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Against the Luddites - By SE Gyges
TL;DR
The video argues the Luddites were not worker heroes but a small labor aristocracy — citing Cambridge historian Richard Jones, it says the movement never exceeded “a couple of thousand” in an industry of 1 million and was led by skilled artisans defending seven-year apprenticeship privileges.
A central claim is that Luddites fought to preserve male guild monopoly, not broad solidarity — the transcript highlights petitions, union resolutions, and attacks on women workers, including cases involving James Dunlop and Sons where female spinners were assaulted and driven out of work.
Marx and Engels are used against modern pro-Luddite nostalgia — the video quotes The Communist Manifesto, The Condition of the Working Class in England, and Capital to frame machine-breaking as an early, confused stage of class struggle aimed at tools rather than the social system using them.
The creator treats Luddism as fundamentally restorationist, not revolutionary — from the Statute of Artificers of 1563 to the Company of Framework Knitters chartered in 1657, the movement is presented as trying to restore medieval-style craft hierarchy, restricted entry, and inherited trade status.
The modern AI-era rehabilitation of the Luddites is called a bad historical analogy — the speaker says it gives today’s automation fears an undeserved pedigree while skipping over violence, sexism, and exclusion baked into the original movement.
The alternative offered is not smashing machines but changing ownership and distribution — the video ends by invoking Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams’s Inventing the Future and Aaron Bastani’s Fully Automated Luxury Communism to argue for UBI, shorter work weeks, and collective ownership of automated production.
The Breakdown
The opening broadside: stop romanticizing the Luddites
The video starts with zero throat-clearing: Luddism “does not deserve to be rehabilitated.” SE Gyges frames it as a reactionary, pre-political defense of guild privilege and male hierarchy, then says the modern urge to reclaim the Luddites mostly serves to give AI anxiety a flattering historical lineage it hasn’t earned.
Richard Jones and the case that this was an elite movement
The first historical pillar is Cambridge historian Richard Jones, whose work is used to argue the Luddites were never a mass working-class uprising. In an industry employing around a million people, the movement topped out at only a few thousand, and its core militants — especially Yorkshire croppers — were highly trained artisans who had done seven-year apprenticeships and believed they were “owed a living.”
The machines were opening work to women and the unskilled
The video then flips the moral framing: the hated machines were often doing something egalitarian by replacing scarce skilled labor with work that could be done by unskilled men, women, and children. Drawing on Daron Acemoglu and parliamentary records, it argues the Luddite objection was not just about wages but about losing exclusive control over who got to work.
The ugliest part: violence against women workers
This is the most visceral section. The speaker recounts Glasgow and Calton cases where women willing to work in spinning were attacked, beaten, driven from their jobs, and in one account a worker’s mother was killed; he sums it up bluntly: rehabilitating Luddism without this history means celebrating a movement that “beat women in the streets for daring to earn a living.”
Marx and Engels saw machine-breaking as a stage to move past
Gyges leans hard on Marxist texts to argue even the canonical anti-capitalist tradition did not celebrate the Luddites. The key line from The Communist Manifesto is that they tried to restore “the vanished status of the workmen of the Middle Ages,” while Capital is used to make the more structural point: mature labor politics attacks the social relation behind the machine, not the machine itself.
Restoration, not revolution
From there the argument becomes political: the Luddites wanted Parliament to preserve old restrictions like the Statute of Artificers of 1563 and appealed to guild bodies like the Company of Framework Knitters, chartered in 1657. Even Eric Hobsbawm’s phrase “collective bargaining by riot” is presented as a concession that this was pre-political and backward-looking — bargaining for old rank, not building a new order.
From the Khmer Rouge to the IWW: two very different responses to modernity
The video makes its most provocative analogy here, comparing Luddite anti-modern romanticism to the Khmer Rouge’s dream of agrarian restoration — not in scale, but in ideological shape. Against that, Eugene Debs and the IWW are held up as the real lineage of worker politics: organize across skill, race, gender, and trade, and seize the means of production rather than destroy them.
The AI-age takeaway: don’t smash the tools, fight over ownership
The conclusion brings the whole thing back to automation. If AI and automation displace workers and concentrate wealth, the answer is not anti-technology nostalgia but changing who owns the machines and how gains are shared — with Inventing the Future and Fully Automated Luxury Communism offered as examples of futures-oriented politics that ask who should own automation rather than whether it should exist.
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