The Luddites and Robotics
Good afternoon comrades and friends
Introduction
Over the decades, these series of summer lectures (now autumn lectures) held, since 1991, by the reconstituted Socialist Party of Great Britain, have looked at, in some depth and detail, questions of economics, history and politics. Socialist understanding is important, but so too is socialist knowledge.
"Knowledge is power" wrote the sixteenth century philosopher and scientist, Francis Bacon in his book SACRED MEDITATIONS (1597). Socialists would agree with this sentiment.
In a world of political ignorance, historical illiteracy and economic shallowness; socialist knowledge is important in order to give a clear route towards the socialist objective; namely - the common ownership and democratic control of the means of production and distribution by all of society.
Today's lecture, The Luddites, Machinery and Capitalism: Lessons for Today's Socialists, takes, its starting point, from rebellion and direct action by a group of workers known as the Luddites against the introduction of machinery by manufacturers. These disturbances took place in Nottinghamshire, Yorkshire, Lancashire and Cheshire between 1811 and 1813.
Why remember working class struggles of the past, particularly ones that seemingly ended in defeat? One reason is that workers can learn something of importance from these struggles and avoid their mistakes.
Working class history becomes a repository of class struggle; both economic and political. We are part of a socialist movement and it is useful to know where we have come from just as it is equally important to know where we are going.
As the Roman orator Marcus Cicero once remarked:
"To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child" (THE ORATOR, chapter 34, section trans. H. M. Hubbell, p. 395 1939).
Origins of the term "Luddite"
Why Luddite? The machine breakers adopted the name of Luddites to sign-off threatening letters to mill owners by 'Ned Lud' or 'General Ludd'. No such person existed at the time but "Luddism" became synonymous with machine-breaking.
According to the historian, Richard Conniff:
"..., no such person existed. Ludd was a fiction concocted from an incident that supposedly had taken place 22 years earlier in the city of Leicester. According to the story, a young apprentice named Ludd or Ludham was working at a stocking frame when a superior admonished him for knitting too loosely. Ordered to "square his needles," the enraged apprentice instead grabbed a hammer and flattened the entire mechanism. The story eventually made its way to Nottingham, where protesters turned Ned Ludd into their symbolic leader (WHAT THE LUDDITES REALLY FOUGHT AGAINST, Smithsonian Magazine March 2011).
The Luddites also used ridicule in their protests by writing threatening-sounding letters that began with "Whereas by the Charter" ...and ending with "Ned Lud's Office, Sherwood Forest."
These letters drew upon the myths of Robin Hood and his Merry Men living lives as outlaws in Nottingham's Sherwood Forest. As Adrian Randall wrote, in the forward to Kevin Binfield's book THE WRITINGS OF THE LUDDITES (2004):
"Robin had famously robbed the rich to give to the poor and defended the weak against arbitrary baronial power. But Ned Ludd epitomized the right of the poor to earn their own livelihood and to defend the customs of their trade against dishonourable capitalist depredators. While Robin, a displaced gentleman, signified paternal protection, Ned Ludd evidenced the sturdy self-reliance of a community prepared to resist for itself the notion that market forces rather than moral values should shape the fate of lobor" (p.xiv).
The Luddites also invoked a "world-turned-upside-down" - a phrase found in the Bible (Psalm 146, 9) but developed in popular usage in the 13 and 14th centuries (see E. Welsford, The Fool, 1935). The Luddites would sometimes march in women's clothes as "General Ludd's wives" to signify change and questioning of convention; an inversion of human relations (Conniff op cit). Satire and humour were used with great effect against the authorities and the owners of capital.
The tradition of turning the world "up-side down" would have been known to the luddites. The British Museum holds a popular etching representing the world turned upside down in sixteen compartments, with animals behaving like men, flying fishes, women adopting the role of men and the earth above the sky. It dates from 1790.
In his book THE WORLD TURNED UPSIDE DOWN (1991), the Historian, Christopher Hill also traced the subversion associated with the phrase to the beliefs and actions of such 17th century radical groups as the Diggers, the Ranters and the Levellers.
