[D66] Rebels Against The Future

[R.O.]

  Review: Rebels Against the Future by Kirkpatrick Sale & Addison Wesley

Review: Rebels Against the Future by Kirkpatrick Sale & Addison Wesley 
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A review by John Gorman of Kirkpatrick Sale & Addison Wesley's Rebels 
Against the Future. Originally appeared in the Industrial Worker #1586 
(December 1995).

Rebels Against the Future, by Kirkpatrick Sale, Addison Wesley, 1995 $24.

Kirkpatrick Sale is writing, first of all, about the English Luddites of 
the early 19th century and, secondly, of their successors today. But the 
title is a bit misleading. Both groups represent not "rebels against the 
future (emphasis mine)," but rebels against a future; one for which they 
never voted, and one where their interests were never seriously 
considered. As Sale puts it, "They (the Luddites) were rebels against 
the future that was being assigned to them by the new political economy 
taking hold in Britain, in which... those who controlled capital were 
able to do almost anything they wished."

With inflation, brought on by a 20-year war with Napoleon, raging, crops 
failing, wages falling and unions illegal, craftsmen in the heart of 
England from Manchester to Nottingham to Leeds rose in carefully 
coordinated assaults on factories and the machines they contained. Faces 
blackened and armed mostly with their own tools, they struck terror into 
the hearts of the newly powerful industrial capitalists.

Secrecy and surprise were the Luddite watchwords. Although not every 
raid succeeded, England was in an uproar from the first attacks in 1811 
until the movement petered out in 1815. Many suspected Luddites were 
arrested, some were hanged, and others transported to penal colonies. 
The authorities finally succeeded in restoring order only by sending 
more troops to the heartland than they had sent against Bonaparte in 
Portugal. But they never succeeded in penetrating the movement, finding 
its leaders or understanding its structure. Indeed the convolution had 
no parallel since the mysterious "Great Society" of the 14th had plunged 
England into turmoil.

The history of the Luddites was, of course, written by the movement's 
enemies and "Luddite" entered our language as a synonym for a blind 
opponent of progress. Sale corrects that picture, helping us to 
understand that these "machine breakers" were not merely trying to keep 
their own incomes up, but were also fighting against the destruction of 
a way of life that had sustained them and countless other craftsmen for 
centuries. The skilled worker who had provided "good gods" at a fair 
price working at his own pace in his own house was being replaced by the 
wage slave toiling his life away in horribly unhealthy factories for 12 
or more hours a day for a pittance that was his only alternative to 
starvation. In a few decades, the Industrial Revolution reduced a third 
of England's population to a destitution that saw 57% of the country;s 
children dead before the age of five and a laborer's life expectancy 
reduced to 18 years.

On the practical level, Sale notes, the Luddite movement was a failure. 
The new machines proliferated, skilled craftsmen were economically 
destroyed, and Dickensian misery stalked the land. But the Luddites did 
succeed in raising the "machinery question" which has never gone away - 
i.e., what is the cost of "progress," and who shall pay it? Ever since 
the Luddites took up their hammers, blind faith in the "onward and 
upward" has been tempered by a realism that sees, as Sale says, that 
"whatever its presumed benefits... industrial technology comes at a 
price, and, in the contemporary world, that price is ever rising and 
ever threatening."

While Sale's history is interesting and enlightening, the most useful 
part of his book for those who want to understand the present comes in 
the discussion of the neo-Luddites of our own time. Like Ned Ludd's 
bands, they too are rebelling against a future they never made, one 
where the cost-benefit ration of technology is heavily weighted in favor 
of the already rich and powerful with machines that have left 40% of the 
work force in disposable jobs, devastated the Earth and reduced much of 
the Third World from poverty to abject misery.

The neo-Luddites reject the myth that any technology is politically and 
morally neutral, holding that technology that goes beyond the laboratory 
into the world is the technology that benefits the ruling class. 
Therefore, the introduction of any technology, the neo-Luddites demand, 
must be subject to the consent of those who will be most affected by it. 
If the machines are economically, ecologically or culturally 
destructive, alternatives must be sought. If none can be found, the old 
ways continue.

Where Sale becomes uncertain, however, is in his advice on what is to be 
done to win this veto power. In this sense, he ends where he should 
begin. Perhaps because most unions have been so slow to recognize this 
threat, let alone combat it, Sale sees little value in mass action, 
believing that "the nation state, synergistically intertwined with 
industrialism, will always come to its defense, making revolt futile and 
reform ineffectual." Yet many of the instances he cites when the onward 
rush of "progress" was stopped or diverted, as in France and India, 
depended on mass protest and mass action, often of the more drastic sort.

Sale seems to prefer a kind of individualized philosophical resistance 
founded on spiritual traditions of long standing, such as those that 
have protected the Amish and some Native American tribes from being 
sucked into a culture of greed. But he does not tell us how the rest of 
us not so blessed are to acquire the ideological ammunition to fight 
this war. Books like Sale's are clearly part of that supply, but even 
the author is far from certain they are enough.

Originally appeared in the Industrial Worker #1586 (December 1995)

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