WEBVTT - Corporate Sabotage 0:00:04.800 --> 0:00:08.160 Welcome to it Could Happen here podcast about things falling 0:00:08.200 --> 0:00:10.800 apart from what you can do about it. My name 0:00:10.840 --> 0:00:13.920 is Christopher Wong, and today I'm gonna be talking about sabotage. 0:00:14.320 --> 0:00:16.880 But this is not the episode on sabotage that you expect. 0:00:18.120 --> 0:00:22.000 I will not be discussing, for example, the destruction of machinery, 0:00:22.360 --> 0:00:25.680 throwing monkey wrenches, slow down strikes, or the myriad of 0:00:25.720 --> 0:00:28.440 other tactics that workers have used since time memorium to 0:00:28.480 --> 0:00:31.840 strike back at their bosses. No, Instead, I'm going to 0:00:31.880 --> 0:00:34.959 be talking about a far more common, an infinitely more 0:00:35.040 --> 0:00:40.920 dangerous form of sabotage, corporate sabotage. Now, the most conficuous 0:00:41.000 --> 0:00:43.560 form of corporate sabotage is the mass destruction of a 0:00:43.600 --> 0:00:48.000 corporation's own products. The fashion company Burberry, for example, destroyed 0:00:48.000 --> 0:00:50.600 three hundred and seventy million dollars of its own product 0:00:50.640 --> 0:00:54.640 in one year alone. Louis Vutton and Chanel also systematically 0:00:54.680 --> 0:00:57.680 destroy their own sold stock every year, joining H and 0:00:57.840 --> 0:01:00.200 M and literally lighting their own sold products on fire 0:01:00.200 --> 0:01:03.640 in order to prevent anyone from using them. Quote business 0:01:03.720 --> 0:01:08.080 insider Richemont, the owner of Cadalier BoNT Blanc, destroyed more 0:01:08.120 --> 0:01:10.959 than four million pounds of watches over a two year 0:01:11.000 --> 0:01:13.720 period after an excess in goods in the Asian markets. 0:01:14.319 --> 0:01:17.200 Nik has also admitted that a New York store slashed 0:01:17.280 --> 0:01:20.600 unsold trainers before throwing them away, and last year an 0:01:20.680 --> 0:01:23.480 Urban Outfitters employee said he was instructed to pour green 0:01:23.600 --> 0:01:27.040 paints on the unsold stock. These, of course, are only 0:01:27.080 --> 0:01:29.480 the stories that have made it into the press, and 0:01:29.560 --> 0:01:32.240 this behavior is by no means limited to high fashion. 0:01:32.760 --> 0:01:36.399 Grocery stores routinely throw away normous quantities of unsold goods, 0:01:37.280 --> 0:01:39.640 and when communities realized they could feed people in need 0:01:39.720 --> 0:01:43.040 by taking the still good products from grocery store dumpstairs, 0:01:43.319 --> 0:01:46.720 the stories began to destroy their food intentionally. But these 0:01:46.760 --> 0:01:50.320 acts of destruction, as callous and horrifically greedy as they are, 0:01:50.760 --> 0:01:54.640 are by no means the extent of corporate sabotage. To 0:01:54.760 --> 0:01:58.640 explain I turned to the work of the economist Thorston Veblen. 0:01:59.720 --> 0:02:02.160 That one is perhaps best known today for the theory 0:02:02.200 --> 0:02:06.680 of conspicuous consumption, but he wrote extensively on corporate sabotage 0:02:08.240 --> 0:02:10.880 in the first part of the Engineers in the Price System, 0:02:10.919 --> 0:02:13.520 a work that is broadly ignored even by his followers. 