Hill said the phrase was:
"...the idea that the world might be permanently turned upside down: that the dream world of the Land of Cokayne or the kingdom of heaven might be attainable on earth now (p 17).
The Land of Cokayne, incidentally, was a fantastic land of plenty in popular medieval literature. It was an imaginary place of extreme luxury and ease where physical comforts and pleasures are always immediately at hand and where the harshness of feudal peasant life does not exist.
In this tradition, there is a well-known Ballad, "The World Turned Upside down" composed by the Digger, Gerrard Winstanley. More recently a Ballad of a similar title was composed by Leon Rosselson in 1975 and recorded by Billy Bragg in 1985.
The Luddites are then in a tradition of dissent against political power. They are not an anomaly.
In fact, machine-breaking was not started by the Luddites. In 1675 the weavers of Spitalfields rioted for three days against machines which could, allegedly, do the work of twenty men (G. Rude, THE CROWD IN HISTORY, 1964, pp 71-73).
Marx wrote in CAPITAL, that in the seventeenth century:
"...nearly all Europe experienced workers' revolts against the ribbon-loom, a machine for weaving ribbons and lace trimmings" (CAPITAL, Volume 1, Ch. 15, p. 554).
Machine-breaking also took place in the eighteenth century, when it was used as a tactic by workers to try to force an increase in pay (Jeff Horn, MACHINE-BREAKING IN ENGLAND AND FRANCE DURING THE AGE OF REVOLUTION, Labour, Vol. 55 Spring, 2005, pp. 143-166 and N. Longmate, MILESTONES IN WORKING CLASS HISTORY, BBC Books 1975, p. 37).
The word "sabotage" (from sabot, a wooden shoe), for example, derives from striking workers in France who threw their wooden shoes into the factory machinery to cause it to stop and break.
Similar practices still took place in the 20th century. This writer/speaker, for example, remembers working for Windsor and Newton in Harrow, Middlesex in the late 1970s. A coin was periodically tossed by workers into the machinery grinding the oil paint, thereby stopping production and giving workers a rest while the machine was recalibrated by technicians.
In England, machine breaking was a feature of early industrial relations from the late seventeenth century well into the nineteenth.
Prior to the outbreak of Luddite activity, between 1800 and 1810, several unsuccessful petitions had been addressed by textile workers to Parliament. These petitions protested that the introduction of machinery was an infringement of their traditional rights and pleading for protection against its introduction. The petitions fell on deaf-ears.
Politicians were more interested in "laissez-faire", free trade and the interests of the manufacturers. Capitalism had moved on and the employers did not want restrictions imposed on the movement of capital of any kind. Profit, capital accumulation and the expansion of value were their only consideration.
The Luddites have had a bad press
The Luddites, who came to prominence in the early eighteenth century, have had a bad press. They have been written-off historically as mindless hooligans fighting against the tide of progress.
Luddism is now used as an insult to put down "technophobes" that resist the introduction of new electronic gadgets or refuse to join Facebook and Twitter. Luddism is also used to criticise those who complain about the introduction of robotics and artificial intelligence into capitalist production, thereby threatening jobs and livelihoods.
However, they are still remembered under different circumstances and struggles. During the miner's strike of 1984, Robert Calvert, the poet and artistic contributor to the music group Hawkwind, wrote of the Luddites in his album FREQ (1985). This is what he wrote:
"They said that Ludd was an Idiot boy
That all he could do was wreck and destroy
The history books said that his reason had fled
When he bashed the monster engine till it was dead
He turned to his workmates and said "death to the Machines".
They tread on our future and tread on our dreams".
Nevertheless, it was not the machines that destroyed the Luddites' future and trod on their dreams. It was in fact capitalism, capitalist conditions of production and the use by capitalists of new knitting frames and power looms to drive down prices which included the wages of the artisans working in their cottages. It was market forces, competition and profit-making that did for the Luddites as it has done for workers since, like the striking miners Robert Calvert interviewed during 1984 for inclusion in his record album.
