Лудиты: Движение против механизации в Англии XIX века.

Member of an 1810s English anti textile machinery organisation
the musical recording

The Luddites were members of a 19th century movement of English textile workers who opposed the use of certain types of cost saving machinery, and often destroyed the machines in clandestine raids. They protested against manufacturers who used machines in "a fraudulent and deceitful manner" to replace the skilled labour of workers and drive down wages by producing inferior goods. Members of the group referred to themselves as Luddites, self described followers of "Ned Ludd", a legendary weaver whose name was used as a pseudonym in threatening letters to mill owners and government officials. The Luddite movement began in Nottingham, England, and spread to the North West and Yorkshire between 1811 and 1816. Mill and factory owners took to shooting protesters and eventually the movement was suppressed by legal and military force, which included execution and penal transportation of accused and convicted Luddites.

The name Luddite ('/l//ʌ//d//aɪ//t/) occurs in the movement's writings as early as 1811.

The machine breaking of the Luddites followed from previous outbreaks of sabotage in the English textile industry, especially in the hosiery and woolen trades. Organized action by stockingers had occurred at various times since 1675. These struggles sometimes resulted in government suppression, via Parliamentary acts such as the Protection of Stocking Frames, etc. Act 1788. Periodic uprisings relating to asset prices also occurred in other contexts in the century before Luddism. Irregular rises in food prices provoked the Keelmen to riot in the port of Tyne in 1710 and tin miners to steal from granaries at Falmouth in 1727. There was a rebellion in Northumberland and Durham in 1740, and an assault on Quaker corn dealers in 1756. Malcolm L. Thomas argued in his 1970 history The Luddites that machine breaking was one of the very few tactics that workers could use to increase pressure on employers, undermine lower paid competing workers, and create solidarity among workers. "These attacks on machines did not imply any necessary hostility to machinery as such; machinery was just a conveniently exposed target against which an attack could be made." Historian Eric Hobsbawm has called their machine wrecking "collective bargaining by riot", which had been a tactic used in Britain since the Restoration because manufactories were scattered throughout the country, and that made it impractical to hold large scale strikes. An agricultural variant of Luddism occurred during the widespread Swing Riots of 1830 in southern and eastern England, centring on breaking threshing machines.

The British government ultimately dispatched 12,000 troops to suppress Luddite activity, which historian Eric Hobsbawm said was a larger number than the army which the Duke of Wellington led during the Peninsular War. Four Luddites, led by a man named George Mellor, ambushed and assassinated mill owner William Horsfall of Ottiwells Mill in Marsden, West Yorkshire, at Crosland Moor in Huddersfield. Horsfall had remarked that he would "Ride up to his saddle in Luddite blood". Mellor fired the fatal shot to Horsfall's groin, and all four men were arrested. One of the men, Benjamin Walker, turned informant, and the other three were hanged. Lord Byron denounced what he considered to be the plight of the working class, the government's inane policies and ruthless repression in the House of Lords on 27 February 1812: "I have been in some of the most oppressed provinces of Turkey; but never, under the most despotic of infidel governments, did I behold such squalid wretchedness as I have seen since my return, in the very heart of a Christian country". Government officials sought to suppress the Luddite movement with a mass trial at York in January 1813, following the attack on Cartwrights Mill at Rawfolds near Cleckheaton. The government charged over 60 men, including Mellor and his companions, with various crimes in connection with Luddite activities. While some of those charged were actual Luddites, many had no connection to the movement. Although the proceedings were legitimate jury trials, many were abandoned due to lack of evidence and 30 men were acquitted. These trials were certainly intended to act as show trials to deter other Luddites from continuing their activities. The harsh sentences of those found guilty, which included execution and penal transportation, quickly ended the movement. Parliament made "machine breaking" (i. e. industrial sabotage) a capital crime with the Frame Breaking Act of 1812. Lord Byron opposed this legislation, becoming one of the few prominent defenders of the Luddites after the treatment of the defendants at the York trials.

The Luddites (specifically the croppers, those who operated cropping machinery) are memorialized in the Yorkshire area folk song "The Cropper Lads," which has been recorded by artists such as Lou Killen and Maddy Prior. The croppers were very highly skilled and highly paid before the introduction of cropping machinery, and thus had more to lose and more reason to rebel against the factory owners' misuse of machinery. Another traditional song which celebrates the Luddites is the song "The Triumph of General Ludd," which was recorded by Chumbawamba for their 1988 album English Rebel Songs. In the 19th century, occupations that arose from the growth of trade and shipping in ports, also as "domestic" manufacturers, were notorious for precarious employment prospects. Underemployment was chronic during this period, and it was common practice to retain a larger workforce than was typically necessary for insurance against labour shortages in boom times. In 1956, during a British Parliamentary debate, a Labour spokesman said that "organised workers were by no means wedded to a 'Luddite Philosophy'." By 2006, the term neo Luddism had emerged to describe opposition to many forms of technology. According to a manifesto drawn up by the Second Luddite Congress (April 1996; Barnesville, Ohio), neo Luddism is "a leaderless movement of passive resistance to consumerism and the increasingly bizarre and frightening technologies of the Computer Age". The term "Luddite fallacy" is used by economists about the fear that technological unemployment inevitably generates structural unemployment and is consequently macroeconomically injurious. If a technological innovation reduces necessary labour inputs in a given sector, then the industry wide cost of production falls, which lowers the competitive price and increases the equilibrium supply point that, theoretically, will require an increase in aggregate labour inputs. During the 20th century and the first decade of the 21st century, the dominant view among economists has been that belief in long term technological unemployment was indeed a fallacy. More recently, there has been increased support for the view that the benefits of automation are not equally distributed.