@Lanz if you choose to post in memes or whatever, can you take a moment to explain it to those if us not in on the reference?
I.e. what the f is "wooden shoes sounds" supposed to mean? A reference to the Dutch????
The luddites taking their clogs (technically, sabot, from which we derive the word “sabotage”) and literally breaking the machinery used to replace them (leaving them without a means to provide for themselves any longer, thanks to their work now being automated to the point where factory owners no longer needed them) with said clogs.
Thus providing steady work for machinery servicers
Marty: The future, it's where you're going? Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
I don't have the data immediately to hand, but more jobs in the 90s were lost to robots than NAFTA.
Worker productivity increased, but worker wages stayed flat or barely kept pace with inflation.
That is a problem with domestic policy and not trade agreements.
NAFTA is a big 'ol red herring for labour and is mostly used in the US to disparage Mexico and blame them for the blue collar loss of standing.
Less a red herring and more a shorthand for the outsourcing trend beginning in the 90s
Like, let’s not pretend that this shit has been some great benefit for workers in the global south. What it’s done is enable the owner class to reap higher and higher record profits, without the pesky interferences of things like “worker rights” or “living wages,” all while shuffling the consequences of their practices away from western society where things like, say a garment factory collapsing and killing nearly 1300 people might cause some clamor and demand for reform instead of quickly disappearing into the mists of time and forgotten memory, to say nothing of the myriad other abuses visited upon these workers.
So frequently is stated the grudge against foreigners that American labor supposedly holds, yet so little is it ever mentioned that our goods are built on blood and pain, not so that they can remain cheaper, but so that the owners of their production can grow ever more wealthy
Ahh yes, cause if there's one thing we all miss, it's pre-industrial society...
I think you're missing the point entirely: the compromise was breaking the machines because the capitalists were happy to let the workers starve and die while they reaped the benefits of ownership. The alternative was using the sabots on the capitalists.
Ahh yes, cause if there's one thing we all miss, it's pre-industrial society...
I think it was more about how capitalism seems to always leave the poor to die in a ditch and less about them being luddites or something.
I'm not sure what the alternative is here to people doing work that is replaced by automation. It seems much more to be an overly romanticized image of people "fighting the man" or something. Where the man in this case is the industrialized production.
Also, as a random sidenote, the popularly thought of etymology for sabotage is wrong from anything I've ever read. It is apparently derived from the word sabot but not specifically from people throwing said sabot into machines.
Ahh yes, cause if there's one thing we all miss, it's pre-industrial society...
I think it was more about how capitalism seems to always leave the poor to die in a ditch and less about them being luddites or something.
Well, they were the Luddites. But what you gotta remember is that the historic Luddites weren’t a bunch of anti-technology conservatives, as the term is now used, but were a militant labor revolt against capital, who’d replaced them with machines, leaving them to die in the ditches of destitution.
Ahh yes, cause if there's one thing we all miss, it's pre-industrial society...
I think it was more about how capitalism seems to always leave the poor to die in a ditch and less about them being luddites or something.
I'm not sure what the alternative is here to people doing work that is replaced by automation. It seems much more to be an overly romanticized image of people "fighting the man" or something. Where the man in this case is the industrialized production.
Also, as a random sidenote, the popularly thought of etymology for sabotage is wrong from anything I've ever read. It is apparently derived from the word sabot but not specifically from people throwing said sabot into machines.
Not really! You’re kind of downplaying just how large a movement this was at the time and the influence it had on society:
The original Luddites were British weavers and textile workers who objected to the increased use of mechanized looms and knitting frames. Most were trained artisans who had spent years learning their craft, and they feared that unskilled machine operators were robbing them of their livelihood. When the economic pressures of the Napoleonic Wars made the cheap competition of early textile factories particularly threatening to the artisans, a few desperate weavers began breaking into factories and smashing textile machines. They called themselves “Luddites” after Ned Ludd, a young apprentice who was rumored to have wrecked a textile apparatus in 1779.
There’s no evidence Ludd actually existed—like Robin Hood, he was said to reside in Sherwood Forest—but he eventually became the mythical leader of the movement. The protestors claimed to be following orders from “General Ludd,” and they even issued manifestoes and threatening letters under his name.
The first major instances of machine breaking took place in 1811 in Nottingham, and the practice soon spread across the English countryside. Machine-breaking Luddites attacked and burned factories, and in some cases they even exchanged gunfire with company guards and soldiers. The workers hoped their raids would deter employers from installing expensive machinery, but the British government instead moved to quash the uprisings by making machine-breaking punishable by death.
The unrest finally reached its peak in April 1812, when a few Luddites were gunned down during an attack on a mill near Huddersfield. The army had deployed several thousand troops to round up these dissidents in the days that followed, and dozens were hanged or transported to Australia. By 1813, the Luddite resistance had all but vanished. It wasn’t until the 20th century that their name re-entered the popular lexicon as a synonym for “technophobe.”
Which is ironic/tragic because it's the very problem we're seeing writ large. Even at McDonalds and the like we're starting to see the early waves of automating out a lot of line level folks. Between kiosks in the unit, ordering over the phone, etc, I almost don't need to ever talk to anyone. If they automated the food delivery I wouldn't. I'm surprised they haven't adapted this into voice order taking considering the level of AI that's out there these days.
Which is ironic/tragic because it's the very problem we're seeing writ large. Even at McDonalds and the like we're starting to see the early waves of automating out a lot of line level folks. Between kiosks in the unit, ordering over the phone, etc, I almost don't need to ever talk to anyone. If they automated the food delivery I wouldn't. I'm surprised they haven't adapted this into voice order taking considering the level of AI that's out there these days.
But if we automate everything, then that pesky labor cost goes closer to zero and we can make more profits!