Ironically it was another poet, Lord Byron, who also championed the Luddites.
Byron was a lord - a privileged member of the aristocracy - which gave him more say in how the country ran than any Luddite could ever hope to enjoy. He used his privileged position to stand up for the Luddites against Prime Minister Spencer Perceval, who was fighting for a bill that would make "machine-breaking" a capital offense. It was Byron's first speech in the House of Lords.
Speaking in the Lords, Byron opposed Perceval's efforts, explaining that the Luddites' recent acts of violence were the product of "circumstances of the most unparalleled distress." This 'once honest and industrious body of the people,' Byron claimed, had become "miserable men" driven by "nothing but absolute want,"
www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/byron-was-one-few-prominent-defenders-luddites
This then was the conditions the Luddites found themselves in "nothing but absolute want". And for existing in this position of abject poverty they have been ridiculed and derided down the centuries.
Luddism, Technology and Class Struggle
Luddism is historically interesting because it explains the importance of technology for the capitalist class and why it is introduced. As the apologist for capitalism: the free-marketeer Andrew Ure wrote in 1835, of the invention of the self-acting mule:
"A creation destined to restore order among the industrious classes...This invention confirms the great doctrine already propounded, that when capital enlists science in her service, the refractory hand of labour will always be taught docility" (quoted in CAPITAL Vol. 1 p.563, chapter 15 Machinery and Large Scale Industry)
The self-acting mule was a cotton spinning machine which could mass produce yarn, without the constant intervention of a highly-skilled operator. It was patented by Richard Roberts in 1799. The benefit for the owner was being able to dispense with expensive skilled labour and retain cheaper adolescents and children. The introduction of machinery like the self-acting mule was considered by Andrew Ure, as a means to discipline workers not to strike for higher pay and better working conditions (The Philosophy of Manufactures, salemcc.instructure.com).
For socialists, the workers, instead of being appendages to the machine, - like Charlie Chaplain in the classic film MODERN TIMES - should be on the outside of the machine, designing, managing them, directly producing and distributing goods and services for the entire community at the level of abundance. Whereas Andrew Ure wanted capitalists and machines without workers - an impossible fantasy - , socialists, want machines and workers without the capitalists.
The use by capitalists of science and technology in the class struggle - to teach workers "docility" and "restore order" repudiates the accusation that the luddites were mere hooligans and idiotic opponents of progress. The luddites were engaged in class struggle.
The capitalists in the early 19th century who wanted to restore order to production and to impose "docility" onto the working class have had their motives for introducing machinery largely unquestioned. Their actions in wanting to drive wages down, de-skill and impose conformity onto the work force have not been critically interrogated by academic historians. Hargreaves, Arkwright, Crompton and other inventers of machines are considered "swash- buckling entrepreneurs" beyond any criticism. And they are uncritically lauded as heroes of the Industrial revolution.
Yet capital intensification, i.e. the displacement of labour by capital (machines) relentlessly continues to create unemployment.
In the 21st century, through digital technology, it is set to create major social and economic problems for the working class. Capitalism’s economists call it "creative destruction". However it means the destruction of jobs, individuals, families and communities while creating more and more profit for the capitalist class.
One newspaper report, for example, recently claimed that Robotics and Artificial Intelligence will lose some 200 million manufacturing jobs world-wide by 2050 (BLOOMBERG 26 June 2019).
Whether this is an accurate prediction of the future remains to be seen. Futurologists have been wrong in the past. The design, maintenance, servicing, transportation and storage of computers have generated employment unknown a decade or two ago. A study by the consultancy Deloitte said that machines will take on more repetitive and laborious tasks, but seem no closer to eliminating the need for human labour than at any time in the last 150 years (GUARDIAN 18th August 2015).
From a socialist perspective it is evident that robots and artificial intelligence is not the problem. The problem is that the workers are a subject class under capitalism forced to be appendages to the machine having no control over production, what is produced and for whom. Workers are denied creative fulfilling and artistic work.
