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It seems there is a specific sense that the concept of “sabotage” by capitalists first suggested by Thorstein Veblen is mainly understood within CasP and throughout the school of institutional economics in general: limiting (controlling) production so that it will never reach full potential or full capacity.
I think said aspect of sabotage is transparent when we take a look into the currently Covid-infested world: a handful of vaccine manufacturers cashing in amid the plight of billions. These manufacturers can certainly increase production even more than now either by increasing manufacturing capacity (whose risks now fully insured by state) or by releasing their holding of intellectual properties (by which they’ll be compensated under TRIPS) or even by aggressively pursuing technology transfers, all of which will lead to even bigger profits. But they don’t. I think this clearly refutes the well-known maxim that capitalist firms maximize profits. In fact, they don’t – it seems that, what they actually pursue is power, or rather general control over society.
Interestingly, despite all the recent talks on “ESG” and “responsible investment” in finance industry, none of the institutional investors that hold shares of Pfizer and Moderna has actually come out and required that these manufacturers either release IPs or more aggressively engage in technology transfers. Indeed, “systematic stewardship” is not happening, in that, in theory, by sacrificing profits of these vaccine producers but saving the whole portfolio (by saving the world from the pandemic, literally), investors should be able to maximize returns.
As CasP’s insight suggests, what capitalists really pursue is “differential” or “relative” growth, even that means overall stagnation – and in today’s case, pandemic persisting.
But I think this understanding of sabotage is perhaps too narrow. Indeed, I think there are multiple ways sabotage operates in reality.
In fact, it was none other than Veblen who showed how this works: conspicuous consumption. We can certainly live a rich life while consuming far less energy and resources than what we consume now, as ecological economists strive to show (but their message seem to be constantly ignored by economists, including many heterodox ones, who, it seems to me, see no issue from ever-increasing consumption of natural resources). But consumers are made to consume because industrial capitalists create constantly demand for new products – JK Galbraith called this process “dependence effect.” This process is by no means natural: as research over research suggests, the role and power of advertisement industry over society is substantial.
In this sense, sabotage works, by inducing people to continuously crave for and purchase products – thereby being “inefficient” in an ecological sense, consuming more and more increasing yet unnecessary amount of energy and resources.
Take the best example: car dependency. It’s well established that personal automobiles are literally the most inefficient means of transportation, in terms of everything: energy, carbon emissions, time (wasted amid traffic), space, air pollution, and direct casualties (caused by car accidents, which we are all somehow required to just accept as a matter of life.) It is also well known that by reducing the number of cars on the road and widely promoting bicycles and public transits, we can actually save an enormous amount of energy and space that can be used for other purposes like urban farming or public housing and make cities denser, and reduce carbon emissions and air pollution, thereby improving the quality of life. Indeed, it is imperative that we actually radically discourage personal car ownership and reduce the cars on the road to decarbonize society.
But that’s not what most nations that at the moment are ostensibly pursing “green industrial revolution” or “green new deal” are seeking. What they seeking is just the reiteration of the political economy of past century: maximizing personal car ownership (i.e. everyone having a Tesla or a Hyundai hydrogen car.) In this aspect, sabotage by industrial capitalist – automobile manufacturers – is intact, maximizing control of these manufactures over society while causing stagnation and decline for everyone else, both in terms of quality of life and in terms of ecology.
Take another example: IT products. My feeling is that it’s by no means an accident that most electronic products are wasteful: they’re hard to be fixed or be upgraded, their lifespans are quite short, and therefore we’re encouraged to keep buying products. Indeed, if you take a look into specific brands, such as iPhone, you’ll find out that it’s virtually impossible to maximize their lifespan as consumers. It’s manufactured in a way that makes it very hard to disassemble and fix by oneself (be it a consumer or an independent repair shop owner): the inside is tightly glued, Apple does not provide spare components, it’s virtually impossible for independently develop components or programs for upgrades, and while Apple provides free software updates for some time in the end it always terminates the service for older models.
Yet it’s entirely possible that electronic products are designed and manufactured in a way that make them as easily repairable and upgradable as possible. If we live in such a world, we would not need to keep buying new products every 3 or 4 years (or every month, for some consumables), maximize the lifespans of products while maintaining or even enhancing their performances, therefore actually reducing both expenditure and resource consumption. The reason we are not living in such a world is simply that it’s an anathema against Big Tech: it threatens their control over the whole of supply chain and thus society, most importantly, now heavily guarded by trade secrets and intellectual properties.
