Resistance to the machine

Geoffrey Pearson

pp. 185-220

in: Helga Nowotny, Hilary Rose (eds), Counter-movements in the sciences, Berlin, Springer, 1979

Abstract

The theme of this essay is that of popular resistance to the machine and to the factory system of labour in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in England. I am, therefore, concerned largely with acts of violence which are usually thought of as 'senseless' and "irrational" crimes — hooliganism and vandalism, smashing and wrecking — crimes which are thought to be pointless, all the more because they do not even submit to the guiding acquisitive principle of theft. I shall attempt to set machine-smashing and machine-breaking in the context of the motives and meanings which guided people in their attacks on machines and factories during the course of the "industrial revolution": in other words, I shall assume that there is, in fact, sense and rationality in this behaviour which has been traditionally shrugged off as senseless, meaningless, motiveless, wanton, random, irrational and pointless. In order to show up the human intelligibility of resistance to the machine, I shall also discuss some earlier forms of "resistance from below" — such as the food riot, and riot against the enclosure of the common lands — and I shall argue that machine-wrecking should be understood as a continuation of these earlier traditions of "pre-industrial" resistance, rather than as an entirely new form of resistance to the newly emerging social order of the machine and the factory system of labour. Finally, I shall draw some points of connection between this early resistance to machines, and forms of struggle which are emerging against technology in the contemporary industrial world.