Workers have no democratic say in what is produced, under what conditions and for whom. Capitalism denies this basic human need to the working class. Workers are told by employers what to do, for how long and under conditions of work not set by workers themselves. And in the process of commodity production, workers are exploited, creating more social wealth than they receive in wagers and salaries.
Why can the capitalist class use technology in the class struggle to displace workers? Surely that is the question to be asked and answered. And it is an answer that leads to questioning exactly who owns the means of production and the control of science and technology and for what purpose.
Why are robotics and artificial intelligence seen as such a threat today? Surely it is the owners of the means of production - the capitalist class - who are the threat? Is it not the ownership and control of the means of production, what they are used for and by whom that is the important question.
This is as true today as it was at the turn of the eighteenth/nineteenth century. Politicians, economists and the media look at robotics and other forms of labour-saving technology as the problem, but completely ignore the owners of this technology; the private owners of the means of production. This was a mistake also made by the Luddites.
The question of the private ownership of the means of production and distribution by employers is just as absent in today's debate on robotics and artificial intelligence as it was during the early 19th century. To privately own the means of production is seen as natural and something that cannot even be questioned. Private property ownership is considered sacrosanct.
The Luddites, E.P. Thompson and Working Class History
The negative view of the Luddites as violent hooligans holding back the tide of progress has been challenged by a number of historians. One such historian was E.P. Thompson in his book THE MAKING OF THE ENGLISH WORKING CLASS, published in 1963.
Thompson devoted an entire chapter of his book to the Luddites in 'An Army of Redressers'.
Thompson wrote, for example:
What was at issue was the 'freedom' of the capitalist class to destroy the customs of trade, whether by new machinery, by the factory-system, or by unrestricted competition, beating down wages, undercutting his rivals, and undermining standards of craftsmanship (Chapter 14, An army of Redressers p. 600).
And he continued:
The tradition of the just price and the fair wage lived longer among the 'lower orders' than is sometimes supposed. They saw laissez faire, not as freedom but as 'foul imposition'. They could see no natural law by which one man, or a few men, could engage in practices which brought manifest injury to their fellows (loc cit. p. 600 -601).
In his Preface to THE MAKING OF THE ENGLISH WORKING CLASS, E. P. Thompson set out his reason for wanting to write a study of the working class at the beginning of the nineteenth century.
Thompson wrote:
I am seeking to rescue the poor stockinger, the Luddite cropper, the 'obsolete' hand-loom weaver, the ‘utopian artisan’. And even the deluded followers of Joanna Southcott, from the enormous condescension of history (p. 12).
The first three groups, stockinger, cropper and weaver, were all crafts corresponding to three regions of Luddite activity and to the machines they believed were undermining their employment, wages and standard of living. Joanna Southcott was an influential spiritualist.
The Luddites did not come from no-where and were rooted in previous organisations and the "quasi-legal" trade union tradition struggling against the Combination Acts of 1799 and 1800 enacted by the government of Pitt the Younger.
Although E.P. Thompson was no socialist, his work as a historian has contributed to an understanding of past struggles of workers against the ruling class and their political agents.
Today, Thompson's histories of the working class are viewed as old-fashioned. Class is considered by a generation of reactionary historians who came to influence in the 1990s, as neither a fruitful concept of historical analysis nor an appropriate basis for a politics of freedom.
A whole cluster of conservative historians have pushed focus away from class to kings and queens, great statesmen and endless reruns of the Second World War extolling the "virtue" of "national cohesion". "Great Men and High politics" now dominates history writing.
The Massacre of Peterloo in 1819, for example, was not even known to the Film's director, Mike Leigh, until he came across it almost by accident. Leigh was never taught about Peterloo at school. The Chartists as a political force are marginalised in historical discourse (although they made a brief appearance in the ITV drama, Victoria), so too the First International. Little is written of socialist politics prior to the formation of the Labour Party. However, our history is not made by kings and politicians but by the working class.