Recently there has been a movement to promote what’s called “right to repair” across several jurisdictions, with mixed successes. The idea is similar to what I described above: consumers should enjoy freedom to actually repair and upgrade their products, and (mainly electronics) producers should design and manufacture products in a way that actually guarantees said freedom. It was originally promoted as a means to promote business competition and protect small businesses, but recently, with the issue of e-wastes getting more attention and the importance of decarbonization recognized, it is also being pursued as a tool to promote ecological efficiency. The European Union has been doing some works on this matter, and recently America’s FTC under the new chairwoman Lina Khan published a good report on the issue of right to repair and voted to ramp up law enforcement against repair restrictions.
In short, I think there are ways that sabotage works other than restricting productive capacity. Most importantly, one way that it works is by inducing people to continuously crave for and purchase products, consuming more and more increasing yet unnecessary amount of energy and resources, promoting ecological inefficiency. I believe this aspect of political economy is very important and should be investigated further: I think it has a big bearing on the feasibility of decarbonization and ecological sustainability.
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Brian, I think you are correct that ‘sabotage’ could and should be interpreted more generally than the economic restricting of productive capacity. Most broadly, we can conceive sabotage as the restriction of the autonomous, creative capacities of humanity to develop and augment the personal and common good, or something along those lines.
In our 2020 paper Growing Through Sabotage (p. 2, footnote 3), we write.
Note that our notion of strategic sabotage here is broader and somewhat different than Veblen’s (Bichler and Nitzan 2019). Writing at the turn of the twentieth century, Veblen’s main focus was the pecuniary institutions of ‘business’ and the ways in which these institutions undermined the universal efficiency of ‘industry’ for redistributional ends. In this sense, his conception of sabotage was largely confined to the ‘economic’ sphere of production and consumption, investment and waste, credit and finance. The CasP approach, although partly influenced by Veblen, transcends the politics-economics duality from the very beginning and is therefore able to conceive of sabotage not as an economic tool, but as a lever of power more generally.
This broader viewpoint reveals significant historical changes in the nature and application of strategic sabotage. In the ancient states (as well as in prehistoric societies), power was usually exerted openly, directly and violently, and often in ways that seemed arbitrary and random. In later, more complex polities, though – and particularly in modern capitalism – this exertion became much more opaque and roundabout, far less violent and significantly more systematic. In this latter constellation, sabotage is less open and more stealthy: instead of acting positively to affirm and assert the will of the powerful, it operates mostly negatively, by preventing, restricting and undermining the actions of those polities’ subjects. It also grows less violent: instead of using brute force, it often resorts to temptation, manipulation, mental pressure and inbuilt guilt. Finally and crucially, it becomes more methodical: instead of yielding to whim and caprice, it progresses deliberately and calculatedly.
In our 2009 Capital as Power, we discussed sabotage in relation not only to the pace of industry but also — and perhaps more importantly — its very direction (p. 235)
[Examples of] broad industrial diversions include the development by pharmaceutical companies of expensive remedies for invented ‘medical conditions’ instead of drugs to cure real disease for which the afflicted are too poor to pay; the development by high-tech companies of weapon technologies instead of alternative clean energies; the development by chemical and bio-technology corporations of one-size-fits-all genetically modified vegetation and animals instead of bio-diversified ones; the forced expansion by governments and realtors of socially fractured suburban sprawl instead of participatory and sustainable urbanization; the development by television networks of lowest-denominator programming that washes the brain instead of promoting its critical faculties; and so on.
Of course, as we repeatedly noted the line separating the socially desirable and productive from the undesirable and counterproductive is inter-subjective and contestable. But taken together, these examples nonetheless suggest that a significant proportion of business-driven ‘growth’ is wasteful if not destructive, and that the sabotage underlying these socially negative trajectories is exactly what makes them so profitable.
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Regarding IT products, you may enjoy the following documentary, which begins with the owner of an inkjet printer discovering that the printer was failing because its maker, HP, designed it to incapacitate itself after a specific number of pages were printed.
Here is an article specifically about the conspiracy that gave the documentary its title.
https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-great-lightbulb-conspiracy
To me, manufactured scarcity and forced obsolescence are two sides of the same coin because they both ensure continuous demand to avoid oversupply.
One dimension of sabotage that I don’t think has been addressed is access to credit, which, if severely restricted, leads to deflation (e.g., the Great Depression) which is much worse for society (but not capitalists) than stagflation. On the other hand, if credit is easy to get, differential accumulation goes through the roof (and the wealth gap widens).
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