Luddites article

i have to disagree. They were a legitimate expression of the class struggle of their time. To term them as lumpenproletariat is to do them an injustice. The description of them as simply machine wreckers is a common misconception. See this Smithsonian article. http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history-archaeology/What-the-Luddites-Really-Fought-Against.html It explains –  “…Despite their modern reputation, the original Luddites were neither opposed to technology nor inept at using it. Many were highly skilled machine operators in the textile industry….Luddites themselves “were totally fine with machines,” says Kevin Binfield, editor of the 2004 collection Writings of the Luddites. They confined their attacks to manufacturers who used machines in what they called “a fraudulent and deceitful manner” to get around standard labor practices. “They just wanted machines that made high-quality goods,” says Binfield, “and they wanted these machines to be run by workers who had gone through an apprenticeship and got paid decent wages. Those were their only concerns.” 

Sorry but i still disagree. Reactionary and Lumpen-proletariat are not the words ever used by Marx in this regard. Try a re-read of Capital Chapter 15 , section 5 , to read where Marx sympathies lay. He describes how “History discloses no tragedy more horrible than the gradual extinction of the English hand-loom weavers, an extinction that was spread over several decades, and finally sealed in 1838. Many of them died of starvation, many with families vegetated for a long time on 2½ d. a day.”Marx says “.. it is with the advent of machinery, that the workman for the first time brutally revolts against the instruments of labour.”And he adds that it was also “the most powerful weapon for repressing strikes, those periodical revolts of the working-class against the autocracy of capital…It would be possible to write quite a history of the inventions, made since 1830, for the sole purpose of supplying capital with weapons against the revolts of the working-class. ”http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch15.htm#S5  “It is not my intention here to go into the history of overwork in England since the invention of machinery. The fact is that as a result of these excesses there broke out epidemics whose devastating effects were equally threatening to capitalists and workers; that the state, against tremendous resistance from the capitalists, was compelled to introduce normal [working] days in the factories (later imitated in greater or lesser degree all over the Continent)”  [Perhaps my reading is wrong but i think he means the “Luddite” excesses forced the hand of Parliament.] http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1861/economic/ch26.htm If you mean the Luddites were reacting then it is true but reactionary, no. To say because they were not actually factory workers as yet but owned their means of production doesn’t make them working class, it does include them in the labouring class or the toiling class. To lose your livliehood in these days meant penury and starvation so i don’t accept it was a mindless act to smash those machines that were causing the threat.  Perhaps Luddism should be seen as a drastic form of collective bargaining. 

You are probably right but i'll still argue that the Luddites were just as part of a working class as any self-employed painter and decorator or electrician is today – sub-contracters,  alienated and exploited, subject and vulnerable to the whims of the capitalist market.  For instance, today the ILO estimates there are 300 million home-workers ranging from IT specialists to the more menial. 

apologies for the formatting of the above poem