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My reflection on The New Luddites is that Luddism should not be understood simply as an anti-technology movement. The Luddites were responding to a specific transformation of labour: factory owners used mechanised machines not only to increase production, but also to weaken the value of skilled work. Automation was not a clean replacement of humans by machines. Instead, it reorganised labour by breaking skilled work into cheaper, more controllable forms. Children, migrant workers and itinerant workers were hired into this system because they could be paid less and controlled more easily.

This reveals both the strength and the limitation of Luddism. The strength is that the Luddites understood that machines were not neutral. Machines were being used by factory owners as political and economic weapons. But the limitation is that their struggle was still largely centred on the displaced skilled worker. The more precarious workers — children, migrants, itinerant labourers — often appeared in the story as instruments of capitalist undercutting, rather than as exploited subjects themselves.

In this sense, these workers became mediators inside the process of mechanisation. They were not outside the machine, and they were not simply replacing the old workers by choice. They were positioned between capital, machinery and production as cheap human interfaces. Their bodies made the so-called automation possible, but their labour and vulnerability were hidden behind the machine.

This is where I see a limitation in a purely Luddite politics. It can clearly identify the violence of machinery when machines threaten skilled workers, but it may not fully address the violence experienced by those who are absorbed into the machine-like system as precarious labour. For me, the question is not only who is replaced by machines, but also who is made invisible inside the machine.