Every time I see someone use “Luddite” as a pejorative, I think, “But the Luddites were right!” Their jobs were being destroyed by technology, and their whole lives and communities were being destroyed as a result. The amount of suffering being caused by adoption of the technology was immense.
They were right from their own self-interest, yes. And it made sense that they rebelled from that perspective. But did other people who were not textile workers who now had access to inexpensive machine-made goods suffer when they then could afford multiple changes of clothing when they couldn’t before?
Wearing that clothing to go to work in what were called the satanic mills-because they ruined much more than the livelihoods of traditional weavers-undoubtedly was worse for the workers. Industrial injury would leave you mired in pain and poverty, industrial pollution lead directly to the climate crisis we now have to deal with, industrial wealth exacerbated inequality, the fact that the machines could run at any time lead to people being seen as part of the machine. The way identical items could be produced and the development of the assembly line lead to horrible ideas about childhood education…yes, having cheaper clothes was not really a great trade off in the long run. Also, those cheap clothes had to be replaced more often, leading to fast fashion and the proliferation of trash covering much of the planet.
In addition to focusing on high-quality and durable goods, 19th century textile mill owners were famous for their obsession with passing on the savings to consumers. [/s for Libertarian and “AI” readers]
And as the Merchant and Conover talked about in the interview I posted above, the quality was actually worse… it’s like saying that it’s okay to exploit workers in china to get cheaper, worse clothes from H&M… no one actually benefits from that whole arrangement. Fast fashions today don’t benefit the consumer, who ends up spending MORE in the long run for clothes, because what they buy is always falling apart faster.
And of course, let’s not forget that the people who would be buying this supposedly “cheaper” yet worse quality clothing, were the same people working in these new factories, at a much cheaper rate (hence the smashy-smash, as they lost pay), many of whom could now not afford more clothes… But hey… as long as the boss gets to line his pockets, that’s all that matters… /s
Which is what I assumed before looking up the data - if industrialists had just tried to keep huge profit margins without driving down the consumer prices, then manual spinners and weavers could have continued to work profitably and there would have been no cause for a Luddite movement.
My comment was in response to the implication that industrialization did not make cloth cheaper for the consumers - which, clearly, it did. As for exactly how and why the industrialization that started in 1769 for yarn production led to the Luddites only in the 1810s - I don’t know. Perhaps this other figure and its description from the same paper might provide a clue:
So what you’re saying is, the development of disposable fashion > mass human suffering? Well, there was also the rise in income disparity, as some factory owners also became disgustingly wealthy, so I guess it evens out.
The cost of cloth did drop during the industrial revolution (even if it didn’t drop nearly as much as the cost of production, and is dwarfed by the drop in costs previous to the Luddites*). But it didn’t have as big an impact on the cost of clothing as you might think, as mass production of clothing lagged quite a bit. Plus, the eventual mass production of clothes wasn’t so much about automation as the industrialization of human labor and degradation of the labor market - treating garment workers like machines, paying them nothing to work under horrendous conditions (just like now). The first real market seems to have been poor quality clothing for enslaved people, because economically it made more sense to buy the cheap clothing than to use slave labor to hand stitch their own clothes.
*There were similar movements to the Luddites as specific areas of the textile industry saw automation and job loss/degradation. The Luddites seem to have been better known because they were more extreme and organized than previous labor movements because they knew exactly what was coming by that point. (Also they invented a cool backstory.)
It just occurs to me, thinking about internet fashion commentator Derek Guy, who talks about how much good quality clothing should cost (and how buying it isn’t necessarily any more expensive than buying cheap shit that won’t last) - his recommendations for the price of an outfit are pretty much in line with pre-industrial clothing prices. It’s mostly about the cost of (properly compensated) labor.
Sure seems like they did - at least for the period of time in question. Luddites were protesting the destruction of their well-paying jobs in 1811, and subsequently the price of cloth went… up, before leveling out and basically not changing relative to what happened to prices in the 18th century. During this time factory owners were becoming incredibly wealthy, so… yeah, the savings really don’t look like they were being passed on. I’m sure there were other, complicating, market factors that caused price fluxuations, but the consumers certainly weren’t seeing any benefit.
Also: “if industrialists had just tried to keep huge profit margins without driving down the consumer prices, then manual spinners and weavers could have continued to work profitably” assumes a free market where weavers were able to buy all the materials they needed and sell in the same markets as the factory owners at the quantities that buyers wanted, and that industrialists didn’t control supply chains or markets to any degree. Which I suspect wasn’t the case.
Speaking of which, I wonder how many of the people who say “sucks for some but just think of the consumers” about the cheap cloth would be bold enough to say the same about the cheap cotton.
Also, fundamentally very little has changed here - we still use slave and exploited labor to produce cheap clothing. Its affordability comes at a human cost, and we’re finally recognizing that not only is it not worth those costs, even the benefits have their own sets of problems.
A hyper-competitive market didn’t make mill owners more fundamentally inclined to pass on savings to consumers; it just forced them to lower prices despite their greed. That’s one of the reasons that rapacious capitalists hate anti-trust regulation.
My point was that mill owners, the heroic and benificent opponents of the Luddites in jhbadger’s version, would not have priced cloth cheaper for consumers if they didn’t have to.
And of course we’re talking about price rather than quality/value (see Oscar Wilde, who could have been talking about Libertarians instead of cynics).
Some “free”-market fundies are fine with it, as long as the enslavement is a voluntary arrangement.
Oh, I know. Where “voluntary” means “preferred it to watching their families starve”, because privatizing all the resources people need to survive and then withholding them from someone is never coercion to libertarians.
That’s a bit of a stretch to jump from the industrial revolution to buying crap from Shein. Are you seriously arguing that it would have been better to never have had the industrial revolution? Even if you are against the capitalist side of things, while there were some 19th century thinkers like the romantic medievalist William Morris who thought socialism should aim to return society to a pre-industrial past, most socialists like Marx just wanted collective ownership of the machinery, not a return to a mythical idyllic age.
Because there is a direct historical connection between the two. AGAIN, there was marked diminishment in quality from the cottage industry to the factory-based products that the luddites were protesting. Same process.
And, no one said that… But maybe not forcing the vast majority of human beings into exploitative forms of labor (chattel slavery and factory work) might have been better for all those people… sure, you don’t get yoru cheap tube socks or whatever, but you know, maybe that’s worth giving up to improve the lives of billions of your fellow human beings forced into that labor… Unless, of course, you’d rather have cheap socks instead…
As the FPP notes, the Luddites weren’t against the technology itself. They were against the greedpig mill owners (sorry, titans of capitalist history) whose use of the technology put them out of a living.
The mill owners the Luddites opposed didn’t invent the various frames, any more than Elon Musk invented the Tesla EV or SpaceX rockets.
Yeah, Turnips was quoting you. Except they haven’t figured out how to actually do that so they’re just copying and pasting the text. They did the same thing to @gracchus. It makes reading Turnips’ comments really hard.
@Turnips when you want to reply to something specific someone said, highlight the text, and hit the quote button that pops up. It will make reading your replies much less frustrating for people.
