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Industrial progress is our civilisational spell. It is the spell of the modern, of comfort, of innovation-anxiety, of hyper-domestication, of estrangement and separation, of unashamed pollution. The collective name we call this spell is hypertechnocivility.

From birth we are conditioned to conform to this story. Early on daycare separates us from our most significant protectors, leaving us vulnerable and often emotionally wounded. As wounded fledglings industrial schooling grooms us to become compliant cogs in the narrative of progress. Technical colleges or universities finish the hardening process, equipping us with trades or degrees to serve industrial capital, rewarding us materially, as long as we are compliant, dutiful and stay under the spell, or in our lanes. By our mid twenties we become modern serfs in service to the Financial Industrial Complex. The key to success is to do as you are told, become upwardly mobile, and not look at what’s really going on around you.

Every industry larger than cottage is subordinate to the Financial Industrial Complex, which controls all the other global raiding parties – Big Tech, Big Pharma, Big Oil, Big Military, Big Ag, et al. Big Finance is the apex predator of this greater mob of morally depraved elites because it controls the capital for all other industries, including government.

It was the Luddites (1811-1812) who mounted the first and only serious rebellion against the spell casters of industrial progress. This happened in the midlands and north of England, where a number of our family’s ancestors hail. Initially the resistance focussed on ‘machine breaking’, smashing the frames of early industrial textile machines that were reducing the capacity of cottage weavers and hosiers to earn a proper income through their fine crafts.

A new power class was emerging in England at this time. The early industrial manufacturers established the first chapter of mass production. They had in turn derived from a revolutionary political theology designed by Adam Smith and others who gave spark to modern predatory capitalism, and lobbied parliament to bring in draconian laws that further prevented common folk from self-provisioning. The classical political economists knew that capitalism could only work if The Common – land that could once be used for people to produce or gather food – was enclosed, and townsfolk, artisans and peasants could no longer easily create non-monetary economies of community-sufficiency.

The Invention of Capitalism by Michael Perelman is a comprehensive resource for examining the dark and mostly untold story of Classical Political Economy.

While the enclosures began in feudal England centuries earlier, Smith and co conspired with the church and state to make sure people were economically fragile and thus exploit-ready for manufacturers and other industrialists. This in turn created unbound poverty and suffering, which would eventually force people to move into the growing manufacturing centres to look for work, kickstarting a de-ruralisation process that continues today:

Displaced populations leave the land and make their way, uselessly, to the cities; urban ghettos swell and fester; families without skills recognisable in the cities compete for the few available jobs or go on the public dole, using food stamps to buy what they once knew how to grow. –– Kirkpatrick Sale (1995)

The wretchedness caused by enclosure and through dispossession of ancestral commons led to mass poverty. This created widespread crime that in turn led to the advent of populations being policed for the first time, as well as the establishment of faraway colonial jails like Australia. Industrial progress is also the story of made-man mass suffering, exported from England to across the world.

The history of the Luddites’ powerful though short lived uprising to save their autonomous economic-technological-cultural relations is told in Kirkpatrick Sale’s detailed Rebels against the Future: Lessons for the Computer Age. Sale’s social history brings greater awareness of the mass exploitation of labour that occurred at this time, which was required to catapult industrial capitalism into existence.

Through the many stages and processes of industrial progress we have more or less become an estranged species of anthropocentric urbanites who no longer yearn to be in relationship with earth-honouring technologies, or living within processes of regeneration. We fabricate stories of progress such as efficient electric homes powered by lithium-ion batteries, without reporting on the millions of fires these batteries start each year and the horrific costs to environments and people that the mining of this one particular metal creates.

In every new technology manufactured by the story of industrial progress, harm proliferates. Look behind the curtains of any new product, any new drug, every new digital tool or means of production, and someone or something is sick or dying. Electric technologies requiring rare earth minerals or metals won’t save us, but these technologies just might:

So, given what we now know about industrial progress, is there anything we can learn from the original Luddites? Is there anything to learn from their gallant failure, which took an English army, larger than any that fought against Napoleon, to crush their resistance?

The first lesson for us from the Luddites is violence only begets more violence, and the state is designed to ultimately protect capital before workers. As we have seen for decades, governments will use excessive force against any uprising, and Big Tech is almost fully capable now of silencing any form of dissent or using dissenting subgroups to create ideological silos in a bid to continue the colonial practice of divide and rule.

Before they resorted to violence, however, the Luddite’s political strategy was to petition the political class.

Lord Byron made his maiden parliamentary speech speaking up for subjugated artisans who were being rapidly turned into impoverished subjects of capital. But shortly afterwards Byron became famous for his writings, and his attention in support of the Luddites disappeared. And then no one in the political class championed the traditional textile artisans whose industry was the first to be subject to the moral depravity of early industrial capitalists. Such powerlessness, especially felt by weavers, led to greater acts of violence against textile manufacturers’ machine parts (thousands of weaving frames were smashed), then against the factories (some were burnt to the ground), then manufacturers themselves (some were murdered).

Secondly, Luddite resistance didn’t pivot towards alternative self-organising economies. Luddites wanted to maintain life as it was, where cottagers would raise their children to take on the craft or trade of the household with their future generations engaged in meaningful, self-organising labour that was rewarded by money. Luddites and their kin perhaps could not imagine alternative economic lifeways as some of us are crafting now. Rapid onset poverty has a way of destroying creativity and thus diminishing the scope to problem solve because the sole concern of destitution is sheltering and feeding oneself and family.