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jmcdonaldI voted, did you?DC(ish)Registered Userregular
Which is ironic/tragic because it's the very problem we're seeing writ large. Even at McDonalds and the like we're starting to see the early waves of automating out a lot of line level folks. Between kiosks in the unit, ordering over the phone, etc, I almost don't need to ever talk to anyone. If they automated the food delivery I wouldn't. I'm surprised they haven't adapted this into voice order taking considering the level of AI that's out there these days.
This is likely achievable, just not cost effective. Yet.
Which is ironic/tragic because it's the very problem we're seeing writ large. Even at McDonalds and the like we're starting to see the early waves of automating out a lot of line level folks. Between kiosks in the unit, ordering over the phone, etc, I almost don't need to ever talk to anyone. If they automated the food delivery I wouldn't. I'm surprised they haven't adapted this into voice order taking considering the level of AI that's out there these days.
This is likely achievable, just not cost effective. Yet.
Considering even pre-pandemic they were automating the ordering, including the big fancy ordering kiosks in places where labor costs were < $400 USD/mo for an average employee, I'd call the expense piece into question. (I'm not referring to the cooking process, just the delivery of packaged food to patrons.)
I don't really see how that is any less short-sighted than our current crop of coal miners who aren't interested in sustainable development or a more effective welfare state, and just want more coal mining jobs.
While racing light mechs, your Urbanmech comes in second place, but only because it ran out of ammo.
I don't really see how that is any less short-sighted than our current crop of coal miners who aren't interested in sustainable development or a more effective welfare state, and just want more coal mining jobs.
The costs of this subsidy aren’t tallied on corporate or government balance sheets. The destruction of central Appalachia’s economy, environment, social fabric and, ultimately, its people’s health is, in a sense, hidden. But they’re plain enough to see on a map. It could be lung cancer deaths you’re looking at, or diabetes mortality. Or try opioid overdoses. Poverty. Welfare dependency. Chart virtually any measure of human struggle, and there it will be, just right of center on a map of the US—a distinct blotch. This odd cluster is consistently one of America’s worst pockets of affliction.
A deeply cynical capitalist experiment has taken place, in which coal companies are kept profitable by passing on the costs they incur to the public.
At the root of these problems lies the ironic insight that struck Nick Mullins as he mined coal deep in the earth his family once owned. The extreme imbalance of land ownership in central Appalachia shifted the power over where and how Appalachians lived to corporations. The political and economic impotence of Appalachian residents that resulted has permitted a deeply cynical capitalist experiment to take place, in which coal companies are kept profitable by passing on the costs they incur to the public. The many ways in which politicians and coal barons have kept coal artificially cheap has, over the course of generations, devoured the potential of the area’s residents, and that of their economy.
Central Appalachia’s problems stem from its distinctive history. But the pattern of its struggles is not unique. Across America, obscure clusters of misery are growing in number and concentration—as people get sicker, poorer, and more isolated than they were just a few decades ago. Thus untangling the knotty problems of central Appalachia holds lessons for the rest of the country about how imbalances of wealth and power, created generations ago, can trap places and their people in the past.
The only real answer to widespread automation is government redistribution of wealth.
Those who were at the forefront of automation imagined a world where people could perform a day's labor in a matter of a few hours, which would mean that everyone would be paid for that day's labor still, but have all this extra time to spend enriching the lives of themselves and society in other endeavors!
But then the corporate boardrooms said "but what if we simply reaped all the increased profits from automation for ourselves?"
Well during my infusion, after a shit ton of channel flipping because basic cable is still full of mostly unwatchable shit. Settled on C-SPAN where the house was voting on the reauthorization of Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act. Surprising no one, no actual republican voted in favor of it. The clown they had come up to talk about why she was opposed, used the horseshit about unions not representing workers and then got into some stupid ass spiel about the left, so I didn't finish listening to her bullshit, partly because my infusion had finished at that point. The GOP was also butthurt that all their bullshit amendments got voted down.
So unless someone convinces two dumbasses to kill the filibuster, it probably doesn't get out of the senate. With unions coming back though, expect to see lots of horseshit where the right tries to make unions and workers two separate things.
We know how the right will react to a resurgent labor movement - a mix of screeching and whining, repressive legislation, and, if necessary, violence.
I am curious how the Democratic Party will react to this movement if it continues to gain momentum. Ignore it? Try to ally with it and/or coopt it? Aim for corporate support by opposing it? Realistically some mix of the three, since they don't have unified positions?
I'm hoping for "ignore it."
The Democratic party is already intimately tied to the Labour movement. The question imo is how newly emerging service unions will mesh with the older existing unions and their relationship with the democratic party.
Running away from, sabotaging, and selling out are not what I would consider to be intimate ties.
Nah, this is bullshit. It's the kind of thing that sounds truthy but doesn't actually match reality. Unions are some of the biggest interests groups in Democratic party politics and spend money and exert political influence accordingly.
How many of the recent strikes have been supported or funded by the Democratic party? Existing unions are tied to the Democratic party in the same way that African Americans are, because the other option is a party that wants them to die. Clinton's economic plan was free trade and exporting jobs. .
Workers of the World* Unite!
*Except you foreigners, no jobs for you.
These jobs get exported not out of an internationalist solidarity of labor, but because the countries they operate in have little to no labor rights protections. Often this is the case with their governments fervently backing the forces of capital against local labor, creating a situation where millions of workers around the globe are exploited in near slave to slave labor conditions. These repressive regimes are more than happy to put down any form of resistance by the workers with state violence.
So congratulations: you said something extremely fucking stupid, short sighted and displaying a complete lack of empathy and awareness of even the most basic facts regarding the topic to try and create a clever burn! All in the most insulting ways possible to every group involved in the matter!
