of a lack of political training, the insurgent workers did not consider state institutions as their enemy, quite the contrary. As this political consciousness is not innate, one must either learn it by studying books, or be trained by joining an organization or a movement (it is also necessary that the organization in question intends to train its troops, which is far from being a priority in contemporary activist circles). Kirkpatrick Sale goes on to say about Luddites:

“In reality, if the rebel workers thought in terms of rebellion, it would never have been directed against the Crown or the London Parliament. These institutions were most often considered, however slight the reasons may be, to have traditionally been on the side of the small English worker and they should, in their opinion, become so again.” (Does that remind you of anything?)

• War of Attrition Strategy : another lesson from the Luddite revolt is the crucial importance of surprise, speed, and the choice of decisive goals in revolutionary action. The longer the insurgency situation drags on, the longer it takes for the resistance to reach its final objective, the more effective the counterinsurgency becomes (see this article on The stalemate of the War of Attrition). In asymmetric combat, the side with the fewest economic, human, and technological resources must take steps to strike strategic targets — for example, energy, transport, or communications infrastructure — in order to cause cascading systemic failures. The Luddites did not seek to disrupt the flow of goods and communication, they did not seek to make England ungovernable. Tackling machines and factories, one by one, was therefore a strategy that was doomed to failure. We still see it today with the ecological movement that seeks to stop one industrial project at a time.

• Internal divisions : as might be expected, the lack of theory, vision, strategy, and concrete and lasting results of Luddite actions ended up dividing the movement between revolutionaries and reformists. The breaking of machines is gradually being abandoned even by the most radical people who prefer to plunder the bourgeois and steal their weapons.

“While one part of Luddism went underground and organized nocturnal arms raids, another became legalistic and petitioned the government, so that the broken machines, located in between, seemed to no longer meet with support, after six months of recurrent and increasing intensity attacks.”

• Absence of ideology : according to Kirkpatrick Sale, the Luddites lacked an ideology capable of cementing their movement in the long term.

“One of the failures of Luddism (although this may have been one of its strengths at the beginning) was its lack of particular form and intention, the vagueness of its perspectives and aspirations. Of course, this is often the case with movements of anger and outrage and, at first, this is enough to impose their existence. But this is not enough in the long term: they do not make it possible to foster a commitment beyond the hard times of repression and trials, they do not forge a solidarity capable of preventing infiltration by spies and parasites, they do not give rise to strategies and tactics to adapt to changing contexts and adversaries and do not develop analyses to define the enemy and what to replace it with.”

In a previous analysis, we made the same remark about the Yellow Vests movement. The lack of a single objective and theoretical unity also explains why the ecological movement is struggling to gain momentum.