this post was submitted on 01 Nov 2025
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Just an aside, the luddites were right. The benefits of automation have been hoarded by the owner class and used to make workers do even more for less compensation.
The problem isn't automation, it's capitalism. Automation keeps up fed, clothed, housed, warm and healthy.
Luddites wouldn't disagree. They specifically rebelled against how technology was being used against workers by capital.
Yes, in the 19 century they had mandatory paid vacation, universal Healthcare, paid maternity leave and paid vacation and a regulated 40h work week. At home machines cleaned their floors, their clothes and their dishes while their kids received free education.
Now we have black lung, hunger and child labor with a bunch of kids dying all the time stuck in chimneys, while Rockefeller owns half the world. Now we live in filth because our 80h work week doesn't allow us to manually clean our homes and since we need to use our houses in the middle of the night we are constantly dying of tuberculosis, Typhus and others.
Wait, I might have mixed the two...
I think you might just have forgotten how many workers faught and died to bring us those things. They were not given, they were the result of what began with the luddites. The world's first arial bombardment from airplanes was bombs dropped on striking US coal miners.
Now those at home machines are designed to be replaced every 8-10 years max, are filling up our landfills and poisoning our environment, and even starting to spy on us in the mean time. Black lungs coming back. We forgot what all these gains cost, and were handing them back bit by bit.
When I sold my old apartment it still had the original appliances, more than 20 years old. A year prior I ordered a part for them directly from the manufacturer and changed it myself.
You just need to pick a brand that offers support long term. Hint: it's not going to be the cheapest one.
Goes without saying, in the new house we bought the exact same brand for almost everything. Don't want to use the "spy" functions? Don't connect them to the internet, you're going to have a dumb machine as before. I for one enjoy the chance of getting notified when it's done or preheating the oven one the way home.
No workers fought and died for washing machines. It was 20th century "tech Bros" who created them, and were adopted in communist and capitalist countries alike. Luddites (old and modern) are just afraid and cause overall harm just to save their own skin and not having to learn a new skill.
No, workers are not doing more for less compensation then they were in 1811. Overall things have improved, though obviously not ideally or universally.
For instance we all have relatively cheap well made clothing in a variety of different designs, primarily because of the automation machines that the Luddites smashed. The problem with Luddites is that they blindly attacked automation when their issue was with capitalism.
The difference is that today you don't see the slaves. They are in the sweatshops.
Even the people working in sweatshops have better access to clothing than peasants pre-industrialisation.
You know proper socialist countries industrialised as fast as they could because their leaders saw the benefits it would bring?