Which is ironic/tragic because it's the very problem we're seeing writ large. Even at McDonalds and the like we're starting to see the early waves of automating out a lot of line level folks. Between kiosks in the unit, ordering over the phone, etc, I almost don't need to ever talk to anyone. If they automated the food delivery I wouldn't. I'm surprised they haven't adapted this into voice order taking considering the level of AI that's out there these days.
This is a good thing! People shouldn't have to toil away at menial tasks! We just need to make sure the benefits of automation are applied to everyone.
The only real answer to widespread automation is government redistribution of wealth.
Those who were at the forefront of automation imagined a world where people could perform a day's labor in a matter of a few hours, which would mean that everyone would be paid for that day's labor still, but have all this extra time to spend enriching the lives of themselves and society in other endeavors!
But then the corporate boardrooms said "but what if we simply reaped all the increased profits from automation for ourselves?"
This really doesn't reflect reality. What actually happened was that a day's labor worth of goods went from something only the rich could afford to something most people could afford. And thus the amount you could make from what was previously a day's labor went down.
While racing light mechs, your Urbanmech comes in second place, but only because it ran out of ammo.
Ahh yes, cause if there's one thing we all miss, it's pre-industrial society...
I think it was more about how capitalism seems to always leave the poor to die in a ditch and less about them being luddites or something.
Well, they were the Luddites. But what you gotta remember is that the historic Luddites weren’t a bunch of anti-technology conservatives, as the term is now used, but were a militant labor revolt against capital, who’d replaced them with machines, leaving them to die in the ditches of destitution.
Ahh yes, cause if there's one thing we all miss, it's pre-industrial society...
I think it was more about how capitalism seems to always leave the poor to die in a ditch and less about them being luddites or something.
I'm not sure what the alternative is here to people doing work that is replaced by automation. It seems much more to be an overly romanticized image of people "fighting the man" or something. Where the man in this case is the industrialized production.
Also, as a random sidenote, the popularly thought of etymology for sabotage is wrong from anything I've ever read. It is apparently derived from the word sabot but not specifically from people throwing said sabot into machines.
Not really! You’re kind of downplaying just how large a movement this was at the time and the influence it had on society:
The original Luddites were British weavers and textile workers who objected to the increased use of mechanized looms and knitting frames. Most were trained artisans who had spent years learning their craft, and they feared that unskilled machine operators were robbing them of their livelihood. When the economic pressures of the Napoleonic Wars made the cheap competition of early textile factories particularly threatening to the artisans, a few desperate weavers began breaking into factories and smashing textile machines. They called themselves “Luddites” after Ned Ludd, a young apprentice who was rumored to have wrecked a textile apparatus in 1779.
There’s no evidence Ludd actually existed—like Robin Hood, he was said to reside in Sherwood Forest—but he eventually became the mythical leader of the movement. The protestors claimed to be following orders from “General Ludd,” and they even issued manifestoes and threatening letters under his name.
The first major instances of machine breaking took place in 1811 in Nottingham, and the practice soon spread across the English countryside. Machine-breaking Luddites attacked and burned factories, and in some cases they even exchanged gunfire with company guards and soldiers. The workers hoped their raids would deter employers from installing expensive machinery, but the British government instead moved to quash the uprisings by making machine-breaking punishable by death.
The unrest finally reached its peak in April 1812, when a few Luddites were gunned down during an attack on a mill near Huddersfield. The army had deployed several thousand troops to round up these dissidents in the days that followed, and dozens were hanged or transported to Australia. By 1813, the Luddite resistance had all but vanished. It wasn’t until the 20th century that their name re-entered the popular lexicon as a synonym for “technophobe.”
Except that's just describing what I said. In the end these people are no different then coal miners opposing green energy or modern labourers opposing automation. There is no romanticism or gain in holding on to a world where stuff costs more and takes longer and gets made in smaller quantities. Pre-industrial manufacturing is not a great victory for labour.
The only real answer to widespread automation is government redistribution of wealth.
Those who were at the forefront of automation imagined a world where people could perform a day's labor in a matter of a few hours, which would mean that everyone would be paid for that day's labor still, but have all this extra time to spend enriching the lives of themselves and society in other endeavors!
But then the corporate boardrooms said "but what if we simply reaped all the increased profits from automation for ourselves?"
I don't know where you got that idea, but there were two types of people at the forefront of automation. The first were the inventors who, if the myriad patent disputes of the time are anything to go by, were much more concerned with creating something manufacturers would buy than they were with reducing the workday. The second group were the manufacturers, who were looking to increase productivity and/or reduce labor costs. They had no interest in cutting hours and increasing pay to compensate; they wanted a larger share of the market and increased profits. It's not a coincidence that the Second Industrial Revolution coincided with the Gilded Age.
Let not any one pacify his conscience by the delusion that he can do no harm if he takes no part, and forms no opinion.
- John Stuart Mill
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HacksawJ. Duggan Esq.Wrestler at LawRegistered Userregular
Ah yes, the Gilded Age, notable for its catalyzing labor moments like the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire and the Ludlow Massacre. What a time to be alive as a worker, and then shortly thereafter killed either through employer negligence or outright murder.
Ah yes, the Gilded Age, notable for its catalyzing labor moments like the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire and the Ludlow Massacre. What a time to be alive as a worker, and then shortly thereafter killed either through employer negligence or outright murder.
Cause the pre-industrial revolution was such a great time to be alive.
+1
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HacksawJ. Duggan Esq.Wrestler at LawRegistered Userregular
Ah yes, the Gilded Age, notable for its catalyzing labor moments like the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire and the Ludlow Massacre. What a time to be alive as a worker, and then shortly thereafter killed either through employer negligence or outright murder.
Cause the pre-industrial revolution was such a great time to be alive.
Which is ironic/tragic because it's the very problem we're seeing writ large. Even at McDonalds and the like we're starting to see the early waves of automating out a lot of line level folks. Between kiosks in the unit, ordering over the phone, etc, I almost don't need to ever talk to anyone. If they automated the food delivery I wouldn't. I'm surprised they haven't adapted this into voice order taking considering the level of AI that's out there these days.
