Nonviolence versus capitalism

Whistleblowing seldom builds an alternative or challenges systems of violence. Fitzgerald’s exposures of waste by the Pentagon were intended to make the military more efficient, not to dismantle it.

2. Is the campaign participatory?

Whistleblowing is mostly an individual activity, though it is far more likely to be effective when carried out in groups. When whistleblowers liaise with social action groups, there can be participation at the activist end, but the whistleblowing itself is seldom participatory.

3. Are the campaign’s goals built in to its methods?

The method of a whistleblower — speaking out, typically through official channels — is quite different from the goal, which is dealing with a problem such as corruption. Whistleblowing is indirect action, an attempt to get someone else — usually someone in a position of power — to do something about a problem.

On the other hand, it is possible to interpret whistleblowing as an attempt to bring about a society in which people are free to speak out without reprisal. In this, whistleblowing combines means and ends.

4. Is the campaign resistant to cooption?

Whistleblowers are more likely to be attacked than coopted. The attacks serve both to discredit the whistleblower and discourage others from speaking out. However, cooption has a role in preventing people from becoming whistleblowers. The whole system of official channels, including grievance procedures, government agencies, parliamentary inquiries and the courts, serves to encourage people who have a complaint to use those channels. This takes them down a path that chews up time and energy with little result. So, from the perspective of a social movement that could benefit by building links with insiders who are aware of problems, the existence of official channels serves as a way of coopting employee dissent. It could almost be said that whistleblowing through official channels is itself a manifestation of cooption, when the alternative is linking with social activists or becoming one.

* * *

In summary, whistleblowing is seldom a great danger to capitalism as a system, though it can sometimes threaten individual capitalists. The best way for whistleblowers to help challenge capitalism is by teaming up with social action groups.

8. Sabotage

A blast furnace operator at a steel mill purposely makes a slight slip-up, causing a cold shut-down. An ex-employee cuts telephone cables serving half a million people. A plumber puts small nails in the pipes of a new building. A computer programmer deletes all copies of data on a computer system. An anti-tobacco activist creatively disfigures and rewrites a billboard advertising cigarettes. A member of Ploughshares uses a hammer to dent the nosecone of a nuclear missile.[1]

A forest activist surreptitiously pulls up survey stakes put in by a logging company. An environmental activist pours sand into the fuel tank of a bulldozer. An animal liberationist torches a laboratory used for animal experiments.

These are all examples of sabotage, which can be thought of as purposeful action to damage, destroy or displace physical objects in order to achieve a social objective.[2] There is a long history of sabotage by workers, for example to obtain a break by forcing a halt to a relentless assembly line. Nonworkers can “disrupt production” — in other words interrupt business as usual — in a wider sense by a range of actions against physical objects.

In the workplace, sabotage as a strategy is commonly portrayed as resisting progress. In the late 1700s and early 1800s in Britain, in the dawn of the industrial revolution, the livelihoods of cottage workers using handlooms were threatened by mechanised looms in factories. Some of them responded by smashing the factory machinery. Inspired by the example of leader Ned Ludd, these workers were called Luddites. Since then, “Luddite” has been turned into a term of derision, treated as synonymous with opposing progress.

However, this is a rewriting of history by the victors: the capitalists. The Luddites were not just machine-smashers; they were campaigning for a system that provided satisfying work and income, a system which had come under attack by the capitalist factory system, which in the early years obtained higher output only through severe exploitation of employees.