Nedd Ludd's Privileged Professionals

[Mark Kohut]

A distinction without a difference, as philosophy profs used to say which I 
repeat confidently,  lacking any historical knowlege of the situation....

From: rich <richard.romeo at gmail.com>
To: "“pynchon-l at waste.org“" <pynchon-l at waste.org> 
Sent: Thursday, April 12, 2012 9:56 AM
Subject: Nedd Ludd's Privileged Professionals


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.'
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://waste.org/pipermail/pynchon-l/attachments/20120412/3dc1d700/attachment.html>