Nedd Ludd's Privileged Professionals

[rich]

history is nuance, it the mere-playthings of kings, corporations, churches,
artists, anarchists, and cooperatives
i believe in her only and shit on all her suitors

rich

On Thu, Apr 12, 2012 at 10:46 AM, Bekah <bekah0176 at sbcglobal.net> wrote:

> Yes,  the Luddites were artisans and craftsmen (with various levels of
> skill)  who were actually displaced.  They were not the lowest class of
> worker who, being capable of working the machines,  displaced them.
>
> Bekah
> Books will get you through times of no money better than money will get
> you through times of no books.
>
>
> On Apr 12, 2012, at 7:37 AM, Mark Kohut wrote:
>
> > 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.'
> >
> >
> >
>
>
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