Today, time-poverty, including among the wealthy, similarly destroys the ability to problem solve because responding to a predicament intelligently requires a mind not over-filled with stresses and distraction. To respond to the predicaments of our time, however we are reading them and which ever ones jump out at us and call for our attention, our minds need to be connected to the universal creativity of the living of the world.

The lack of pivot of the Luddites was probably also due to the demotion of subsistence (or non-monetary) economies, again due to prior enclosure laws. While Luddite cottagers, at night, focussed on organising secret militia attacks in numbers that are astounding to consider right across the industrialising midlands and north of England, they could have alternatively spent this time covertly growing crops on marginal or hidden lands, keeping pigs and chickens in simple enclosures, poaching the game and stock of the landed gentry, and generally setting up underground food networks, which also distributed other basic needs to people. This form of covert economic resistance may have resulted in the manufacturers having much less of a population to draw on for labour, and therefore lessening their ability to exploit workers with wages that barely enabled people to survive.

Thirdly, life is not worth living when we are enslaved or owned by others and we cannot augment our own economic forms with kindred souls. Many Luddites had nothing to lose but to gather, swear oaths (a crime considered worthy of hanging or transporting to Australia), and form secret militia groups that would conspire to attack the new masters.

The political classes learned from the political violence the Luddites escalated between 1811 and 1812. After the Luddites were eventually smashed, the new rich manufacturers, the established political elites and the financial class gradually conspired to produce more subtle ways to placate and incarcerate working peoples and turn them into docile factory slaves. Industrial schooling, drugs, alcohol and mass entertainment became important tools of capital that worked on placating and making soporific the rebellious spirit the Luddites possessed. As we know, these are still some of the tools used for compliance today.

Adaptation before panic has been a message we and countless others have been singing for some time now. Collapse now and avoid the rush, as John Michael Greer famously wrote in 2012, precisely two hundred years after the last Luddite was publicly hanged.

The Luddites had no such prior story to inform them. No story of pivoting or reclaiming. Nothing before them had so utterly transformed human life and economy, as rapidly. Today, it’s hard to see anything that the three industrial revolutions haven’t already shat on, so an argument for economic alternatives, village rebuilding and reclaiming a ceremonial species approach should, you would think, have greater agency. So what are the road blocks?

Fear is central to killing off the creative agency needed to spell a new story of economy and culture making. The spell of Industrial progress is bound by fear. What will my parents think? What will my partner think? What will my peers think, if I take off the chains and leave the cave of industrial progress?

The Luddites wanted to preserve pre-industrial life where handmade tools aided cottage productions of beautiful and useful things, and contributed to a village logic that was not centred on extraction and pyramidal hierarchy, but rather was rooted in relationship with local, bioregional, land-accountable practices of life making. Yes, manorial lords stood over village folk to lesser and greater degrees, however, this powering-over was relatively benign by comparison with the misery of early factory servitude. As the spell of industrial progress spread like a plague throughout the world, the word Luddite naturally became a pejorative term employed by hypertechnocivility to shame-label critics.

Although all three of our wheelbarrows have derived from industrial mines, factories and markets – two salvaged from the local tip shop and one purchased new and given to us as a gift – they represent technology that can be replicated by materials walked for and harvested respectfully in nearby common land, which we help care for. Our wheelbarrows are low-impact transportation technologies that enable us to take large amounts of fodder to our goats and collect our winter fuel. We do not take for granted their simplicity or their meaning in recrafting ecological economies of place.

While we currently have access to a car, and we hold a small title of land that belongs to the great industrial legal lie terra nullius, we give no money to Big Finance, Big Tech, Big Ag, Big Pharma, Big Military or any other industrial complex. We have crafted a cottager, community sufficient lifeway based on ancestral relations to local economy making, brought forward into the context of today and the Mother Country we live within. We don’t dress in period costumes or romanticise what was. Instead we find kinship with our ancestors and community in reclaiming and re-skilling, while recognising the greatest threat to life is the romanticisation of industrial progress.

Rather than violence as our response to the sickly spell of industrial progress, we choose defunding its power. This, for us, is the most rich and rewarding form of resistance, which is steeped in relationships that the Financial Industrial Complex or its challenger, Big Tech, can never have jurisdiction over. Sharing our story, linking with like minds, revillaging, and teaching our lifeways and learnings at the School of Applied Neopeasantry, is all we can do alongside the primary concern of actually crafting economy that refuses to participate in industrial progress. This scale is human and local, and soon to come back offline. Living the change. Living life outside the chains of the cave. Sharing our learnings with others. Dancing in the face of industrial progress without fear. This is our power.

Our wealth is time and relationships and knowledges and skills almost entirely found outside the vast drag net of the Financial Industrial Complex. We generate so little money that we don’t pay tax, therefore we don’t support the war machine or participate in government welfare given to corporates to promote earth- and health-wrecking technologies, such as gain-of-function synthetic medicines or drone warfare or more toxic biotech farming practices.

Yes, we are neoluddites. Yes, we are conspiracists. Yes, we are anti-vaxxers. Yes, dirty hippies. Yes, witches. Yes, op-shoppers. Yes, radical homemakers. Yes, neopeasants. Yes, some of us are quite toothless, repair things and practice self-suturing.

And yes, we are among the freest people we know.