Is opposition to the AI development the new Ludditism?

In the early C19th, skilled English textile workers fearing for their future wage earning capacity launched a campaign against the automated machinery that was fast being introduced into the factory system. The initial protests in Nottingham in 1811 spread quickly to Yorkshire and Lancashire. They became known as the – Luddites – a self-appointed title and for the next 5 years or so, the conflict between the workers and the bosses (aided by government) ensued. The workers’ case was really about who controlled the production process and the new technology they were fearful of was just another part of the sequence where capital sought to exert control on the extraction of surplus value from the workforce. Since then, if one expresses opposition to the introduction of new technology one is labelled with that title. The latest battle front in this struggle might be the rapid introduction of Artificial Intelligence, although that process goes well beyond an aim to control workplaces and reflects a broader desire to control society in general.

It is important to understand that the textile workers back in C19th Britain did not oppose technology per se, but rather were struggling to maintain the rights of workers in the face of the burgeoning profitability of industrial capital and the massive income and wealth inequalities that were emerging under Capitalism.

I gained a much greater understanding of that struggle when I recently read the book by American author – Brian Merchant – called – Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech (published September 23, 2023).

What the book teaches us is that the urgency of Capital to continually seek ways to control the workplace to ensure they can maximise the extraction of surplus value (the unpaid labour in each day of work) is relentless and the only comeback for workers is the traditional one – to organise and countervail the power that Capital wields, given it owns the material means of production.

The relevance of this historical struggle continues to resonate although the scale of the struggle these days transcends the workplace and is becoming a battle for society.

On one level, the workplace concerns remain – technology that can replace skilled labour or any labour with machines – tends to undermine the prosperity of the workers displaced.

The old arguments that technology just frees up labour to work in higher paying jobs that emerge as society becomes more sophisticated (for example, in the professional service sector) has long been made and may have carried some validity in the past.

Today, many jobs in the service sector are vanishing.

I was on a call to an Internet company today and spent several minutes essentially discussing options with an automated chat bot, when 10 years ago, I would be talking to someone in India.

But even the well-paid, internal labour market jobs – the professional jobs – are disappearing as technology expands in the AI revolution.

Economists like to talk about consumer sovereignty to justify their faith in the unregulated ‘market’ as the primary means of allocating resources between alternative uses.

The implication is that inferior products that are offered to consumers will be rejected and those companies will disappear – part of the process that economists claim ensures that the highest satisfaction among consumers is achieved through market exchanges.

But one lesson from the struggle of the Luddites was that inferior stockings, which were produced by the machines sewing two separate woven segments together (so-called ‘cut ups’) instead of the existing practice at the time of producing with a single continuous knitting process (so-called fully fashioned stockings), were not rejected in the market.

The stockings didn’t last very long, and had an ugly seam.

But they were much cheaper and as the urban class emerged (and with long skirts the fashion), the consumers purchased them and ‘ratified’ the technological shift, even if it undermined the prosperity of the textile workers who produced the products.

As mass consumption became the norm in the C20th, this trend became familiar.

The Luddites were at the forefront of the emergence of the factory system.

This was the beginnings of industrial production and the way in which the capitalist class had to introduce a control function because they couldn’t trust the workforce to work hard and long enough to generate the surplus production that was the source of capital accumulation and maintenance of the capitalist hegemony.

Under the ‘cottage industry’ or ‘putting out’ system, the workers had some volition and the capitalists soon worked out that they needed to ‘bring the industry under one roof’.

I discussed that topic in several blog posts, among them – Capitalists shooting their own feet – destroy trust and layer management (September 30, 2015).

Another lesson from the Luddite struggle was that it was the role of the state that rendered their actions (smashing textile machines) impossible to maintain.

The British government, in Brian Merchant’s words “sided decisively with the entrepreneurs” by making the actions of the workers capital offenses and many workers were hung as a result.

17 workers were hung in 1813 after a mass trial in the city of York in January 1813.

Many others were transported to the penal colony that is now Australia.

This song memorialises the struggle.

If the state had have taken a different route – such as to introduce regulative controls on the textile industry, things might have turned out differently.

While the emergence of AI certainly resonates with many of the same issues, I think the challenge facing us workers is even more profound.

I read the recently published post by the Anthropic boss – We Must Pace the Frontier (published September 2026) – which indicates why I write that assessment of the current state of play.

His main thesis is that:

We must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models. Progress will still seem fast, and we must make wise use of the time we gain.

