Luddism: Issues and Interpretation 1: Labour and conflict

 Luddite Images: Mockery and Militancy

                                  The Leader of the Luddites                                                        Modern Luddite Reenactor

This drawing is based on an 1812 print of the same name.            Modern reenactors prefer a more masculine and military guise. 

A Luddite is shown wearing a woman's dress in front of               This drawing is based on a 2013 commemoration of the Luddite                      

a burning mill and mountains the size of Alps.                             executions in York.      

       https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite                                                https://undergroundhistories.wordpress.com/living-history/                                                                                                                                                                                         

Though dresses were worn as disguise by male protesters during the Rebecca Riots of 1839-43, there is no evidence that these were worn  by Luddites.  

                                43 http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/education/resources/rebecca-riots/

The Rebbeca Riots took place in daylight when a dress might have been an effective disguise whilst most Luddite operations were

 carried out at night, when a dress would be a hindrance.  The only possible exception might be an account of a 'Queen Ludd'

 leading a food-riot in Leeds Market Place in 1812.  

http://ludditebicentenary.blogspot.co.uk/2012/08/18th-august-1812-food-riots-in-leeds.html   

This could have been a man in drag but need not have been.  It is more probable that the dress in the print is a caricature touch

 meant to ridicule the Luddites.     Nonetheless both images hint at the force the Luddites had to employ to resist the destruction of their  livelihood.  as the 'Queen Ludd' incident shows, the name of 'Luddite' was briefly seized on to cover any protest against poverty and starvation.

Labour Conflict: Confrontation or Cooperation?

The simplicity and brutality of early capitalism, displayed during the industrial revolution, imposed a sharp polarisation on the economic needs of masters and operatives.  Marx and Engels took this to be the paradigm of labour relations in The Communist Party Manifesto of 1848, the prelude to a proletarian revolution that might resemble the French Revolution.  By contrast the novelists do their best to marginalise the violence of Luddites; indeed a great deal of the imaginative effort of these novels is devoted to creating a distance between the Luddites and the communities from which they emerged.  Ben can be a leading attacker at Rawfolds Mill, yet end up a mill owner.   Daisy Baines comes from a Luddite family and is arrested but released.    Dorothy Harwood is the Luddite’s daughter of Scarlea Grange or The Luddite’s Daughter (aka in the Toils of the Luddites) but she is the devoted maid of a magistrates daughter.   This pattern is intensified in Bond Slaves; Wat Hartland is seduced into becoming a Luddite but his family contains Mary, working as a nanny for Wainwright, Lydia, who prevents arson at Dacre’s Mill and the crippled Benjy who warns owners of Luddite attacks.   

Bradley Mills: Once the target of Luddite attacks, now hidden behind a screen of trees

Marxism itself underwent a similar transformation in Britain.  In 1848 the Manifesto used ‘revolution’ to mean both violent uprising and economic transformation but imagines only a violent uprising will ensure the victory of the proletariat.    By the 1890s Engels was impressed by the economic transformation of workers’ conditions achieved by the socialist political and economic organisations emerging in Britain.   In a typical letter to Friedrich Adolph Sorge he appears optimistic that workers’ rights could be achieved through parliamentary action, though he warns of the dangers of sectarian strife and personal ambition:    http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon6/works/1893/letters/93_01_18.html

Harold Wilson

If Marx and Engels alighted by train in modern Huddersfield they would be surprised to see the square outside the station dominated by a statue of a leader of a socialist prime-minister.   This is Harold Wilson, one of the most successful leaders of the traditional Labour Party before its transformation into ‘New Labour’ in 1998. ( Ian Adams, Ideology and Politics in Britain Today, 1998

https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=_7t714alm68C&pg=PA144#v=onepage&q&f=false)

Ian Walters: Harold Wilson 1999  

 Wilson was born in Huddersfield in 1916, became leader of the Labour party in 1963 and struggled to hold together the left and right wings of the party through two terms in office; 1964 and 1974.  http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/390348.stm

19th century radicals might be even more surprised to find how un-radical mass democracy has turned out to be.    Engels expressed his conviction, in the Preface to the Second German Edition of The Condition of the Working Class in England, that the emerging workers’ parties in England would shake off ‘traditional prejudices of all kind’ (Moscow, Progress Publishers, 1973, [1892] p39).

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/condition-working-class-england.pdf

 Most European countries have adopted some version of a Welfare state but have drawn back from following the course Marx and Engels expected an electorate dominated by a proletariat to take.  Their expectations were summed up by the Labour Party’s Clause IV, which was adopted as an aim by the party in 1918:

‘To secure for the workers by hand or by brain the full fruits of their industry and the most equitable distribution thereof that may be possible upon the basis of the common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange, and the best obtainable system of popular administration and control of each industry or service.’

One of the key transformations of ‘Labour’ to ‘New Labour’ was the changing of this clause into one supporting a mixed economy.

(Ian Adams, Ideology and Politics in Britain Today, 1998

https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=_7t714alm68C&pg=PA144#v=onepage&q&f=false)

                                                          The plaque beneath chooses the Open University as one of the                                                                    most abiding of Wilson's achievements. 

Marx and Engels would have even more disagreeable surprised to find that Wilson ended his days ennobled with establishment honours that derived from the Middle Ages: ‘1976 appointed a Knight of the Garter; 1983 created Baron Wilson of Rievaulx;’

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/22-obituary-lord-wilson-of-rievaulx-1620977.html

20thcentury Britain still had a monarchy and a House of Lords, as does early 21st century Britain.

The statue of Wilson was made by Ian Walters and unveiled by Tony Blair in 1999.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/390348.stm

From the side the statue has the unfortunate suggestion of a Richard III like hunchback…

The nearest thing to a high-security prison York had in 1812 was The Debtors' Prison.

Here the accused Luddites were held in a prison that once held Dick Turpin. 

None of the fictional texts show this.  Instead the writers tend to support amelioration not confrontation and depoliticise the Luddite struggle.  After the attack on Rawfolds Mill Cartwright reported that one of the soldiers in Rawfolds Mill refused to fire on the Luddites apparently saying ‘I might hit one of my brothers’(Reid, 127).  The soldier was sentenced to 300 lashes outside Rawfolds Mill for disobeying orders.  This was likely to cause a man to bleed to death.   

The flogging at Rawfolds, as a contemporary artist might have illustrated it. 

Cartwright intervened and got the whipping reduced to 25 lashes (Reid,p 129).  Daisy Baines shows three soldiers as refusing to fire during attack on Rawfold’s Mill but the reason one gives is not political ‘I’ve been a cropper mysen’, (Chp XXV, Column 2, 18.12.1880).  Arkwright (Cartwright) says they will face court-martial but the results are not shown.   In Ben O’ Bills soldiers are represented by Soldier Jack, an ex-soldier who drills the Luddites but ends up law-abiding and Long Tom, a soldier who is beaten up by Ben for thrusting himself on Mary but who shields Ben from discovery.    Sentiment displaces politics.  Where historians like Brooke and Kipling interpret ‘I might hit one of my brothers’ as an expression of radical sympathies (p 42) Bond Slaves neutralises the soldier’s remark.   In the novel the solider, Uncle Jack, is worried that his actual brother, Wat, may be amongst the attackers.  Jack survives the 25 lashes and the execution of his brother apparently without bitterness and remains in the army. 

Luddite meeting places were mostly pubs.  The White Hart in Huddersfield was associated with Luddites, trade union meetings and the Radical Association (1835) that later merged with the Chartists.

http://www.huddersfieldhistory.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/radical_heritage_trail1.pdf