Welcome to this throwback edition of the award-winning Best of the Left Podcast

where we remember the past and choose to repeat it. Today's episode was

originally published on December 22nd, 2021.

And I'm playing it today as Biden continues to court the labor movement as part of his

presidential campaign because this is a good reminder of how movements for labor rights always

bubble up from the ground level and eventually demand that politicians take

action. Sources today include on the media, Jacobin Radio, Intercepted, UnFing the Republic, Economic

Update with Professor Richard Wolf and the Tom Hartman Program. apartment program. In his book, Breaking Things at Work, The Luddites are right about why you hate your job. Mueller makes the case that the Luddites are right about why you hate your job, Mueller makes the case that the Luddite workers weren't

technophobes, but rather tech savvy pioneers.

These are skilled craftspeople, so they're very good at using technology in fact,

and very perceptive about what the effects of technology will be on their trade

and they immediately perceive that these new factory technologies create

textiles of lower quality, that lower wages, and undermine entire communities

of families, towns, regions.

And in fact, that is ultimately what happened to these places.

To see the Luddites is somehow irrational,

we can only do that from the vantage point of 200 years later, thinking

that what happened to them was sort of inevitable and they should have just given up.

I think if you were in their position, you would probably do something similar to what they did.

And what exactly did they do, and how did they manage to organize themselves to do it?

They would go on these kind of midnight raids and

smash up gig mills and stocking frames, but they actually engaged in a lot of

...