0:02:13.880 --> 0:02:17.040 Febun wrote a section called on the Nature and Uses 0:02:17.040 --> 0:02:21.880 of Sabotage. From that work, Writers and speakers who dilate 0:02:21.919 --> 0:02:25.480 on the militarious exploits of the nation's businessmen will not 0:02:25.600 --> 0:02:29.799 commonly allude to this voluminous running administration near sabotage, this 0:02:29.919 --> 0:02:34.320 conscientious withdrawal of efficiency that goes into their ordinary day's work. 0:02:34.800 --> 0:02:37.120 We are not used to thinking of the ordinary work 0:02:37.600 --> 0:02:42.079 of a corporation being sabotage. But for Veblen there was 0:02:42.120 --> 0:02:44.960 no other explanation for what he was seeing. In the 0:02:44.960 --> 0:02:47.480 wake of World War One, there was an enormous explosion 0:02:47.480 --> 0:02:50.840 and unemployment, an enormous need on half of the population. 0:02:51.560 --> 0:02:54.120 But even as the unemployed begged to be let in 0:02:54.160 --> 0:02:56.240 to create the products that could build the needs of 0:02:56.240 --> 0:03:00.440 their fellow humans, business owners steadfastly refused to open their factories. 0:03:01.040 --> 0:03:05.000 As Feblin explained, but for reasons of business expediency, it 0:03:05.080 --> 0:03:07.640 is impossible to let these idle plants and idle workmen 0:03:07.680 --> 0:03:10.080 go to work, that is to say, for reasons of 0:03:10.120 --> 0:03:14.040 insufficient profit to the businessmen interested, or in other words, 0:03:14.120 --> 0:03:16.919 for reasons of insufficient income to the vested interests which 0:03:16.960 --> 0:03:20.639 controlled the staple industries and so regulate the output of product. 0:03:21.639 --> 0:03:24.600 Feblen was not alone in observing these are similar conditions. 0:03:25.080 --> 0:03:29.079 John Maynard Keynes, writing during the depression, observed newly precisely 0:03:29.120 --> 0:03:33.040 the same thing. For Canes, the solution simply was to 0:03:33.040 --> 0:03:37.160 have the government step into increased demand. But for Veblen 0:03:37.360 --> 0:03:39.640 dismissed the core of the problem. The real problem was 0:03:39.680 --> 0:03:42.280 at a core of absentee owners had the ability to 0:03:42.280 --> 0:03:44.320 shut down the factories in the first place by simple 0:03:44.440 --> 0:03:48.600 virtue of their ownership, Feblen argued, was simply sabotage, no 0:03:48.760 --> 0:03:51.080 different from the hated strikes of the I w W 0:03:51.320 --> 0:03:54.760 that's so racked and perturbed the capitalist ruling class of 0:03:54.800 --> 0:03:57.440 his time. At least, the workers could argue that they 0:03:57.440 --> 0:04:00.320 were simply fighting for a better share of what they 0:04:00.360 --> 0:04:03.440 had created. Absentee owners, on the other hand, who had 0:04:03.480 --> 0:04:07.920 no actual involvement in the production process whatsoever, simply carried 0:04:07.960 --> 0:04:11.000 out sabotage on an enormous scale in order to secure 0:04:11.040 --> 0:04:14.440 their own returns, and this was true even in times 0:04:14.440 --> 0:04:17.280 they weren't marked by massive depressions in order to make 0:04:17.360 --> 0:04:21.000 payments to capitalists, Feblin argued, who expect a certain rate 0:04:21.040 --> 0:04:24.480 of return on their investment. Corporations must maintain prices at 0:04:24.480 --> 0:04:26.680 such a level that they can meet their returns, and 0:04:26.720 --> 0:04:29.240 the only way they can do this is sabotage. For 0:04:29.279 --> 0:04:31.960 the good of business, it is necessary to curtail production 0:04:32.000 --> 0:04:35.040 of the means of life on pain of unprofitable prices, 0:04:35.400 --> 0:04:38.200 at the same time that the increasing need of all 0:04:38.200 --> 0:04:40.640 sorts of necessities of life must be met in some 0:04:41.160 --> 0:04:45.360 passable fashion on