It began on the night of November 4, cloudy but still not yet winter-cold, in the little village of Bulwell, some four miles north of Nottingham, England. A small band of men gathered in the darkness, blackened their faces or covered them with scarves, counted off in military style, hoisted their weapons--hammers, axes, swords, and pistols--and marched off in a more-or-less soldierly fashion along back roads to their destination.

When they reached the house of a "master weaver" named Hollingsworth, they posted a guard to make sure no neighbors interfered with their work and suddenly forced their way inside through doors that gave way to their hammer-blows. They set upon half a dozen weaving machines, new wide-lace looms that produced such shoddy goods at such a pace that one man could turn out the work of six--and thus had already done some 500 men out of work--and within a few minutes had destroyed them all. Fearing that Hollingsworth's wild cries from the upstairs bedroom would rouse the neighbors, they quickly scattered into the darkness. Not long after, they reassembled at the edge of town and responded in turn to a list of numbers called out by their leader. When each man was accounted for, a pistol was fired and they disbanded, headed for home.

A week later, on a Sunday night, the workers attacked again--only this time Hollingsworth was ready. In preparation for a new onslaught he had arranged for seven or eight of his workers and neighbors to stand watch with muskets over his last seven looms, and when the band of attackers approached the house they were met with a volley of shots. In the exchange of gunfire that followed one young man, a weaver named John Westley, was shot while tearing down the window shutters to force his way in and, according to a contemporary account, had just time to exclaim before he died, "Proceed, my brave fellows, I die with a willing heart!"

Proceed they did. With a fury made stronger by the loss of their comrade, they broke down the front door and smashed the windows while the family and guards escaped by the back entrance. And then, methodically, they smashed the remaining looms and some of the furniture, set fire to the house and dispersed into the night, never identified, never caught. The house was a gutted ruin in an hour.

Thus, starkly, began the movement that was to become known as Luddism, named after the mythical and mysterious figure who, in different guises and different locales, was their leader, King Edward ("Ned") Ludd. It began that November night in 1811, just as England was rushing headlong into what would become known as the Industrial Revolution, and it ended, with 11 Luddites hanging from the York gallows, in January of 1813. Before it was over, it destroyed something over ú100,000 worth of property (at a time when the average laborer earned around ú30 a year), including at least 1,500 weaving machines, two houses, three factories and a public hall; it had forced the British Government to send nearly 14,000 soldiers to quell the uprising, at a cost of probably close to a million pounds; it had given up probably three dozen lives in Luddite actions and another 24 to the gallows, and had taken one mill-owner's life and injured several others; and it had embedded in the culture of English industrialism, and the English language itself, an irradicable idea of opposition to the domination of industrial technology and to the values of mechanization, exploitation, consumption, competition and emisseration that go along with it--an idea alive with new vigor now, as the second Industrial Revolution empowered by the microchip sweeps the world.

But it did not win. In the end, with the power of amoral wealth and the British political and military machines against it, Luddism was crushed, and the factory system and technological values of the Industrial Revolution triumphed.

And that is why, today, for those or us who understand that first movement of Luddites and would wish to find some way to march under that banner again in opposition to the present onslaught of technology, it is important to try to draw from the experience of Luddism. I suggest that there are four particularly pertinent lessons:

1. The issue of technology is not secondary or irrelevant: it is paramount. Let us not fall for the line that technology is neutral and it only matters who controls it, good guys or bad. That is dangerous nonsense. Technology, as Norbert Weiner (the father of cybernetics) knew well, comes with the logic and aims of the economic system that spawns it, and it will do those things that advance the larger economic and cultural interests of that system, and it will not do other kinds of things or even allow other ways of thinking that are threatening or antithetical to it.

Therefore, it is vital that we keep this issue in the forefront of current debate and on all the agendas of political action. Modern technology is catastrophically changing all aspects of the world around us, and it is imperative that we confront it, name it as the enemy, encourage resistance to it and work to see that its devastations are minimized and eventually negated.

This means learning and laying out as clearly and fully as possible the full range of costs and consequences of this technology in the near term and long, so that even those in thrall to the ease/comfort/speed/power of high-tech gadgetry are forced to understand at what price it comes and who is paying for it. And it means awakening people to see who it is that really benefits from the technology--not this individual number-cruncher or that scientist or the house-ridden grandmother over there, but rather the large corporate and governmental organizations that created the stuff in the first place so as to exert their control farther and more efficiently.

