Here are a couple of propositions that seem to me more fruitful than defending the 'common sense' (i.e. mainstream media) meaning of sabotage or debating whether sabotage (in the mainstream media sense) by workers is a 'good thing.'
"Contrary to the common view of distribution as a corollary of creativity, Veblen maintained it was a consequence of 'sabotage'. Most generally, the income of an owner is proportionate not to the specific productive contribution of his or her input, but rather to the overall damage the owner can inflict on the industrial process at large." - Jonathan Nitzan, "Differential Accumulation: Towards a New Political Economy of Capital." 1998. "To emphasize shirking on the part of workers, which is analytically no different than the restriction of output by business in order to maximize profits, is to give effect to bias. This asymmetry characterizes conventional neoclassical treatment of firms and workers in the literature of shirking and of principal-agent relations. The opposite emphasis would, of course, likewise give effect to bias. [...] it is striking that the problem as defined in mainstream literature is almost always one of maximizing for the firm conditional on the worker's behavior rather than vice versa. [...] Veblen's analysis did not go anywhere near as far as I have gone here, and certainly not along neoclassical lines. But he did treat business and labor "sabotage" symmetrically, which is more than can be said of contemporary neoclassical analysis." Warren J. Samuels, "On 'Shirking' and 'Business Sabotage': A Note," 1994. Incidentally, Mitchell cites Nitzan and Bichler in Carbon Democracy and pursues a line of analysis suggested by them and by Veblen. -- Cheers, Tom Walker (Sandwichman)
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