In 1812 the British government created an Act of Parliament which made the destruction of mechanized looms – or knitting machines – a capital felony and hence a crime punishable by death. The Act was implemented as a result of so called Luddite attacks on machines.[1]
It should be noted that in many cases the so called Luddites were not raging against the machines taking jobs, but against the employers who failed to provide them with a ‘living wage.’
According to the esteemed historian Eric Hobsbawm, the Luddites had: “no special hostility to machines as such,” their actions were in fact, “a normal means of putting pressure on employers.” Hobsbawm wrote: “Such misconceptions are, I think, due to the persistence of views about the introduction of machinery elaborated in the early nineteenth century.”[2] Adding:
This sort of wrecking was a traditional and established part of industrial conflict in the…
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Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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