Thompson demonstrated how class was worthy of historical investigation touching upon Marx's comments in the COMMUNIST MANIFESTO that "The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles". (Of course Engels later clarified that this meant all 'written histor', since for the vast bulk our existence human societies were based, by necessity, on cooperation and equality - primitive communism).
Marx also noted that the class struggle was "the motor force of historical change" and is in fact a "political struggle" over the ownership and control of the means of production.
The Luddites and Class struggle
Luddism was also an important historical event because it was one of the first organised forms of resistance to the encroachment of capital, market forces and laissez-faire competition. Organised resistance is class struggle.
Class struggle raises questions about what the Luddites tried to achieve, the use of force against the Luddites by the ruling class and their State, and the political means open to the working class to abolish capitalism and replace the profit system with socialism.
Marx and Engels made a passing comment to groups of workers like the Luddites in the COMMUNIST MANIFESTO.
In a reference to the early stage of the working class movement, Marx and Engels wrote:
The proletariat goes through various stages of development. With its birth pangs begins its struggle with the bourgeoisie. At first the contest is carried on by individual labourers, then by the workpeople of a factory, then by the operatives of one trade, in one locality, against the individual bourgeois who directly exploits them.
And they continued:
They direct their attacks not against the bourgeois conditions of production, but against the instruments of production themselves; they destroy imported wares that compete with labour, they smash to pieces machinery, they set factories ablaze, they seek to restore by force the vanished status of the workmen of the Middle Ages (THE COMMUNIST MANIFESTO in The Communist Manifesto and the Last One Hundred Years, Socialist Party of Great Britain, p67 – 68).
As capitalism emerged from Feudalism, a new and propertyless working class increasingly confronted a capitalist class who privately owned the means of production and distribution to the exclusion of everybody else. It was a class of workers who were denied trade union representation and who looked at the effects of capitalism rather than the cause.
Marx commented on the peculiar position of the "free labourers" under capitalism. These "free labourers" were, Marx said:
Free labourers, in the double sense that neither they themselves form part and parcel of the means of production, as in the case of slaves, bondsmen, etc., nor do the means of production belong to them, as in the case of the peasant-proprietors; they are, therefore, free from, unencumbered by, any means of production of their own (CAPITAL, Volume 1, ch. XXVI, p. 714).
From this propertyless and weak initial position, workers did organize and struggle to fight back. Attempts at trade union organisation were one route constantly being thwarted by the government. Unable to unionise, Luddism did at least indicate that the working class had a voice under very difficult circumstances - a voice that demanded to be heard or an "alternative political economy" to be considered, as the historian M.I Thomis put it.
Thomis went on to say:
"Luddism was, in places, a remarkably successful exercise of working-class solidarity and excellent testimony to what could be carried out by organisation. When its lessons had been learned, adapted, and adopted by groups more vitally important to the economy than disappearing croppers, redundant handloom weavers or cottage stocking-knitters, it might then be said to have contributed something to the making of the English working class" (Malcolm I. Thomis, THE LUDDITES: MACHINE BREAKING IN REGENCY ENGLAND, 1970 p172).
Luddism failed but its failure has much to teach workers today in particular the ownership and control of the means of production and its exclusion by the majority working class.
Main Events of Luddism
The Luddites were active in three areas of the English textile industry. The luddites in the West Riding of Yorkshire were the croppers who sheared or cropped the cloth. Their craft traditions and wages were threatened by the introduction of the gig-mill or shearing frame.
In the Nottinghamshire and adjacent parts of the Midlands there were the stockingers who weaved the stockings. They were being made redundant by the framework-knitting machine.
And in Lancashire there were the cotton weavers who were being made unemployed by the application of the steam-engine to the hand-loom.
In his book STOP THIEF!: THE COMMONS, ENCLOSURES AND RESISTANCE, the historian Peter Linebaugh called these three regions the "Luddite Triangle" (p. 78).
