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kleinbl00  ·  1217 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Thomas Pynchon: Is It O.K. To Be A Luddite?

I mean it's a lovely little fantasy but the Luddites were against the unfair labor practices of mechanized Victorian England. Yeah - a lot of the tools had been around but they hadn't been concentrated through mercantilism in the hands of factory owners who were able to annihilate the artisan class. THAT was the beef of the Luddites: not that stocking machines should be destroyed, but that stocking machines should belong to tailors who would make you two pairs by Thursday as opposed to rich House of Lords dwellers who owned 200 of them in an unsafe warehouse where unskilled labor churned out fifty a day for tuppence.

In 1984 it makes sense to argue that technology is inescapable. in 2020 we should remember what the Luddites were actually about: how unrestrained capitalism destroys the middle class.