The Luddites Weren’t All That

In Capital, Vol. 1, Marx made the critique [of the Luddites] structural. “It took both time and experience before workers learnt to distinguish between machinery and its employment by capital, and therefore to transfer their attacks from the material instruments of production to the form of society which utilises those instruments.” The Luddites had not learned this lesson. They attacked the machine and left the system untouched.

Elsewhere in the same chapter, Marx was explicit: the Luddite phase had to be superseded. The destruction of machinery was the first instinctive reaction of workers who had not grasped that their enemy was the social relation wielding the machine. Trade unions and political organization represented the maturation that machine-breaking could never achieve: workers learning to target the system rather than its tools.

— “Against the Luddites,” by SE Gyges