Chance democratic

Chance democratic

Monday, December 5, 2016

Review, David F. Noble, Progress Without People: In Defense of Luddism (Charles H. Kerr Publishing, 1993)

Columbia Missourian, April 10, 1994

The word sabotage derives from the French word sabot, a type of wooden shoe worn by workers in the early nineteenth century. With the coming of the Industrial Revolution, workers faced increasing unemployment, the erosion of labor skills, and the devastation of their communities as the introduction of machinery destroyed their traditional crafts. They fought back by tossing their sabots into the machines, causing breakdowns.

This pattern became widespread, especially in northern England, where workers celebrated the mythic Ned Ludd, champion of machine wreckers. As David Noble argues, the Luddites have been widely misrepresented and their movement dismissed. But as we find ourselves in the midst of the second Industrial Revolution, faced again with increasing unemployment and the destruction of communities because of new technology, he argues we might have much to learn from the Luddites.

History is written largely by the winners; therefore, our understanding of Luddism is based primarily on the accounts of the defenders of mechanization and progress. In this view, the advance of technology was inevitable, powered by social forces beyond human control. In opposing this process, the Luddites sought to accomplish the impossible by turning back the hands of time. But, as Noble says, when factory owners and workers struggled over whether and how machinery would be introduced into the workplace, the story was complex and the outcome in doubt.

The mechanization of the workplace was not primarily an economic issue, Noble says, but a political one. The struggle was one for power, as owners sought to establish unquestioned dominance over their employees while workers fought to maintain control of the conditions of labor by preventing the destruction of their crafts. In the process of defending their interests, the owners articulated an explanatory paradigm to justify the advance of technology and the displacement of workers. This ideology portrayed society as governed by vast social forces, or “invisible hands,” in Adam Smith’s classic phrase. Immutable “laws” of supply and demand rendered the actions of individual capitalists and workers irrelevant.

Developed in the midst of the struggle between workers and owners over control of the workplace, this ideology gradually became the dominant cultural view in Western society so that even opponents of capitalism and defenders of labor accepted its basic premises.

By the end of the nineteenth century, industrial capitalism had become an abstract doctrine and, in the process, the immediate and tangible experiences of workers on the shop floor grew increasingly irrelevant in the grand theories of both capitalism’s defenders and opponents.

The struggle, in short, effectively had been removed from the point of production—the shop floor, the one place workers wielded the most potential power. Determined not to seem antiprogress, labor unions accepted the mechanization of the workplace and focused their attention on such bread-and-butter issues as wages and hours.

In 1983, Business Week proclaimed, “Everyone believes the United States is in the midst of an economic transformation on the order of the Industrial Revolution.” Whereas mechanization propelled the original Industrial Revolution, automation has guided the second. Growing largely out of the state-sponsored developments in technology made during World War II, the second Industrial Revolution has been based on programmable machinery as well as self-correcting machinery. With the growth of multinational corporations and the creation of a global labor market, it has affected labor’s development worldwide.

Once again, technological developments have given rise to an official ideology justifying the process. As Noble explains it, “Economists revealed that the very idea of technological unemployment was simply a semantic confusion, since technological development invariably created more jobs than it eliminated.” Union leadership accepted the official optimistic explanation and confined its criticism to areas besides the increasing automation of the work place. But workers themselves have not been so quick to assume the beneficence of technological advances. Thus they have found themselves in opposition not only to their employers but to their unions.

Ned Ludd lives and has shown a creativity in the struggle for power in the workplace. In the late-1970s in Australia, for instance, telephone workers went on strike to oppose the introduction of a computerized system that would have displaced many of them. Striking technicians switched over the local-call system and the long-distance system, enabling the public to make unlimited long-distance calls at local-call prices.

One of the dominant forms of power in society is the ability to define what constitutes “common sense.” For nearly two centuries in Western society, technological progress has been common sense, and those who oppose it thereby are defined as either misguided or insane. But Noble asks us to look more closely at such common-sense assumptions and recognize that they are the results not of hidden hands but of power politics. Furthermore, Noble argues, it is necessary to look at the experiences of the workers who have been displaced by the mechanization of the first Industrial Revolution and the automation of the second. In demanding that we recognize the tremendous costs that are glossed over in the optimistic dominant ideology, Noble displays the same critical spirit that prompted the British poet Lord Byron to condemn the authors of the Frame Bill which made machine breaking a capital offense:

Men are more easily made than machinery—
Stocking fetch better prices than lives—
Gibbets on Sherwood will heighten the scenery—
Showing how Commerce, how Liberty thrives.



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