Even if we make allowances for the cheapening of the product, it is impossible to designate as ‘progressive’, in any meaningful sense, processes which brought about the degradation, for twenty or thirty years ahead, of the workers employed in the industry. And, viewed from this aspect, we may see Luddism as a moment of transitional conflict. On the one hand, it looked backward to old customs and paternalist legislation which could never be revived; on the other hand, it tried to revive ancient rights in order to establish new precedents. At different times their demands included a legal minimum wage; the control of the ‘sweating’ of women or juveniles; arbitration; the engagement by the masters to find work for skilled men made redundant by machinery; the prohibition of shoddy work; the right to open trade union combination. All these demands looked forwards, as much as backwards; and they contained within them a shadowy image, not so much of a paternalist, but of a democratic community, in which industrial growth should be regulated according to ethical priorities and the pursuit of profit be subordinated to human needs.

Luddism lingers in the popular mind as an uncouth, spontaneous affair of illiterate handworkers, blindly resisting machinery. But machine-breaking has a far longer history. The destruction of materials, looms, threshing-machines, the flooding of pits or damage to pit-head gear, or the robbing or firing of houses or property of unpopular employers – these, and other forms of violent direct action, were employed in the eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth, while ‘rattening’ was still endemic in parts of the Sheffield cutlery industry in the 1860s. Such methods were sometimes aimed at machinery held to be obnoxious as such. More often they were a means of enforcing customary conditions, intimidating blacklegs, ‘illegal’ men, or masters, or were (often effective) ancillary means to strike or other ‘trade union’ action.

Although related to this tradition, the Luddite movement must be distinguished from it, first, by its high degree of organization, second, by the political context within which it flourished. These differences may be summed up in a single characteristic: while finding its origin in particular industrial grievances, Luddism was a quasi-insurrectionary movement, which continually trembled on the edge of ulterior revolutionary objectives. This is not to say that it was a wholly conscious revolutionary movement; on the other hand, it had a tendency towards becoming such a movement, and it is this tendency which is most often understated.

[...] With a year’s intermission, war had continued for almost twenty years. The people had few civil and no trade union liberties. They were not gifted with historical clairvoyance, so that they might be comforted by the knowledge that in twenty years (when many of them would be dead) the middle class would secure the vote. In 1812 the weavers had experienced a disastrous decline in their status and living standards. People were so hungry that they were willing to risk their lives upsetting a barrow of potatoes. In these conditions, it might appear more surprising if men had not plotted revolutionary uprisings than if they had; and it would seem highly unlikely that such conditions would nourish a crop of gradualist constitutional reformers, acting within a Constitution which did not admit their political existence.

From another aspect we may see the Luddite movement as transitional. We must see through the machine-breaking to the motives of the men who wielded the great hammers. As ‘a movement of the people’s own’, one is struck not so much by its backwardness as by its growing maturity. Far from being ‘primitive’ it exhibited, in Nottingham and Yorkshire, discipline, and self-restraint of a high order. One can see Luddism as a manifestation of a working-class culture of greater independence and complexity than any known to the eighteenth century. The twenty years of the illegal tradition before 1811 are years of a richness at which we can only guess; in particular in the trade union movement, new experiments, growing experience and literacy, greater political awareness, are evident on every side. Luddism grew out of this culture – the world of the benefit society, the secret ceremony and oath, the quasi-legal petition to Parliament, the craftsmen’s meeting at the house of call – with seeming inevitability. It was a transitional phase when the waters of self-confident trade unionism, dammed up by the Combination Acts, strove to break through and become a manifest and open presence. [...]

The demagogue is a bad or ineffectual leader. Hunt voiced, not principle nor even well-formulated Radical strategy, but the emotions of the movement. Striving always to say whatever would provoke the loudest cheer, he was not the leader but the captive of the least stable portion of the crowd. [...]

[...] The towns, and even the villages, hummed with the energy of the autodidact. Given the elementary techniques of literacy, labourers, artisans, shopkeepers and clerks and schoolmasters, proceeded to instruct themselves, severally or in groups. And the books or instructors were very often those sanctioned by reforming opinion. A shoemaker, who had been taught his letters in the Old Testament, would labour through the Age of Reason; a schoolmaster, whose education had taken him little further than worthy religious homilies, would attempt Voltaire, Gibbon, Ricardo; here and there local Radical leaders, weavers, booksellers, tailors, would amass shelves of Radical periodicals and learn how to use parliamentary Blue Books; illiterate labourers would, nevertheless, go each week to a pub where Cobbett’s editorial letter was read aloud and discussed.