This is a good thing! People shouldn't have to toil away at menial tasks! We just need to make sure the benefits of automation are applied to everyone.
I mean? Yes? The tragic part is that despite their efforts we're still heading down the very same road.
Ahh yes, cause if there's one thing we all miss, it's pre-industrial society...
I think it was more about how capitalism seems to always leave the poor to die in a ditch and less about them being luddites or something.
Well, they were the Luddites. But what you gotta remember is that the historic Luddites weren’t a bunch of anti-technology conservatives, as the term is now used, but were a militant labor revolt against capital, who’d replaced them with machines, leaving them to die in the ditches of destitution.
Ahh yes, cause if there's one thing we all miss, it's pre-industrial society...
I think it was more about how capitalism seems to always leave the poor to die in a ditch and less about them being luddites or something.
I'm not sure what the alternative is here to people doing work that is replaced by automation. It seems much more to be an overly romanticized image of people "fighting the man" or something. Where the man in this case is the industrialized production.
Also, as a random sidenote, the popularly thought of etymology for sabotage is wrong from anything I've ever read. It is apparently derived from the word sabot but not specifically from people throwing said sabot into machines.
Not really! You’re kind of downplaying just how large a movement this was at the time and the influence it had on society:
The original Luddites were British weavers and textile workers who objected to the increased use of mechanized looms and knitting frames. Most were trained artisans who had spent years learning their craft, and they feared that unskilled machine operators were robbing them of their livelihood. When the economic pressures of the Napoleonic Wars made the cheap competition of early textile factories particularly threatening to the artisans, a few desperate weavers began breaking into factories and smashing textile machines. They called themselves “Luddites” after Ned Ludd, a young apprentice who was rumored to have wrecked a textile apparatus in 1779.
There’s no evidence Ludd actually existed—like Robin Hood, he was said to reside in Sherwood Forest—but he eventually became the mythical leader of the movement. The protestors claimed to be following orders from “General Ludd,” and they even issued manifestoes and threatening letters under his name.
The first major instances of machine breaking took place in 1811 in Nottingham, and the practice soon spread across the English countryside. Machine-breaking Luddites attacked and burned factories, and in some cases they even exchanged gunfire with company guards and soldiers. The workers hoped their raids would deter employers from installing expensive machinery, but the British government instead moved to quash the uprisings by making machine-breaking punishable by death.
The unrest finally reached its peak in April 1812, when a few Luddites were gunned down during an attack on a mill near Huddersfield. The army had deployed several thousand troops to round up these dissidents in the days that followed, and dozens were hanged or transported to Australia. By 1813, the Luddite resistance had all but vanished. It wasn’t until the 20th century that their name re-entered the popular lexicon as a synonym for “technophobe.”
Except that's just describing what I said. In the end these people are no different then coal miners opposing green energy or modern labourers opposing automation. There is no romanticism or gain in holding on to a world where stuff costs more and takes longer and gets made in smaller quantities. Pre-industrial manufacturing is not a great victory for labour.
You are utterly ignoring the human costs here.
No one here is arguing that we should go back to some kind of pre-industrial level of society, but you cannot deny that automation has long been utilized by the owner class as a method to break labor and deny them the ability to provide for themselves on their skills and services because the owner class views them not as people who need money to survive and thrive in a market society, but as costs on a spreadsheet, a drain on company revenues, etc.
You are trying to chalk this up to a sort of Irrationality of the Antiquated because that better serves your viewpoint and comfort rather than engage with the reality that coal miners or the Luddites do/did what they do/did from a rational perspective constructed from a hostile economic environment (with attendant cultural issues cultivated by that hostility) that is largely designed by the ownership class and their allies in the ruling classes, because they know full well what those changes mean for them: the dissolution of their livelihoods and a society that will refuse to do anything to make a place for them other than the dredges of destitution. It’s a cold and heartless economic darwinism, one which cruelly treats human beings as a resource to be exploited by the ownership class in service to a cancerous capitalism obsessed with little more than its continued, endless growth.
For every machine you destroy, a machine will be built to build a machine to replace it
Marty: The future, it's where you're going? Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
Ah yes, the Gilded Age, notable for its catalyzing labor moments like the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire and the Ludlow Massacre. What a time to be alive as a worker, and then shortly thereafter killed either through employer negligence or outright murder.
That's rather the point. The people driving the industrial revolutions were far from concerned with their workers.
Let not any one pacify his conscience by the delusion that he can do no harm if he takes no part, and forms no opinion.
- John Stuart Mill
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HacksawJ. Duggan Esq.Wrestler at LawRegistered Userregular
Ah yes, the Gilded Age, notable for its catalyzing labor moments like the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire and the Ludlow Massacre. What a time to be alive as a worker, and then shortly thereafter killed either through employer negligence or outright murder.
That's rather the point. The people driving the industrial revolutions were far from concerned with their workers.
Yeah they sucked. Their lionization is propaganda-as-history on a level that's exceeded only by, like, the diefication of the American Founding Fathers. Every one of them were astoundingly evil and are remembered so fondly. It makes me feel like I'm taking crazy pills when I hear people praising them.
There's two arguments running at the same time, and they are different enough to differenciate them:
First, is the idea that stopping automatization is possible. Is not. In fact, it has been long pointed out that the US is behind where should be on automatization, since labor being so relatively cheap is a huge government subsidy to corporations that kept companies from having to do it. That, of course, is changing.
Second, is the idea that industralists were good people. They weren't. Duh. Early 20th century was a very bad place to be.
Ah yes, the Gilded Age, notable for its catalyzing labor moments like the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire and the Ludlow Massacre. What a time to be alive as a worker, and then shortly thereafter killed either through employer negligence or outright murder.
