Nedd Ludd's Privileged Professionals

[rich]

http://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/rage-against-the-machine/

'Now a study by Richard Jones, a research student at the University of
Cambridge, suggests that Luddism may be celebrated for the wrong reasons.
He argues that it was not a movement which represented the concerns of the
working classes at all – rather those of privileged professionals with
disparate, local concerns. In a British textile industry that employed a
million people, the movement’s numbers never rose above a couple of
thousand.

“For historians, the Luddites have traditionally been seen as a phenomenon
of social history,” Jones said. “They are viewed as workers dispossessed by
economic advances, frozen out of existing structures and doing whatever
they could to make their voices heard. But these were not downtrodden
working class labourers – the Luddites were elite craftspeople.”

...

Jones believes that this smallness of scale reflects the fact that Luddism
was far from a genuinely pan-working class movement. Instead, Luddites were
skilled workers – a relatively “elite” group, whose role had traditionally
been protected by legislation regulating the supply and conduct of labour.

This centuries-old body of laws had also laid down rules for access to
certain professional roles, such as the “croppers”, or cloth dressers, who
led the rebellion in Yorkshire. These skilled workers had to spend seven
years in apprenticeships before they could take up their chosen profession.
At the end of it, they tended to feel that they were owed a living.

New machinery in the textile sector was starting to deny them this. For the
real working classes, however, that was an old story – many unskilled jobs
had long-since been displaced by technological advances and there was
little reason for these groups to get involved in an uprising in 1811/12.'
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