pain of popular disturbances, as it will 0:04:45.400 --> 0:04:47.800 always come of popular distrust when they passed a limit 0:04:47.839 --> 0:04:51.800 of tolerance. The sabotage Feblan argue was simply a product 0:04:51.839 --> 0:04:54.239 of the price system. Any production that was too efficient 0:04:54.240 --> 0:04:58.160 would simply and inevitably be sabotaged for private gain, because 0:04:58.200 --> 0:05:01.440 in order to maintain prices that would maintain the returns 0:05:01.440 --> 0:05:04.719 of investors, it was necessary when sure that production never 0:05:04.800 --> 0:05:08.520 became too efficient to produce too many goods. Feplin used 0:05:08.520 --> 0:05:11.240 as his example the twentieth century post office, but we 0:05:11.279 --> 0:05:13.920 could just as easily point to Trump sabotaging the post 0:05:13.960 --> 0:05:17.280 office in a dual bid to privatize the service by 0:05:17.320 --> 0:05:19.960 causing it to collapse and prevent mail and votes from 0:05:19.960 --> 0:05:21.919 being counted as part of his attempt to win the 0:05:21.920 --> 0:05:25.600 two thousand twenty election. In their book Capitalist Power Condis, 0:05:25.680 --> 0:05:30.120 Samshawan Bickler, and Jonathan Needson take Feplin's argument and expand 0:05:30.160 --> 0:05:35.640 on it, noting that capitalism, far from encouraging productivity at large, 0:05:36.000 --> 0:05:39.560 makes things inefficient on purpose. They used the example of 0:05:39.600 --> 0:05:43.240 public transportation, which is by bay essentially any measure, a 0:05:43.320 --> 0:05:46.240 significantly more efficient way of moving people around the US 0:05:47.279 --> 0:05:50.640 as an example. In the US and the nineteen forties, 0:05:50.839 --> 0:05:53.160 a hundred electric rail lines were brought up and destroyed 0:05:53.200 --> 0:05:59.039 by car companies. Those same companies likewise twice destroyed incredibly 0:05:59.040 --> 0:06:02.360 efficient and popular electric cars, once in the nineteen thirties 0:06:02.400 --> 0:06:05.080 and again in the nineteen eighties because the profit rate 0:06:05.120 --> 0:06:08.200 was lower than that of gas cars. They then set 0:06:08.240 --> 0:06:10.359 out to cause everyone to forget that they had actually 0:06:10.360 --> 0:06:12.680 done this until Elon Musk figured out a way to 0:06:12.680 --> 0:06:16.040 sell electric cars that was profitable, namely by selling himself 0:06:16.080 --> 0:06:18.440 as a brand and not the cars themselves. Now, if 0:06:18.480 --> 0:06:21.359 capitalism was simply destroying its own products in order to 0:06:21.400 --> 0:06:24.360 create Elon Musks, you could argue that the system at 0:06:24.400 --> 0:06:27.440 least produced advancements before it stopped them. But the most 0:06:27.480 --> 0:06:32.200 violent forms of sabotage are reserved for productive systems that 0:06:32.240 --> 0:06:37.440 are simultaneously efficient and outside of capitalist control together. Perhaps 0:06:37.440 --> 0:06:39.720 the best known example of this is the East British 0:06:39.720 --> 0:06:43.480 East India companies the industrialization of the Indian textile industry, 0:06:43.680 --> 0:06:47.720 not to be outmatched by their British forebearers. American settlers 0:06:48.120 --> 0:06:51.760 and their allies in the American military sterminated the buffalo 0:06:51.839 --> 0:06:55.159 herds of the Great Plains in an attempt to starve 0:06:55.200 --> 0:06:58.560 out the indigenous tribes that lived there. In doing so, 0:06:58.680 --> 0:07:02.280 they destroyed it enormously doctive and sustainable