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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