That's rather the point. The people driving the industrial revolutions were far from concerned with their workers.
No one has ever been concerned with their workers. Not feudal lords, not communist party leadership, no one. That is not some unique evil of industrialization or capitalism, it's just basic human nature.
While racing light mechs, your Urbanmech comes in second place, but only because it ran out of ammo.
Ahh yes, cause if there's one thing we all miss, it's pre-industrial society...
I think it was more about how capitalism seems to always leave the poor to die in a ditch and less about them being luddites or something.
Well, they were the Luddites. But what you gotta remember is that the historic Luddites weren’t a bunch of anti-technology conservatives, as the term is now used, but were a militant labor revolt against capital, who’d replaced them with machines, leaving them to die in the ditches of destitution.
Ahh yes, cause if there's one thing we all miss, it's pre-industrial society...
I think it was more about how capitalism seems to always leave the poor to die in a ditch and less about them being luddites or something.
I'm not sure what the alternative is here to people doing work that is replaced by automation. It seems much more to be an overly romanticized image of people "fighting the man" or something. Where the man in this case is the industrialized production.
Also, as a random sidenote, the popularly thought of etymology for sabotage is wrong from anything I've ever read. It is apparently derived from the word sabot but not specifically from people throwing said sabot into machines.
Not really! You’re kind of downplaying just how large a movement this was at the time and the influence it had on society:
The original Luddites were British weavers and textile workers who objected to the increased use of mechanized looms and knitting frames. Most were trained artisans who had spent years learning their craft, and they feared that unskilled machine operators were robbing them of their livelihood. When the economic pressures of the Napoleonic Wars made the cheap competition of early textile factories particularly threatening to the artisans, a few desperate weavers began breaking into factories and smashing textile machines. They called themselves “Luddites” after Ned Ludd, a young apprentice who was rumored to have wrecked a textile apparatus in 1779.
There’s no evidence Ludd actually existed—like Robin Hood, he was said to reside in Sherwood Forest—but he eventually became the mythical leader of the movement. The protestors claimed to be following orders from “General Ludd,” and they even issued manifestoes and threatening letters under his name.
The first major instances of machine breaking took place in 1811 in Nottingham, and the practice soon spread across the English countryside. Machine-breaking Luddites attacked and burned factories, and in some cases they even exchanged gunfire with company guards and soldiers. The workers hoped their raids would deter employers from installing expensive machinery, but the British government instead moved to quash the uprisings by making machine-breaking punishable by death.
The unrest finally reached its peak in April 1812, when a few Luddites were gunned down during an attack on a mill near Huddersfield. The army had deployed several thousand troops to round up these dissidents in the days that followed, and dozens were hanged or transported to Australia. By 1813, the Luddite resistance had all but vanished. It wasn’t until the 20th century that their name re-entered the popular lexicon as a synonym for “technophobe.”
Except that's just describing what I said. In the end these people are no different then coal miners opposing green energy or modern labourers opposing automation. There is no romanticism or gain in holding on to a world where stuff costs more and takes longer and gets made in smaller quantities. Pre-industrial manufacturing is not a great victory for labour.
You are utterly ignoring the human costs here.
No one here is arguing that we should go back to some kind of pre-industrial level of society, but you cannot deny that automation has long been utilized by the owner class as a method to break labor and deny them the ability to provide for themselves on their skills and services because the owner class views them not as people who need money to survive and thrive in a market society, but as costs on a spreadsheet, a drain on company revenues, etc.
You are trying to chalk this up to a sort of Irrationality of the Antiquated because that better serves your viewpoint and comfort rather than engage with the reality that coal miners or the Luddites do/did what they do/did from a rational perspective constructed from a hostile economic environment (with attendant cultural issues cultivated by that hostility) that is largely designed by the ownership class and their allies in the ruling classes, because they know full well what those changes mean for them: the dissolution of their livelihoods and a society that will refuse to do anything to make a place for them other than the dredges of destitution. It’s a cold and heartless economic darwinism, one which cruelly treats human beings as a resource to be exploited by the ownership class in service to a cancerous capitalism obsessed with little more than its continued, endless growth.
The coal miners make the decisions they make because they would personally rather work high paying jobs even if the consequences of them continuing to work those jobs is millions of future deaths.
Ahh yes, cause if there's one thing we all miss, it's pre-industrial society...
I think it was more about how capitalism seems to always leave the poor to die in a ditch and less about them being luddites or something.
Well, they were the Luddites. But what you gotta remember is that the historic Luddites weren’t a bunch of anti-technology conservatives, as the term is now used, but were a militant labor revolt against capital, who’d replaced them with machines, leaving them to die in the ditches of destitution.
Ahh yes, cause if there's one thing we all miss, it's pre-industrial society...
I think it was more about how capitalism seems to always leave the poor to die in a ditch and less about them being luddites or something.
I'm not sure what the alternative is here to people doing work that is replaced by automation. It seems much more to be an overly romanticized image of people "fighting the man" or something. Where the man in this case is the industrialized production.
Also, as a random sidenote, the popularly thought of etymology for sabotage is wrong from anything I've ever read. It is apparently derived from the word sabot but not specifically from people throwing said sabot into machines.
Not really! You’re kind of downplaying just how large a movement this was at the time and the influence it had on society:
The original Luddites were British weavers and textile workers who objected to the increased use of mechanized looms and knitting frames. Most were trained artisans who had spent years learning their craft, and they feared that unskilled machine operators were robbing them of their livelihood. When the economic pressures of the Napoleonic Wars made the cheap competition of early textile factories particularly threatening to the artisans, a few desperate weavers began breaking into factories and smashing textile machines. They called themselves “Luddites” after Ned Ludd, a young apprentice who was rumored to have wrecked a textile apparatus in 1779.
