Concept
Luddite
Overview
The Luddites were members of a 19th-century movement of English textile workers who protested the usage of certain types of automated machinery owing to their concerns relating to worker pay, labour savings, child labour, working conditions, and output quality. They often destroyed said machines in organised raids. 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.
Despite its original meaning, the term has over time been used to refer to those who are opposed to the introduction of new technologies.
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
Possible passages
Found by search and not yet checked by a person; they may only mention the idea in passing.
The men wear chiefly trousers of fustian or other heavy cotton goods, and jackets or coats of the same. Fustian has become the proverbial costume of the working-men, who are called "fustian jackets," and call themselves so in contrast to the gentlemen who wear broadcloth, which latter words are used as characteristic for the middle-class. When Feargus O'Connor, the Chartist leader, came to Manchester during the…
Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 with a Preface written in 1892
States what Luddite is.
The Owenites in England, and the Fourierists in France, respectively, oppose the Chartists and the "Réformistes." (a) Not the English Restoration 1660 to 1689, but the French Restoration 1814 to 1830. (b) This applies chiefly to Germany where the landed aristocracy and squirearchy have large portions of their estates cultivated for their own account by stewards, and are moreover, extensive beet-root sugar…
Karl Marx, Manifesto of the Communist Party
Close in meaning to Luddite; the term itself is not named.
But the perfecting of machinery is making human labor superfluous. If the introduction and increase of machinery means the displacement of millions of manual, by a few machine-workers, improvement in machinery means the displacement of more and more of the machine-workers themselves. It means, in the last instance, the production of a number of available wage-workers in excess of the average needs of capital, the…
Friedrich Engels, Socialism, Utopian and Scientific
Close in meaning to Luddite; the term itself is not named.
Related ideas
Opposing perspectives
Place in the tradition
Part of Transhumanism.