It has led to rather lurid headlines about AI going feral and manically killing off humanity in the next decade or so.

The Anthropic boss doesn’t go that far but seems concerned that a rogue AI event will cause “hundreds of billions of dollars in damage”.

To reduce the likelihood of such an event occurring, his plan is relatively straightforward.

1. Embed evaluators at each frontier AI company.

2. “Democratic coordination” – AI Companies establish self-regulative rules of operation.

3. “Global coordination” – we all agree on rules – Russia, Iran, North Korea, China, Australia, the US, everyone.

What I read into the Anthropic boss’s post was that he thinks that the presence of national sovereignty is behind the expanded risk of the burgeoning AI sector, which is an extraordinary idea when you think about it.

He doesn’t exactly say that but hints that the might of the US is threatened if it cannot control outcomes in China, which he names as the greatest threat.

This is a familiar argument and is applied to debates about climate change, nuclear weapons, virus management and more.

The implication is that having many separate nations, governed by elected officials, making decisions in their own interests is not conducive to a solution to a problem that impacts on all humanity.

There is a hypocritical element to all this of course.

The tech companies are going hell bent to out do each other and the debates about the dangers to children from the social media companies is indicative of what happens when the tech companies break out of societal norms.

And a model of self-regulation is doomed to fail because there is too much financial risk exposure from the financial sector as a result of the funding these AI companies have already extracted.

I touched on that as one of the key explanations for rising bond yields at present.

But underlying the theme that a sort of global governance is required is the denial of the way monetary systems work.

A familiar theme among the Left historically has been the need for ‘internationalisation’.

That goes back to the C19th when the – First International – or International Workingmen’s Association (IWA) sought to unite disparate working class groups across nations into a coordinated organisation capable of centralising the struggle against Capital.

The modern Left in Europe, for example, continues to support the common currency in the Eurozone, despite it being the most advanced form of neoliberalism there is – given it embeds the ideology in the basic legal system of the union rather than expresses the ideology as one of a number of competing ideologies that rise and fall at the ballot box.

They cite ‘cosmopolitanism’ as the theoretical basis for their support despite going along with the EU allowing impoverished refugees to drown at the EU’s borders.

The sort of coordination that the Anthropic boss is suggesting is not that far removed from those ideas.

These ideas have long been associated with the call for supranational currencies (like Keynes’s idea for a ‘bancor’ or the euro), which would require one world central bank.

I do not think there is sufficient homogeneity across our national spaces to make it desirable to have only one monetary policy.

I do not need to outline all the obvious questions – where would the central bank operate from? who would elect the board?

Would it just be an IMF-type organisation which has failed so badly to date to underpin prosperity.

Further, to avoid the dislocations that cripple the Euro, a single central bank has to be matched with a single treasury (running fiscal policy).

While we are being asked to cede regulative power to the tech companies on a global scale, would the pressure be on to allow macroeconomic policy to be conducted by a non-elected body like the IMF?

That would be a disaster (see next point).

Also, by implication, if these characters continue to hold out the idea of pacing within democracies, would we have only one world electorate.

I don’t think much of the term democracy (given the control over the electoral process of the power elites) but it still transpires that in Australia we get to throw out our national government every three years if we dislike what they are doing.

A change of government doesn’t necessarily improve things but it remains true that we can change our governments and force them – with some difficulty in certain situations – to obey the rule of law.

Importantly, a fiat currency needs to be legitimised by the electoral process.

While the currency-issuing government has unlimited expenditure capacity from a financial perspective, it really is only legitimised if there is a coherent demos that has the capacity to express their views.

The eurozone problems have demonstrated that there is not a coherent demos within the common currency space.

The Germans, for example, eschew an asymmetric fiscal transfer system, because of their animosities to the Southern European states.

That tells us that there is not a united demos.

The problem expands beyond comprehension if we are to articulate a single world government.

The undercurrent of the Anthropic boss’s message is that big US frontier AI countries have to coopt the US government to impose their will on the rest of us.

That is far removed from the idea of a coherent global government that works to advance the prosperity of all of us.

He really wants to find a way to stop China expressing the interests of their national sovereignty.

Conclusion

Like the Luddite struggle, AI capital is seeking a way to coopt governments to advance their interests while pretending to be worried about our welfare.

We will see how that pans out.

Perhaps humanity will be extinct in 10 years.

Although I doubt that.

That is enough for today!

(c) Copyright 2026 William Mitchell. All Rights Reserved.