Luddism began in March 1811 in the lace and hosiery industry of Nottinghamshire. The targets were the wide-frames which were introduced for making stockings. From Nottinghamshire machine breaking spread to Yorkshire in January 1812. Here the croppers attacked gig-mills and shearing frames. Finally, by March 1812 the movement had reached Lancashire and Cheshire where steam-driven power looms were attacked (David Taylor, MASTERING ECONOMIC HISTORY, chapter 5, The Luddites pp71-79, 1988).
Elsewhere on 11 March 1811 stocking frames were destroyed in Arnold outside Nottingham followed by rioting in Bulwell, Sutton, Basford, Kimberley, Mandfield, Ollerrton, Retford and Hucknall. The state responded with arrests and in March 1812, at Nottingham Assizes, seven Luddites were sentenced to transportation.
In January 1812 Oatlands Mill near Leeds was set on fire. This was followed by widespread smashing of gig-mills and shearing frames in the West Riding. When the Rawfolds Mill, owned by William Cartwright was attacked, two Luddites were killed. With the killing of William Horsfall, who had denounced the Luddites, several Luddites were executed on 8 January 1813 and five were sentenced to transportation for "administrating unlawful oaths".
Between February and April 1812 a number of attacks took place in Lancashire, mainly aimed at power looms. The most serious incident was an attack in a power-loom factory at Middletion on 20 and 21 April 1812. Five Luddites were killed on the initial assault. On the second assault a further six Luddites were killed. In May 1812 at Chester Assizes 47 Luddites were tried, and concluded with 12 sentences of death by hanging and 8 sentences of transportation.
Why did Luddism Fade Away?
Luddite activity had little long-term effect. The employers continued to use shearing-frames since they owned the means of production and workers had no say in the matter, forced to sell their labour-power for a wage under market conditions and market forces over which they had no control.
There are some historians who believed that the Luddites harmed the future of working class struggle in England and Marx is given in evidence. Did not Marx and Engels praise the capitalist class in the early pages of the COMMUNIST MANIFESTO? Despite all the misery and pain, did not capitalism establish the material basis for socialism?
It is true that Marx made the point that the actions of the Luddites did not help the wider working class movement at the time. He wrote that it:
"...gave the anti-Jacobin government, composed of such people as Sidmouth and Castereagh, a pretext for the most violent and reactionary measures." (CAPITAL volume 1 1976, pp.554).
And Marx went on to conclude that:
"It took both time and experience before the workers learnt to distinguish between machinery and its employment by capital, and therefore to transfer their attacks from the material instruments of production to the form of society which utilizes those instruments" (pp 554-555).
However, Marx's comment should be placed in a historical context. Capitalism was necessary for socialism. The working class did mature. They did learn lessons from the past.
Luddism did not prevent trade unions being successfully established as legal entities with the repeal of the Combination Act in 1824. Luddism did not prevent the growth of Chartism, which some former Luddites joined, nor did it harm the spread of socialist ideas from the First International onwards.
The main reason for Luddism's decline was political. The capitalists who owned the shearing-frames were supported by the machinery of government including the armed forces of the state.
This led to a number of actions by the government of the day:
* Troops were deployed on a wide scale. According to E.P. Thompson more troops were used to suppress the Luddites than Wellington had under his command in the Peninsula War against Napoleon (loc cit, p. 617)
* The sentences handed out by judges at the Assizes at York, Lancaster and Chester was harsh and brutal enough to deter further Luddite activity.
* Government spies infiltrated the Luddites giving information to the authorities.
* The Frame Breaking Act, passed in February 1812, made machine-breaking a capital offence.
The question of what the Luddites accomplished is much harder to answer. It is true that the Luddites exhibited worker solidarity, but as far as achieving their goals of keeping their former trade and wages, they failed. Although sympathetic to the Luddites, E.P. Thompson concluded that "Luddism ended on the scaffold" (loc cit, p.540).
However, it should be remembered that the Luddites did not oppose technological change for the sake of it; the machines they smashed had been around for a long time.
