08/10/26 18:21:15
The knitting machines which provoked the first Luddite disturbances had been putting people
out of work for well over two centuries. Everybody saw this happening -- it became part of daily life.
They also saw the machines coming more and more to be the property of men who did not work,
only owned and hired. It took no German philosopher, then or later, to point out what this did,
had been doing, to wages and jobs. Public feeling about the machines could never have been
simple unreasoning horror, but likely something more complex: the love/hate that grows up
between humans and machinery -- especially when it's been around for a while -- not to mention
serious resentment toward at least two multiplications of effect that were seen as unfair and
threatening. One was the concentration of capital that each machine represented, and the other
was the ability of each machine to put a certain number of humans out of work --
to be "worth" that many human souls. What gave King Ludd his special Bad charisma,
took him from local hero to nationwide public enemy, was that he went up against these amplified,
multiplied, more than human opponents and prevailed. When times are hard, and we feel
at the mercy of forces many times more powerful, don't we, in seeking some equalizer, turn,
if only in imagination, in wish, to the Badass -- the djinn, the golem, the hulk, the superhero --
who will resist what otherwise would overwhelm us? Of course, the real or secular frame-bashing
was still being done by everyday folks, trade unionists ahead of their time, using the night,
and their own solidarity and discipline, to achieve their multiplications of effect.