Political Memes

In short: the Luddites were wrong to oppose new technology, but right to oppose the surplus value created by that technology being captured entirely by the capitalist class.

They were also opposed to the machines being run by unskilled labor and children. The same children that died and maimed running the machines. The children died in such masses that they had them buried in mass graves away from the factory. There is a lot to this story and not just one thing.
https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/blood-in-the-machine/ This is worth a listen if you would like to hear more about the Luddite movement.

Exactly.

This wouldn't be a problem if average workers were compensated, in part, with shares of the business. When automation comes and takes your job, you lose the hourly portion of your pay. But the shares you own suddenly start paying more.

It's honestly a bit cringe how these memes always need to pull some kind of capitalist Boogeyman into the narrative where it doesn't belong.

Marx's entire theory of history is built in the inevitability of technological progress, and how it shapes economic and social systems. From a Marxist lens, opposing such progress is pissing into the wind. It's worse than being an actual aristocrat in many ways, because it actively harms the progression towards the post scarcity utopia where surplus labor has no value to exploit.

There's a reason why the USSR and China formed their entire revisionist theory around rapid industrialization to compete with more advanced capitalist societies.

a reasonable critique especially compared to the propaganda passed down to us. :) to me it really makes sense to want to destroy the exploitation machines the exploitation boss made to exploit. did it work? obviously not, lol, but the heart was in the right place and i am tired of these poor souls getting trashed ya know? it doesn’t sit well with me to have these folks’ legacy become an insult.

Do you have the citation for the Chomsky reference? Would love to get a better handle on these concepts.

You can be anti-capitalist and pro-labor without needing to see the Luddites as anything except what they were - middle-class workers trying to defend their own handful of specialized jobs and firms exploiting familial rather than wage labor against the intrusion of more efficient processes during an economic downturn. It's not propaganda to fail to read some kind of proto-class consciousness into it.

There’s something of a myth of a “model demographic” that I think is being misapplied by those “falling for the propaganda.” Of course, it’s a meme, but when I refer to certain groups or individuals in a positive light, I don’t mean to imply they were ethically perfect or without flaws. What I mean is that they were actively challenging the systems that needed to be challenged. In that sense, the praise is about their resistance to a deeply exploitative system, not an endorsement of every action or belief they held.

For example, many view Malcolm X positively—not because he was without contradictions, but because he challenged oppressive systems and presented a radical alternative. Similarly, someone like Luigi Mangione might be admired for resisting corporate or state control in his own way, even though the context is different.

totally valid perspective to take on the matter. i can do my little piece to combat that but in the end i am just a droplet among the waves.

Yep, before industrialisation you had powerful guilds that would hold monopolies over production of certain goods and we're basically unions before the fact.

Just learned of this guy now, but yeah. If the originalist Luddites were doing the right thing for the wrong reason, Berry here is doing the wrong thing for the wrong reasons.

When huge majority of ~~technology at the time~~ industrial technology was designed to drive wages down, yeah, people are going to become industrial “tech haters.”

Not many realize how new this tech and type of mechanical exploitation was to those people, and how it was concentrated on simply extracting value from them.

What did I do to you?

No, not the same way at all (edit: similar, yes but I take issue with calling them identical). The Luddites fought against machines that exploited workers and destroyed communities, targeting the systems of inequality behind them. Horse breeders opposed motorized buses purely to protect their market share. One was a fight for justice; the other was just economic self-interest.