There’s no evidence Ludd actually existed—like Robin Hood, he was said to reside in Sherwood Forest—but he eventually became the mythical leader of the movement. The protestors claimed to be following orders from “General Ludd,” and they even issued manifestoes and threatening letters under his name.
The first major instances of machine breaking took place in 1811 in Nottingham, and the practice soon spread across the English countryside. Machine-breaking Luddites attacked and burned factories, and in some cases they even exchanged gunfire with company guards and soldiers. The workers hoped their raids would deter employers from installing expensive machinery, but the British government instead moved to quash the uprisings by making machine-breaking punishable by death.
The unrest finally reached its peak in April 1812, when a few Luddites were gunned down during an attack on a mill near Huddersfield. The army had deployed several thousand troops to round up these dissidents in the days that followed, and dozens were hanged or transported to Australia. By 1813, the Luddite resistance had all but vanished. It wasn’t until the 20th century that their name re-entered the popular lexicon as a synonym for “technophobe.”
Except that's just describing what I said. In the end these people are no different then coal miners opposing green energy or modern labourers opposing automation. There is no romanticism or gain in holding on to a world where stuff costs more and takes longer and gets made in smaller quantities. Pre-industrial manufacturing is not a great victory for labour.
You are utterly ignoring the human costs here.
No one here is arguing that we should go back to some kind of pre-industrial level of society, but you cannot deny that automation has long been utilized by the owner class as a method to break labor and deny them the ability to provide for themselves on their skills and services because the owner class views them not as people who need money to survive and thrive in a market society, but as costs on a spreadsheet, a drain on company revenues, etc.
You are trying to chalk this up to a sort of Irrationality of the Antiquated because that better serves your viewpoint and comfort rather than engage with the reality that coal miners or the Luddites do/did what they do/did from a rational perspective constructed from a hostile economic environment (with attendant cultural issues cultivated by that hostility) that is largely designed by the ownership class and their allies in the ruling classes, because they know full well what those changes mean for them: the dissolution of their livelihoods and a society that will refuse to do anything to make a place for them other than the dredges of destitution. It’s a cold and heartless economic darwinism, one which cruelly treats human beings as a resource to be exploited by the ownership class in service to a cancerous capitalism obsessed with little more than its continued, endless growth.
The coal miners make the decisions they make because they would personally rather work high paying jobs even if the consequences of them continuing to work those jobs is millions of future deaths.
You are right, it's not like there weren't generations spent making sure that coal mining (like a lot of factory jobs in other places) were seen as THE jobs, with really good pay and attendant social status in areas. When you start factoring in their neighbors livestyles, especially in the last couple decades with much lower incomes, of COURSE they are going to take the selfish route out. Most people would.
To dismiss it as personal greed is such a disconnected trainwreck of an idea I'm not even going to engage it further.
Ahh yes, cause if there's one thing we all miss, it's pre-industrial society...
I think it was more about how capitalism seems to always leave the poor to die in a ditch and less about them being luddites or something.
Well, they were the Luddites. But what you gotta remember is that the historic Luddites weren’t a bunch of anti-technology conservatives, as the term is now used, but were a militant labor revolt against capital, who’d replaced them with machines, leaving them to die in the ditches of destitution.
Ahh yes, cause if there's one thing we all miss, it's pre-industrial society...
I think it was more about how capitalism seems to always leave the poor to die in a ditch and less about them being luddites or something.
I'm not sure what the alternative is here to people doing work that is replaced by automation. It seems much more to be an overly romanticized image of people "fighting the man" or something. Where the man in this case is the industrialized production.
Also, as a random sidenote, the popularly thought of etymology for sabotage is wrong from anything I've ever read. It is apparently derived from the word sabot but not specifically from people throwing said sabot into machines.
Not really! You’re kind of downplaying just how large a movement this was at the time and the influence it had on society:
The original Luddites were British weavers and textile workers who objected to the increased use of mechanized looms and knitting frames. Most were trained artisans who had spent years learning their craft, and they feared that unskilled machine operators were robbing them of their livelihood. When the economic pressures of the Napoleonic Wars made the cheap competition of early textile factories particularly threatening to the artisans, a few desperate weavers began breaking into factories and smashing textile machines. They called themselves “Luddites” after Ned Ludd, a young apprentice who was rumored to have wrecked a textile apparatus in 1779.
There’s no evidence Ludd actually existed—like Robin Hood, he was said to reside in Sherwood Forest—but he eventually became the mythical leader of the movement. The protestors claimed to be following orders from “General Ludd,” and they even issued manifestoes and threatening letters under his name.
The first major instances of machine breaking took place in 1811 in Nottingham, and the practice soon spread across the English countryside. Machine-breaking Luddites attacked and burned factories, and in some cases they even exchanged gunfire with company guards and soldiers. The workers hoped their raids would deter employers from installing expensive machinery, but the British government instead moved to quash the uprisings by making machine-breaking punishable by death.
The unrest finally reached its peak in April 1812, when a few Luddites were gunned down during an attack on a mill near Huddersfield. The army had deployed several thousand troops to round up these dissidents in the days that followed, and dozens were hanged or transported to Australia. By 1813, the Luddite resistance had all but vanished. It wasn’t until the 20th century that their name re-entered the popular lexicon as a synonym for “technophobe.”
Except that's just describing what I said. In the end these people are no different then coal miners opposing green energy or modern labourers opposing automation. There is no romanticism or gain in holding on to a world where stuff costs more and takes longer and gets made in smaller quantities. Pre-industrial manufacturing is not a great victory for labour.
You are utterly ignoring the human costs here.
No one here is arguing that we should go back to some kind of pre-industrial level of society, but you cannot deny that automation has long been utilized by the owner class as a method to break labor and deny them the ability to provide for themselves on their skills and services because the owner class views them not as people who need money to survive and thrive in a market society, but as costs on a spreadsheet, a drain on company revenues, etc.