What the Luddites objected to, was the employers paying them less wages, degrading their skills and the quality of what they made and imposing on their working practices the discipline of the labour market.
Lessons of Luddism
So, what lessons can be learnt from Luddism?
There are four principal lessons that can be learnt.
First, there is the political conservatism associated with phrases like the "just wage" or the "fair wage".
This is still known today in the form of the slogan: "A fair day's wage for a fair day's work!"
Luddites were protesting against changes they thought would make their lives much worse, changes that were part of a new labour market system - the wages system. Before this time, artisans would do their work for a set price, the usual price.
Workers did not want the new system that involved working out how much work they did, how much materials cost, and how much profit there would be for the factory owner. They wanted a "fair or just" payment for their work.
In his lecture to the General Counsel of the First International in 1865, published after his death as the pamphlet Value, Price and profit, Marx concluded that workers should reject the backward looking conservatism associated with the struggle for a "fair wage".
Instead, Marx urged workers to "inscribe on their banners" the revolutionary watchword: "Abolition of the wages system".
Marx's conception of socialism involved "abolition of buying and selling, of the bourgeois conditions of production (COMMUNIST MANIFESTO p. 75). Marx urged workers of his own day to give up struggling for a "fair wage" and press for the abolition of the wages system.
In this, Marx was being consistent.
The abolition of the wages system was not something that could occur with the retention of the profit system and commodity production for sale, but rather it had to be an integral part of getting rid of capitalism and its replacement by socialism.
In socialism there will be no classes, no employers and employees, no labour market and no buying and no selling of the commodity "labour-power".
Socialism would be "From each according to ability to each according to need" (Gotha Programme)
In 1881 Frederick Engels also criticised the slogan "a fair day's wage for a fair day's work" in the first issue of THE LABOUR STANDARD.
Engels argued that workers exchange their full labour power for a day in return for the subsistence necessary to maintain them for a day.
Engels said
The workman gives as much; the Capitalist gives as little, as the nature of the bargain will admit.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/subject/newspapers/labour-standard.htm
Engels went on to state that capitalists can force a better bargain as they can live off their capital, whereas workers, without reserves, will be forced to accept work at a less advantageous rate.
As innovation continually replaced workers with machines, Engels argued, workers come to form an industrial reserve army of the unemployed putting further down-ward pressure on wages.
And, in any case, Engels argued, the wealth of capitalists has been accumulated through the exploitation of the working class.
Engels, like Marx, also called for the abolition of the wages system.
The second lesson to learn from the Luddites is the use they made of violence to achieve their objective.
Needless to say, there can be no successful outcome of workers engaging the capitalist class in violence. This has been the bitter historical lesson learnt since the Luddites.
We only have to recall the failure of the coal miner's strike of 1984 and the 1986 "
In both examples the working class lost out to the determination of the government, the intransigence of employers and the strength and organisation of the police.
There are those who urge the workers to use physical force against the state power, fight the police and the armed forces, try to get soldiers to change sides, in short, seek power through civil disobedience and civil war. This leads to a blood bath. Such a tactic can never in any circumstances lead to socialism, which presupposes a predominantly socialist working class majority.
The misguided people who advocate violence against the capitalist state only do so because they have given-up winning over the working class to socialism, or who think that a non-socialist working class can be led or forced into socialism.
Today the capitalist state can not only call upon a police force with sophisticated surveillance techniques and armoury but also military armed force with powerful and deadly weaponry.
Capitalists have their private ownership of the means of production and distribution protected by the armed forces of the state; the power of coercion. And the control of political coercion and the use of armed force rest in Parliament and the political representatives of the capitalist class.
Socialists are not pacifists, but we do recognise that the more workers understand socialist ideas and organise themselves within socialist political parties so violence can be avoided.
A socialist revolution has to be peaceful and can be peaceful by the use of voting for socialist delegates and the formation of a socialist majority in Parliament. In doing so, the machinery of government, including the armed forces of the state, can be "converted from an instrument of oppression into the agent of emancipation..." (Clause 6, SPGB, DECLARATION OF PRINCIPLES).