agricultural system. They 0:07:02.279 --> 0:07:06.440 did so precisely because the system was efficient, so efficient, 0:07:06.480 --> 0:07:11.360 in fact, that it allowed indigenous tribes to repeatedly defeat 0:07:11.360 --> 0:07:14.240 the American army and defence of their lands. We are 0:07:14.320 --> 0:07:17.040 used to thinking of capitalism as the system of production, 0:07:17.760 --> 0:07:21.720 but here, amidst the fields of buffalo corpses something else 0:07:21.880 --> 0:07:26.280 entirely capitalism appearing in its true form, a system of 0:07:26.360 --> 0:07:40.720 organized sabotage. To fully untangle what this means, let us 0:07:40.760 --> 0:07:45.920 return to Feblin. Feblin divided capitalism into two separate processes. 0:07:46.440 --> 0:07:51.160 The first he called industry industry Feblin argued, has existed 0:07:51.480 --> 0:07:54.400 long before capitalism and will continue to exist long after 0:07:54.440 --> 0:07:56.760 it has a bit Clear and niets and put it 0:07:57.240 --> 0:08:02.160 quote when considered an isolation from emporary business institutions. The 0:08:02.200 --> 0:08:07.120 principal goal of industry it's raison, according to Veblen, is 0:08:07.120 --> 0:08:09.840 the efficient production of quality goods and services for the 0:08:09.880 --> 0:08:14.160 betterment of human life. Industry is an inherently collective undertaking. 0:08:14.880 --> 0:08:18.720 The basis is cooperation and integration, the creation of communal 0:08:18.760 --> 0:08:22.520 knowledge that allows production and scientific advance to occur, and 0:08:22.560 --> 0:08:26.360 coordination and cooperation between people to create things for each other. 0:08:27.000 --> 0:08:29.880 Left to its own devices, industry would simply produce goods 0:08:29.920 --> 0:08:33.760 for people. It has no concern for profitability, rates of returns, 0:08:33.800 --> 0:08:38.559 or capitalization. Unfortunately, capitalism is defined by private ownership. This 0:08:38.640 --> 0:08:41.760 is what Veblen calls business. Business is a system of 0:08:41.760 --> 0:08:45.240 power that extracts wealth from industry by means of sabotage 0:08:45.679 --> 0:08:49.839 production to serve human need. The basis of industry is 0:08:49.920 --> 0:08:52.080 useless to business unless it can be turned into a 0:08:52.120 --> 0:08:55.600 revenue stream. It does this by taking control of industry 0:08:55.600 --> 0:08:58.040 and its products and the restricting access to it. Part 0:08:58.040 --> 0:09:01.280 Clear and Nichs input it the most important feature of 0:09:01.320 --> 0:09:04.640 private ownership is not that it enables those who own, 0:09:05.000 --> 0:09:09.120 but that it disables those who do not. Technically, anyone 0:09:09.160 --> 0:09:11.599 can get in someone else's car and drive away, But 0:09:11.760 --> 0:09:14.320 given order to sell all of Warren Buffett shares in 0:09:14.360 --> 0:09:18.800 Berkshire hathaway, the purpose of private ownership is wholly and 0:09:18.920 --> 0:09:23.840 only an institution of exclusion. An institutional exclusion is a 0:09:23.840 --> 0:09:26.960 matter of organized power. As we can see from the 0:09:27.000 --> 0:09:30.400 genocide on the Plans, This power is no abstract force. 