You are trying to chalk this up to a sort of Irrationality of the Antiquated because that better serves your viewpoint and comfort rather than engage with the reality that coal miners or the Luddites do/did what they do/did from a rational perspective constructed from a hostile economic environment (with attendant cultural issues cultivated by that hostility) that is largely designed by the ownership class and their allies in the ruling classes, because they know full well what those changes mean for them: the dissolution of their livelihoods and a society that will refuse to do anything to make a place for them other than the dredges of destitution. It’s a cold and heartless economic darwinism, one which cruelly treats human beings as a resource to be exploited by the ownership class in service to a cancerous capitalism obsessed with little more than its continued, endless growth.
The coal miners make the decisions they make because they would personally rather work high paying jobs even if the consequences of them continuing to work those jobs is millions of future deaths.
people operate in the context of the systems they find themselves in, Tin.
You give a person a choice: lack the means to get out of an economically devastated region, have two general job types: the job that, while shit for the planet, pays you a wage enough to stay above water, possibly start a family, or sub-living wage jobs where you’ll live a lifetime of precarity unless some miracle of fortune walks into your life.
Which choice do you think people are gonna fuckin’ pick in that system?
The individualist moralization of the problems of fossil fuels isn’t going to fix this, especially not when meted out against people at the lowest part of the corporate food chain. The only way forward is dismantling the system that drives these workers to coal, and having another system ready and waiting for them to operate within that give them human dignity instead of leaving them to fend for themselves or compete against each other for the scraps left behind; that’s why we have government, to fix collective, systemic problems like this.
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minor incidentexpert in a dying fieldnjRegistered Userregular
I’m as pro-renewable, green energy as anyone, but to totally dismiss the concerns of coal workers who are being kicked to the curb with no consideration as nothing but “greed” is incredibly classist and tells me you’ve never lived in or around a coal town. My brother dug coal for 12 years. He hated it. His family hated it. His coworkers mostly hated it. But it was work in a town where there wasn’t much else and it paid the bills and kept his kids fed a little better than working at the Walmart 2 towns over would have. Coal miners aren’t getting rich. Jesus Christ, what an absurd take.
The onus should be on the mining companies to take care of transitioning their workers to new fields and industries, not on the workers to “just figure it out” after the company that employs a third of their town packs it in. On top of that, of course we also desperately need expanded social aid programs for those who fall through the cracks, but we should be squeezing the companies first and foremost to take care of the workers they exploit.
Ah, it stinks, it sucks, it's anthropologically unjust
Self-interest is probably a better word. The owners want to make money and don't care about the workers or the environment. The workers want to make a living and the mines are the best game in town and other industries don't want to take unnecessary risks by moving into a resource curse area and hoping it works out vs just staying in a more established area. People concentrate where resources are consumed, not where they are extracted
With enough political will this can be counteracted (see Norway's oil fund) but the popular and tempting thing to do is eg Wyoming which has no income or corporate taxes, minimal sales and property taxes, but instead funds a most of its services via extraction royalties. This can make developing the infrastructure required to attract different industries cripplingly expensive, even if they manage to do it it won't expand their tax base https://qz.com/1886798/the-resource-curse-that-plagues-the-western-us-and-saudi-arabia/
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The luddites taking their clogs (technically, sabot, from which we derive the word “sabotage”) and literally breaking the machinery used to replace them (leaving them without a means to provide for themselves any longer, thanks to their work now being automated to the point where factory owners no longer needed them) with said clogs.
Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
I think it was more about how capitalism seems to always leave the poor to die in a ditch and less about them being luddites or something.
Less a red herring and more a shorthand for the outsourcing trend beginning in the 90s
Like, let’s not pretend that this shit has been some great benefit for workers in the global south. What it’s done is enable the owner class to reap higher and higher record profits, without the pesky interferences of things like “worker rights” or “living wages,” all while shuffling the consequences of their practices away from western society where things like, say a garment factory collapsing and killing nearly 1300 people might cause some clamor and demand for reform instead of quickly disappearing into the mists of time and forgotten memory, to say nothing of the myriad other abuses visited upon these workers.
So frequently is stated the grudge against foreigners that American labor supposedly holds, yet so little is it ever mentioned that our goods are built on blood and pain, not so that they can remain cheaper, but so that the owners of their production can grow ever more wealthy
Luddites were against the exploitation of workers.
The term has changed from its original form. You can thank corporate propagandists for that one, probably.
Rock Band DLC | GW:OttW - arrcd | WLD - Thortar
I think you're missing the point entirely: the compromise was breaking the machines because the capitalists were happy to let the workers starve and die while they reaped the benefits of ownership. The alternative was using the sabots on the capitalists.
I'm not sure what the alternative is here to people doing work that is replaced by automation. It seems much more to be an overly romanticized image of people "fighting the man" or something. Where the man in this case is the industrialized production.
Also, as a random sidenote, the popularly thought of etymology for sabotage is wrong from anything I've ever read. It is apparently derived from the word sabot but not specifically from people throwing said sabot into machines.
Well, they were the Luddites. But what you gotta remember is that the historic Luddites weren’t a bunch of anti-technology conservatives, as the term is now used, but were a militant labor revolt against capital, who’d replaced them with machines, leaving them to die in the ditches of destitution.
Not really! You’re kind of downplaying just how large a movement this was at the time and the influence it had on society:
https://www.history.com/news/who-were-the-luddites
But if we automate everything, then that pesky labor cost goes closer to zero and we can make more profits!
This is likely achievable, just not cost effective. Yet.
Considering even pre-pandemic they were automating the ordering, including the big fancy ordering kiosks in places where labor costs were < $400 USD/mo for an average employee, I'd call the expense piece into question. (I'm not referring to the cooking process, just the delivery of packaged food to patrons.)
