Nonviolence versus capitalism

Sabotage has only occasionally been an organised workers’ strategy. There are a few who argue for this approach, notably David F. Noble in his book Progress Without People: In Defense of Luddism. He sees capitalism as a struggle between capital and workers in which capital has all the weapons and workers are not even in the fight. In his own words: “There is a war on, but only one side is armed: this is the essence of the technology question today. On the one side is private capital, scientized and subsidized, mobile and global, and now heavily armed with military spawned command, control, and communication technologies.”[3] On the other side, workers are in disarray. Noble argues that the way workplace technologies are constructed reflects the capitalist system of power and, once constructed, these technologies help perpetuate capitalism.[4]

For example, the assembly line subordinates workers to the pace and tasks set by the line, reducing their opportunities to exercise autonomous judgement and to design and run the production process themselves. This is compatible with Gandhi’s analysis of mechanised textile production, which subordinates workers, compared to the hand-spun cloth khadi, whose production meshes with community self-reliance.

It can be said, in short, that certain technologies embody capitalist social relations. Capitalists choose or design machinery to serve their purposes, and in practice the machinery gives owners and managers power over workers.

Analysis of the role of technology in capitalism is one thing. How to challenge this is another. Noble observes that smashing the machines is one response by workers.[5] But is it effective?

From a nonviolence point of view, sabotage falls into a borderline category. Nonviolent action always means no physical violence against humans. Sabotage can be interpreted as physical violence against physical objects. The type of sabotage of interest here involves no direct harm to humans.[6]

We can only be concerned with direct harm, since indirect harm is possible with any sort of nonviolent action. A boycott can lead to a business going bankrupt, a far more serious harm than a few broken windows.

Among nonviolent activists, there are different attitudes to sabotage. Some, taking a strong line against any form of physical violence, would rule out sabotage altogether. Others think it is fully legitimate, while an intermediate position is that it depends on the circumstances.

It is worth keeping in mind that people do not always mean the same thing by the word “violence.” In the early 1970s, a group of researchers investigated attitudes to violence by surveying over 1000 US men. Among their revealing findings were that more than half the men thought that burning draft cards was violence and more than half thought that police shooting looters was not

violence. The researchers concluded that “American men tend to define acts of dissent as `violence’ when they perceived the dissenters as undesirable people.”[7] In other words, many of the US men used the label “violent” when they thought something was bad and “nonviolent” when they thought it was good. In contrast, from a nonviolence viewpoint burning draft cards is a form of sabotage — destroying physical objects — and of course shooting someone is definitely a form of violence.

Another way of defining sabotage is as violence against property. This definition highlights ownership rights under capitalism, since nearly every physical object is owned by someone or something, whether individual, corporation or government. Many people see violence against property as more despicable than violence against humans.

There may be significant cultural as well as individual variations in the way people respond to sabotage, as indeed in the way that they respond to nonviolent actions such as strikes and fasts. Responses will also vary greatly depending on what the sabotage involves. A giant explosion wiping out a shipping terminal is quite a different thing from deletion of a computer file, which affects only a few atoms. Yet if the computer file is of crucial importance — for example, a list of labour activists targeted for impending arrest — its destruction may have a greater impact than the destruction of the terminal.

Sabotage is a method and so cannot be assessed in total independence from the goal of an action or campaign. If the goal is improved wages and conditions, with little fundamental challenge to capitalism, then use of sabotage is unlikely to make the challenge any greater. What is possible, though, is to look at how a nonviolent campaign is altered by use of sabotage.

1. Does the campaign help to

undermine the violent underpinnings of capitalism, or

undermine the legitimacy of capitalism, or