0:09:30.559 --> 0:09:33.440 Beblin tends to focus on the power of absentee owners 0:09:33.440 --> 0:09:37.120 to stop production, and for good reason, but business stands 0:09:37.120 --> 0:09:40.160 in the way of industry in more immediate ways too. 0:09:40.600 --> 0:09:43.600 After all, the purpose of cooperative industry is to make 0:09:43.640 --> 0:09:46.800 goods to improve our lives. And yet in between us 0:09:46.840 --> 0:09:50.080 and the proceeds that industry creates to slerve our needs, 0:09:50.880 --> 0:09:54.000 there is a cash register in a cop Even the 0:09:54.000 --> 0:09:57.160 creators of a Louis Vuitton bag, or for that matter, 0:09:57.480 --> 0:10:01.040 a tomato, have no claim on it. Its business takes over, 0:10:01.240 --> 0:10:03.440 and business would rather destroy it than see it fall 0:10:03.520 --> 0:10:07.480 into their hands. The famous Russian anarchist theorist Peter Kirpopkin 0:10:07.880 --> 0:10:10.400 was writing along similar lines to Veblen just a few 0:10:10.440 --> 0:10:13.640 years before Feblen, it seems, have been exposed to anarchist 0:10:13.679 --> 0:10:16.880 ideas through his association with the Industrial workers of the World. 0:10:17.679 --> 0:10:20.760 In early nineteen hundreds, it was not altogether unusual for 0:10:20.800 --> 0:10:24.960 economists to move in radical circles. The great Italian economist 0:10:25.000 --> 0:10:28.760 Piero's Raffles smuggled pens and papers to Antonio Gramsey, while Grumsey, 0:10:29.320 --> 0:10:32.240 the head of the Italian Communist Party, was a prisoner 0:10:32.559 --> 0:10:35.720 with the Italian fascist regime. Grapha would later extract the 0:10:35.760 --> 0:10:41.679 writings that Crampsy had written in prison Unlesian Gramsey's prison 0:10:41.720 --> 0:10:44.560 notebooks onto the world. But Veblin was unique even among 0:10:44.600 --> 0:10:47.360 these economists for the extent that he incorporated radical theories 0:10:47.400 --> 0:10:51.280 directly into his work. As you've seen was his adoption 0:10:51.280 --> 0:10:55.560 of sabotage as a way of thinking about capitalism. This 0:10:55.679 --> 0:10:58.240 led Veblen to call the end of the system of 0:10:58.240 --> 0:11:04.079 what he described as vested interests and absentee owners. Febulance solution, however, 0:11:04.559 --> 0:11:08.480 which he described as a quote sovietive technicians would manage 0:11:08.520 --> 0:11:12.040 production for all society leaves a lot to be desired for. 0:11:12.800 --> 0:11:15.840 So let us return to the source Herscropotkin in the 0:11:15.880 --> 0:11:20.200 Conquest of Bread the minds, so they represent the labor 0:11:20.240 --> 0:11:23.600 of several generations, and derive their sole value from the 0:11:23.640 --> 0:11:27.320 requirements of the industry of a nation and the density 0:11:27.360 --> 0:11:31.480 of the population. The minds also belonged to the few, 0:11:32.120 --> 0:11:34.640 and these few restrict the output of coal, are prevented 0:11:34.840 --> 0:11:39.839 entirely if they find a more profitable investments for their capital. Machinery, too, 0:11:39.960 --> 0:11:43.839 has become the exclusive property of the few. And even 0:11:43.840 --> 0:11:48.800 when a machine and contestedly represents an improvements added to 0:11:48.840 --> 0:11:53.160 the original rough invention by three or four generations of workers, 0:11:53.520 --> 0:11:56.840 it nonetheless belongs to a few owners. And if the 0:11:56.840 --> 0:12:00.680 descendants of the very inventor who constructed the first machine 0:12:00.720 --> 0:12:04.360 for lace building a century ago were to present themselves 0:12:04.360 --> 0:12:07.560 today at a lace factory and bail or Nottingham and 0:12:07.640 --> 0:12:11.080 demand their rights, they would be told hands off, this 0:12:11.160 --> 0:12:13.400 machine is not yours, and they would be shot down 0:12:13.440 --> 0:12:16.800 if they attempted to