Thus working men formed a picture of the organization of society, out of their own experience and with the help of their hard-won and erratic education, which was above all a political picture. They learned to see their own lives as part of a general history of conflict between the loosely defined ‘industrious classes’ on the one hand, and the unreformed House of Commons on the other. From 1830 onwards a more clearly defined class consciousness, in the customary Marxist sense, was maturing, in which working people were aware of continuing both old and new battles on their own.

Such opportunism made impossible the development of any systematic political theory out of Cobbettism. And his economic prejudices were of a piece with this kind of evasion. Just as he developed, not a critique of a political system, nor even of ‘Legitimacy’, but an invective against ‘Old Corruption’, so he reduced economic analysis to a polemic against the parasitism of certain vested interests. He could not allow a critique which centred on ownership; therefore he expounded (with much repetition) a demonology, in which the people’s evils were caused by taxation, the National Debt, and the paper-money system, and by the hordes of parasites – fund-holders, placemen, brokers and tax-collectors – who had battened upon these three. This is not to say that this critique was baseless – there was fuel enough for Cobbett’s fire, in the grossly exploitive pattern of taxation, and in the parasitic activities of the East India Company and the Banks. But, characteristically, Cobbett’s prejudices keyed in with the grievances of the small producers, shopkeepers, artisans, small farmers, and consumers. Attention was diverted from the landowner or industrial capitalist and focussed upon the middleman – the factor or broker who cornered markets, profited from the people’s shortages, or lived, in any way not closely attached to land or industry, upon unearned income. The arguments were moral as much as economic. Men were entitled to wealth, but only if they could be seen to be hard at work. Next to sinecurists Cobbett hated Quaker speculators.

This is why Cobbett (and John Fielden, his friend and fellow Member for Oldham after 1832) came so close to being spokesmen of the working class. Once the real condition of the working people – for Cobbett, the labourer, for Fielden, the factory child – is made, not one, but the test of all other political expedients, then we are close to revolutionary conclusions. Concealed within the seemingly ‘nostalgic’ notion of the ‘historic rights of the poor’, which, in different ways, was voiced by Cobbett, Oastler and Carlile, there were also new claims maturing, for the community to succour the needy and the helpless, not out of charity, but as of right.2 Cobbett loathed the ‘comforting system’ of charity and moral rescue, and, in his History of the Protestant ‘Reformation’, he was chiefly intent upon giving historical backing to his notion of social rights. The lands of the medieval Church had been held in trust for the poor. Wrongfully misappropriated or dispersed, nevertheless the poor still had a claim upon them, which (in Cobbett’s eyes) was recognized through the mediation of the old Poor Laws. The repeal of those laws constituted the last act in a shameful series of robberies by which the poor had been cheated of their rights:

[...] the rules of a society formed in 1832 in Ripponden, a weaving village in the Pennines:

From the astonishing changes which the course of a series of years have produced to the labouring classes… from competition and the increase of machinery which supersedes hand labour, combined with various other causes, over which, as yet, the labouring classes have no control – the minds of thinking men are lost in a labyrinth of suggestions what plan to adopt in order to better, if possible, their conditions….

By the increase of capital the working classes may better their condition, if they only unite and set their shoulder to the work; by uniting we do not mean strikes and turning out for wages, but like men of one family, strive to begin to work for ourselves….
The plan of cooperation which we are recommending to the public is not a visionary one but is acted upon in various parts of the Kingdom; we all live by the produce of the land, and exchange labour for labour, which is the object aimed at by all Cooperative Societies. We labourers do all the work and produce all the comforts of life; – why then should we not labour for ourselves and strive to improve our conditions?
Fundamental Principles
First. – That, labour is the source of all wealth; consequently the working classes have created all wealth.
Secondly. – That the working classes, although the producers of wealth, instead of being the richest, are the poorest of the community; hence, they cannot be receiving a just recompense for their labour.

This vision was lost, almost as soon as it had been found, in the terrible defeats of 1834 and 1835. And, when they had recovered their wind, the workers returned to the vote, as the more practical key to political power. Something was lost: but Chartism never entirely forgot this preoccupation with social control, to the attainment of which the vote was seen as a means. These years reveal a passing beyond the characteristic outlook of the artisan, with his desire for an independent livelihood ‘by the sweat of his brow’, to a newer outlook, more reconciled to the new means of production, but seeking to exert the collective power of the class to humanize the environment: – by this community or that cooperative society, by this check on the blind operation of the market-economy, this legal enactment, that measure of relief for the poor. And implicit, if not always explicit, in their outlook was the dangerous tenet: production must be, not for profit, but for use.