Groucho Marxism

The Luddites were a group of workers in the cotton industry who lived in northern England (Nottinghamshire, Lancashire, and Yorkshire) in the early 19^th century. They take their name from Ned Ludd, an apocryphal figure said to have smashed machines back in 1799, although he did not share the later Luddites’ motivations. In modern parlance, ‘Luddite’ has come to mean ‘technophobe’, but in reality the Luddites embraced the power loom, which was invented in 1800 and complemented their skills. Their main contention was that this new invention would lead to capitalists paying workers less as workers did not have to be as skilled to use it. They also objected to the alienation this new invention created.

A machine such as a power loom can only do some of the making of a product, leaving the rest for the worker to do; but the introduction of such a machine means the worker now has a much weaker relationship with the product. Furthermore, the inner workings of a machine are generally unfathomable to the worker, which gives the machine a kind of power. As machines become more and more complicated this power increases, leading to dominion of the machine over the worker, with workers required to work at the pace of the machine rather than the other way round. The Luddites were well aware of this process of alienation as they experienced it first hand. The mill owners were well of it too and used it to increase their control over workers.

An important lesson we as Marxists can learn from the Luddites is not to make arguments that involve bargaining with capitalists. They didn’t try to argue that the use of power looms and the resulting issues that created was detrimental to capitalism or to the capitalist class. The Luddites were not interested in maintaining a prosperous capitalist economy even within their locale. Their argument was based on human concerns and was not compromised by using the language of the capitalist. Nevertheless, the Luddite movement was a flawed one. This was not entirely the fault of the Luddites: they were working during a period when trade unions were outlawed, which meant they were limited in what they could realistically achieve.

Although the Luddites engaged in direct action (smashing up power looms), their movement was ultimately defensive and localized, aiming to preserve working conditions rather than overturning the capitalist system. However, the spontaneity of the movement is an example of workers’ understanding of natural justice, which aligns with Marx’s later analysis; although whether they were truly class conscious is open to debate. Moreover, the Luddites’ struggle spurred workers in the West to unionize. Primary and secondary industries in the West were ultimately dismantled due to the power the workers within them wielded. These industries were largely replaced by the retail and service sectors, and we now see capitalists attempting to bring about further automation in these sectors.

We can use the Luddites’ struggle as a lens through which to view current workers’ conflicts. The parallels between the power loom and modern-day automated plagiarizing systems, such as AI-based text-generation models and image generators, are stark. Both cases involve new inventions being wielded by capitalists to reduce workers’ ability to sell their skilled labour-power. Also, in both cases the quality of outputs produced by automation is generally inferior. The Luddites assumed that the poorer quality products produced by the power loom would be rejected by the consumers of their day, but they were mistaken. It is incumbent on us modern-day consumers to reject sub-par AI-generated goods before they become the accepted norm.

It seems that whenever and wherever new technology is employed under capitalism, it does not fulfil the promise of a better life for workers. Instead, it is used to drive down wages, decrease the quality of outputs, and lock workers into oppressive systems. This is obviously bad for workers, and it is only good for capitalists in the short term. Usually a temporary reduction in production costs resulting from increased automation leads to a long-term depression of profits across whole sectors, as competing firms also automate their production. A core tenet of Marxism is that profit is surplus value produced by labour, but not by machines. We see this play out with a decrease in the labour content of commodities leading to lower profits, referred to by Marx as the ‘tendency of the profit rate to fall’.

In 1930, John Maynard Keynes famously predicted that by century’s end, technology would have advanced sufficiently that countries like Great Britain or the United States would have achieved a 15-hour work week. Sadly, that didn’t happen. What happened instead was that greater automation simply led to higher levels of output being expected, with workers being forced to work as hard as ever. In light of this historical context, it is crucial for us to remember that resistance to new technology is not about opposing progress, but about fighting for the dignity and rights of workers. The Luddites’ struggle reminds us that under capitalism, technological innovation serves profit over people. Exactly the same dynamic is at play globally today that was at play in northern England over 200 years ago.

Our task as socialists is not to critique new technological developments but to organize around a vision of technology that genuinely serves the common good. We must demand that technological advancements empower workers rather than alienate them, and that they enhance workers’ quality of life rather than erode it. The key lesson from the Luddites is to resist false promises of capitalist efficiency, and advocate for a future in which both technology and production are democratically controlled and geared towards collective well-being.