Craft Resistance to Mechanization

Craft resistance to mechanization is the organized opposition by skilled workers to technological changes restructuring the social relations of production. Smith's framework treats this resistance not as irrational technophobia but as rational defense of legitimate interests by actors possessing sophisticated understanding of mechanization's costs. The Harpers Ferry armory workers who resisted precision manufacturing for a decade understood that the new methods would transfer process control from craftsmen to managers, replace holistic knowledge with specialized operations, and eliminate the autonomy through which craft identity was constituted. Their resistance was informed, strategic, and ultimately insufficient—but its insufficiency reflected institutional power imbalances, not the irrationality of the resisters. The contemporary dismissal of AI-concerned knowledge workers as 'Luddites' or 'doomers' replicates this pattern, converting legitimate grievances into character flaws to avoid addressing the institutional arrangements that might protect against the costs resisters accurately identify.