The term "Luddite" has become synonymous with "technophobe" but that's not what the Luddites were about. They were a labour movement that fought to give workers control over the technology that was advancing without oversight and rapidly automating them out of their jobs.
"Luddite" as a pejorative was a technocrat PR coup.
@Wolven they were a labor movement that fought against technology that was set to improve society for all because they were busy clinging to the old ways out of a sense of self-entitlement.
It wasn't a technocrat PR coup. It was society as a whole telling them to knock it off for the sake of the general welfare.
@volkris yeah nah. "Improving society" by putting people out of work while still demanding they pay in to capital isn't really an improvement
@Wolven @volkris The irony of the whole debate is, it isn't an either-or proposition. If the money made from the machines went to the people they replaced, instead of to some 3rd party investor who did nothing but have money already, then improving society could happen without impoverishing a group of people. If industrialism had manifested as worker cooperatives instead of capitalist enterprises, this would have been the natural outcome. But some rich dudes figured out how to stick their fingers in the pie and call dibs, and here we are, still dealing with the same ridiculous issues.
@hosford42 "nothing but have money already" is no trifle.
Those people sacrificed for the greater good, turning down other opportunities to benefit with that money, putting it toward society-improving projects instead.
To be clear, I'm not saying it was charity or that they were good people or anything like that, but for them to forego their own immediate benefit for the sake of a project for the greater good is itself something we should be glad happened.
If industrialism had manifested as worker cooperatives instead of capitalist enterprises then society as a whole would have probably been worse off.
@Wolven
Even setting aside the fact that investment is not drawn from pre-existing stocks amassed by the investor by deferring consumption—that’s not how investment works—the idea that *wealthy British elites in the late 18th and early 19th centuries* were sacrificing for the greater good is particularly fucking absurd.
Where did those fortunes come from, qoto.org?
@volkris @Wolven @hosford42
Workers constantly advance each other product and labor in a network of credit.
Capitalists do not provide anything in that process; they simply monopolize control over that credit creation process.
Even if they didn’t, the British elites who owned the labor of the Luddites and their contemporaries did not build their fortunes by deferring consumption. They built them on the backs of slaves, enclosed and immiserated workers, and colonial expropriation.