In the face of a world-wide socialist majority what can the capitalist class do? They will have lost political control, they will have lost protection of their private property, they will face a determined and organised socialist majority and so the revolutionary situation leads the way inexorably to the transformation of capitalism into socialism.
Third, the question of machinery and its use in production.
In the COMMUNIST MANIFESTO, Marx commented that the early worker's movement, which included the Luddites, directed their attacks:
"...not against the individual bourgeois who directly exploit them. They direct their attacks not against the bourgeois conditions of production but against the instruments of production themselves" (p67).
Therefore, the use by the capitalist class, of the instruments of production, whether they are hand looms or robotics and artificial intelligence is not the point.
The point is that they are the private property of the capitalist class intentionally used to displace workers, increase productivity and make more and more profit. It is the capitalist ownership of the means of production and distribution which workers should turn their attention to, not machinery.
That is why Marx remarked that workers should look to the individual capitalists who exploit them: that is look to "the bourgeois conditions of production". Capitalism has to be replaced not machinery.
In CAPITAL, Marx devoted an entire chapter to machinery. In the chapter, Machinery and Large-Scale Industry (ch. 15), Marx stated that the primary purpose the capitalist had for introducing machinery into production is to further their aim in making profit and accumulating capital. He wrote:
Like every other instrument for increasing the productivity of labour, machinery is intended to cheapen commodities and, by shortening the part of the working day in which the worker works for himself, to lengthen the other part, the part he gives to the capitalist for nothing. The machine is a means for producing surplus-value. (Marx, CAPITAL, Volume One, Penguin Classics edition, p492)
The capitalist has no interest in lightening the load of the worker, nor to reduce the hours of the working day. Instead the capitalist wants to increase the productivity of labour within the workplace, replace workers by machines and make more profit.
Finally, there is the question of socialism and machinery.
Socialists, have no aversion to the invention of new technologies and their application within a socialist system of common ownership and democratic control by all of society.
Socialists welcome the introduction of machinery in a future socialist society in order to enable production and distribution to take place at the level of abundance and for products to be used directly and solely to meet social need.
The use of robots will also relieve workers from having to engage in dangerous, boring and unpleasant work.
William Morris has been unfairly referred to as a "Luddite" for his criticism, in his own day, of the use of machinery under capitalism.
However Morris wrote that:
...it is the allowing machines to be our masters and not our servants that so injures the beauty of life nowadays... (HOW WE LIVE AND HOW WEMIGHT LIVE, 1884).
Morris was right to point out the dangers inherent in machine production under capitalism. The accuracy of his observation is today, all too clear. Hours of work continue to be far too long. The introduction of machinery like robots suits the employers not the workers. Labour is still intensively and extensively exploited and the struggle for quality, a struggle at the heart of Luddism, is constantly undermined for the need of cheapness under conditions of the market and competition.
Doubtless Morris would have welcomed the Magnetic Resonance Imaging machine (MRI) used in hospitals for picturing bleeds on the brain following a stroke and the 'Sharon and Tracy' boring machines used to dig under the Thames to create the Jubilee line extension. The first machine helps doctors in diagnosing illness the latter saves back-breaking and dangerous work. The use of machines and robotics and artificial intelligence in socialism will be an act of freedom from drudgery, danger, and boredom.
Therefore, the important point to remember is that it is not technology which is the problem facing workers.
It is the fact, that, under capitalism, the means of production and distribution, like robotics and artificial Intelligence, are in the private ownership of a minority capitalist class and is used to further their interests and their profit-making to the exclusion of everybody else.
The socialist objective is for the working class to organise consciously, democratically and politically for the replacement of capitalism with socialism.
And by socialism we mean the common ownership and democratic control of the means of production and distribution by all of society. Free and voluntary labour will then be at liberty to organise production and distribution to suit their lives rather than the dictates of capital and profit-making.