Click here to access article by "Ned Ludd" posted on People and Nature. (I put "Ned Ludd" in quotes because I think this must be a pseudonymn. Ned Ludd was a person, mythical or not, whose name was used to identify the movement of Luddites around the late 18th-early 19th centuries. This essay was by a person or persons associated with a contemporary British organization inspired by Luddism called Breaking the Frame.)
I'm not sure one can separate out industrialism or "technocratic thinking" from capitalism as this author tries to do. However the author does identify pre-capitalist tendencies found in Christian countries that did emphasize dominion over nature. It seems clear to me that early capitalists greatly emphasized the value of technological progress, which was a product of the Enlightenment period, because they saw in this the potential to accumulate vast profits and power under private ownership. As their power grew with the rapid developments in technology, growth of economies, and capitalist accumulation and concentration of wealth/power, so has the utilitarian relationship with nature become grossly exaggerated in the thinking of capitalist ruling classes and their societies.
Anyway, the author provides much food for thought about what the Luddites' position was in opposition to the introduction of machinery under the private ownership/control of early capitalists.