Because capital and the government conspired for years to make Coal Mining the only thing in Appalachia close to a living wage:
https://qz.com/1167671/the-100-year-capitalist-experiment-that-keeps-appalachia-poor-sick-and-stuck-on-coal/
Those who were at the forefront of automation imagined a world where people could perform a day's labor in a matter of a few hours, which would mean that everyone would be paid for that day's labor still, but have all this extra time to spend enriching the lives of themselves and society in other endeavors!
But then the corporate boardrooms said "but what if we simply reaped all the increased profits from automation for ourselves?"
Rock Band DLC | GW:OttW - arrcd | WLD - Thortar
This is a good thing! People shouldn't have to toil away at menial tasks! We just need to make sure the benefits of automation are applied to everyone.
This really doesn't reflect reality. What actually happened was that a day's labor worth of goods went from something only the rich could afford to something most people could afford. And thus the amount you could make from what was previously a day's labor went down.
Except that's just describing what I said. In the end these people are no different then coal miners opposing green energy or modern labourers opposing automation. There is no romanticism or gain in holding on to a world where stuff costs more and takes longer and gets made in smaller quantities. Pre-industrial manufacturing is not a great victory for labour.
I don't know where you got that idea, but there were two types of people at the forefront of automation. The first were the inventors who, if the myriad patent disputes of the time are anything to go by, were much more concerned with creating something manufacturers would buy than they were with reducing the workday. The second group were the manufacturers, who were looking to increase productivity and/or reduce labor costs. They had no interest in cutting hours and increasing pay to compensate; they wanted a larger share of the market and increased profits. It's not a coincidence that the Second Industrial Revolution coincided with the Gilded Age.
- John Stuart Mill
Cause the pre-industrial revolution was such a great time to be alive.
False equivalence.
I mean? Yes? The tragic part is that despite their efforts we're still heading down the very same road.
You are utterly ignoring the human costs here.
No one here is arguing that we should go back to some kind of pre-industrial level of society, but you cannot deny that automation has long been utilized by the owner class as a method to break labor and deny them the ability to provide for themselves on their skills and services because the owner class views them not as people who need money to survive and thrive in a market society, but as costs on a spreadsheet, a drain on company revenues, etc.
You are trying to chalk this up to a sort of Irrationality of the Antiquated because that better serves your viewpoint and comfort rather than engage with the reality that coal miners or the Luddites do/did what they do/did from a rational perspective constructed from a hostile economic environment (with attendant cultural issues cultivated by that hostility) that is largely designed by the ownership class and their allies in the ruling classes, because they know full well what those changes mean for them: the dissolution of their livelihoods and a society that will refuse to do anything to make a place for them other than the dredges of destitution. It’s a cold and heartless economic darwinism, one which cruelly treats human beings as a resource to be exploited by the ownership class in service to a cancerous capitalism obsessed with little more than its continued, endless growth.
Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
That's rather the point. The people driving the industrial revolutions were far from concerned with their workers.
- John Stuart Mill
Yeah they sucked. Their lionization is propaganda-as-history on a level that's exceeded only by, like, the diefication of the American Founding Fathers. Every one of them were astoundingly evil and are remembered so fondly. It makes me feel like I'm taking crazy pills when I hear people praising them.
First, is the idea that stopping automatization is possible. Is not. In fact, it has been long pointed out that the US is behind where should be on automatization, since labor being so relatively cheap is a huge government subsidy to corporations that kept companies from having to do it. That, of course, is changing.
Second, is the idea that industralists were good people. They weren't. Duh. Early 20th century was a very bad place to be.
No one has ever been concerned with their workers. Not feudal lords, not communist party leadership, no one. That is not some unique evil of industrialization or capitalism, it's just basic human nature.
The coal miners make the decisions they make because they would personally rather work high paying jobs even if the consequences of them continuing to work those jobs is millions of future deaths.
You are right, it's not like there weren't generations spent making sure that coal mining (like a lot of factory jobs in other places) were seen as THE jobs, with really good pay and attendant social status in areas. When you start factoring in their neighbors livestyles, especially in the last couple decades with much lower incomes, of COURSE they are going to take the selfish route out. Most people would.
To dismiss it as personal greed is such a disconnected trainwreck of an idea I'm not even going to engage it further.
people operate in the context of the systems they find themselves in, Tin.
You give a person a choice: lack the means to get out of an economically devastated region, have two general job types: the job that, while shit for the planet, pays you a wage enough to stay above water, possibly start a family, or sub-living wage jobs where you’ll live a lifetime of precarity unless some miracle of fortune walks into your life.
Which choice do you think people are gonna fuckin’ pick in that system?
The individualist moralization of the problems of fossil fuels isn’t going to fix this, especially not when meted out against people at the lowest part of the corporate food chain. The only way forward is dismantling the system that drives these workers to coal, and having another system ready and waiting for them to operate within that give them human dignity instead of leaving them to fend for themselves or compete against each other for the scraps left behind; that’s why we have government, to fix collective, systemic problems like this.
The onus should be on the mining companies to take care of transitioning their workers to new fields and industries, not on the workers to “just figure it out” after the company that employs a third of their town packs it in. On top of that, of course we also desperately need expanded social aid programs for those who fall through the cracks, but we should be squeezing the companies first and foremost to take care of the workers they exploit.
With enough political will this can be counteracted (see Norway's oil fund) but the popular and tempting thing to do is eg Wyoming which has no income or corporate taxes, minimal sales and property taxes, but instead funds a most of its services via extraction royalties. This can make developing the infrastructure required to attract different industries cripplingly expensive, even if they manage to do it it won't expand their tax base
https://qz.com/1886798/the-resource-curse-that-plagues-the-western-us-and-saudi-arabia/