2. Revolt is futile and reform ineffectual, but resistance is both possible and necessary. With the real means of repression in the hands of the state, and the legislative bodies in the pockets of the corporations, neither armed violence nor electoral legalism will work to bring about significant change. But it is still possible to fashion ways of resistance and protest, individual and collective, local and regional, physical and intellectual.

There is clearly a role here for violent confrontation, as the original Luddites showed and as many varieties of ecoteurs in recent years have demonstrated--it is a tactic that has a certain shock and attention-getting value, even a certain moral power and audacity to it. But it should be obvious by now that it is extremely limited in its power to effect change, particularly in a country like the United States, where the government has such overwhelming strength on its side--military, police, propaganda, money, etc.--and is not afraid to use it. Moreover, it is hard to argue that the low means of violence are justified by the high ends of principle, and without that moral underpinning violence usually tends to loose its political utility.

Nonetheless, other ways of challenging the industrial status quo are available. They can be personal, as Lewis Mumford urged a generation ago in suggesting "quiet acts of mental and physical withdrawal" and "a stoppage of senseless routines and mindless acts." Or communitarian, as with the Amish communities and Indian tribes that have chosen the wisdom of their traditional ways and simply rejected those aspects of the industrial system they find harmful and threatening to their land-based, communal, small-scale way of life. Above all, they can be political, continually and urgently bringing the messages and warnings of technological crisis to as wide an audience as possible through all means of communication--and positing the sensible alternatives that give some hope of living rightly on the earth.

3. We can find no better guide for our stance toward technology than Herbert Read's "Only a people serving an apprenticeship to nature can be trusted with machines." When an economy is not so embedded in nature it not only wreaks its harm throughout the biosphere in indiscriminate and ultimately fatal ways, but it also loses its sense of the human as a species and the individual as an animal. In fact it creates such a mighty technosphere, speedy powerful, efficient and consumptive, that the biosphere becomes nothing more than a source for extraction and a basin for wastes, and the human becomes entirely displaced and alienated from its natural systems and rhythms. That way madness, and ecocide, lies.

The first part of any coherent analysis with which to confront and resist the industrial system must be based in Read's quite simple idea: only insofar as we individually, and then as a society collectively, devote ourselves to a deep understanding and appreciation of nature--much as the tenets of deep ecology would have us do--can we learn to choose the technologies that we can safely adopt. The second part:

4. We must articulate and spread an ideology based on the long and rich tradition of anti-technology beginning with Luddites. It is there for us to use and its library is full of brilliant statements of the problem and moving exhortations toward the solution, and it is exemplified today by a whole movement of neo-Luddites proud to call themselves so.

Such an ideology would contain, I'd like to suggest, such postulates as these: Industrialism is the culture that is endangering economic, social and environmental systems around the world and must be opposed by an organicism based on the integrity, stability and harmony of the biotic world. Anthropocentrism is the dangerous mind-set of the industrial culture and must be opposed by a biocentrism that teaches a spiritual identification of the human with all living species and the living earth. Globalism is the economic and military strategy of the industrial system and must be opposed by an assertion of localism and an empowerment of the coherent bioregion and the human-scale community. And capitalism is the means of exploitation and unjust distribution underlying that system and must be opposed by an ecological economy built upon harmony with the earth and cooperation among humans.

That is not complex. A movement united around just those principles, at least for starters, would have a firm sense of where and what the problem is and where and what the solutions are.

A Luddism for today is certainly feasible, and the initial shock troops are already in place, the lessons from the past ready and available, and the strategies and tactics, at least for the moment, pretty well evident. We are, moreover, at an auspicious time, when the pace and price of high technology are causing increasing dislocations in economic and social lives, in the US and around the world, and an increasing number of people are willing to start questioning the assumptions and resisting the directions imposed by the technological system.

Might it be too much to expect that, in the not-so-distant future, a band of Luddite lads and ladies will be sitting around a crowded pub, just as the Nottingham warriors did in the fall of 1811, singing the equivalent of that rousing Luddite song:

Now by force unsubdued, and by threats undismay'd

Death itself can't his (King Ludd's) ardor repress;

The presence of armies can't make him afraid

or impede his career of success;

Whilst the news of his conquests is spread far and near,

How his Enemies take the alarm;

His courage, his fortitude, strikes them with fear,

For they dread his Omnipotent Arm!

Kirkpatrick Sale is the author of Rebels Against the Future: The Luddites and Their War on the Industrial Revolution: Lessons for the Computer Age.(Addison Wesley). He is a member of the Lead Pencil Club, the E.F. Schumacher Society, the International Forum on Globalization, the Jacques Ellul Society and the Good Life Center to preserve the legacy of Scott and Helen Nearing.