Leeds Bradford Newswire Archive

In fifteen months at the beginning of the second decade of the 19th century a movement of craft workers and their supporters declared war on the then emerging industrial society. The movement spread across the Northern counties of Yorkshire, Lancashire, Cheshire, Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire. It smashed thousands of machines, looted markets, burned down factories and spread hope of a way out of the bleak future being offered by state and industries. It was a movement that, in the words of the late radical historian E.P. Thompson; "in sheer insurrectionary fury has rarely been more widespread in English History,".

Towards the end of the first decade of the 21st century nearly 200 years later, a new age of Luddites return with an insurrection in México. Over a hundred phone booths of multinational exploiter and bullfight sponser Telmex have been sabotaged using cutters, paint, glue and fire. The Luddites are showing resistance to anthropocentrism (human supremacy), civilization and the domestication of wild nature, using radical methods of sabotage for animal and earth liberation.