take possession of it. Here we 0:12:16.840 --> 0:12:20.080 see the competition between two different kinds of rights. On 0:12:20.120 --> 0:12:23.959 the one hand, the right of industry, the right of creativity, 0:12:24.240 --> 0:12:27.000 the right of those who produce and care for each 0:12:27.040 --> 0:12:30.760 other to be able to determine where are the proceeds 0:12:30.800 --> 0:12:33.920 of their labor go. From industry's point of view, this 0:12:34.040 --> 0:12:37.760 is to each other, to those in need, into society 0:12:37.800 --> 0:12:40.320 as a whole. On the other hand, there is the 0:12:40.400 --> 0:12:42.559 right of property, the right of men with guns to 0:12:42.640 --> 0:12:45.400 throw oysters into the ocean because it's not profitable for 0:12:45.440 --> 0:12:48.599 anyone to eat them. Capitalism has developed a myriad of 0:12:48.679 --> 0:12:52.640 iterations precisely the same principle, and the world is now 0:12:52.640 --> 0:12:57.480 infested by them. Patent trolls haunt they already fraught waters 0:12:57.480 --> 0:13:01.240 of intellectual property, buying up patents for cheap or on 0:13:01.360 --> 0:13:05.679 rare occasions, creating something themselves for the sole purpose, or 0:13:05.760 --> 0:13:08.720 preventing anyone else from using it, making money by suing 0:13:08.760 --> 0:13:12.000 anyone who dares try. Large corporations, of course, to precisely 0:13:12.080 --> 0:13:15.480 the same thing, see for example, Disney's War. In the 0:13:15.559 --> 0:13:19.880 concept of anything, anything at all, falling into the public domain, 0:13:20.320 --> 0:13:24.520 the sabotage, and on this all four of our interlocutors 0:13:24.840 --> 0:13:29.240 Veblin Kropotkin clear needs and degree as long as private 0:13:29.240 --> 0:13:33.360 ownership exists, because sabotage is all private ownership really is. 0:13:34.520 --> 0:13:37.359 But it is not simply enough to answer corporate sabotage 0:13:37.360 --> 0:13:40.720 with their own sabotage. As Veblin pointed out, this is 0:13:40.720 --> 0:13:44.760 simply the ordinary state of affairs under capitalism. For Capotkin, 0:13:44.880 --> 0:13:50.720 the answer was simple. This rich endowments, painfully one builded, fashioned, 0:13:50.840 --> 0:13:54.320 or invented by our ancestors, must become common property, so 0:13:54.360 --> 0:13:57.480 that the collective interest of men may gain forbid the 0:13:57.520 --> 0:14:00.760 greatest good for all. There must be appropriate ation the 0:14:00.800 --> 0:14:05.480 well being of all the end expropriation. The means how 0:14:05.559 --> 0:14:07.679 precisely to go about doing such a thing has been 0:14:07.679 --> 0:14:10.120 the subject of endless debate for nearly two hundred years, 0:14:10.400 --> 0:14:13.480 And I am not arrogant enough to propose to solve 0:14:13.520 --> 0:14:16.679 the problem here. But a system where a company can 0:14:16.720 --> 0:14:20.280 prevent even the US government from attempting to produce ventilators 0:14:20.800 --> 0:14:23.520 by simply buying up the company that won the contract 0:14:23.880 --> 0:14:26.760 and refusing to fill the order to maintain the value 0:14:26.800 --> 0:14:29.680 of the ventilators it was already producing. Is a system 0:14:29.720 --> 0:14:32.520 based on nothing less than ensuring that people will die 0:14:32.840 --> 0:14:35.920 for or five percent rate of return. If we are 0:14:36.040 --> 0:14:39.480 to have any hope of stopping the ravages that climate 0:14:39.560 --> 0:14:43.160 change promises for our future, we cannot afford to be 0:14:43.200 --> 0:14:45.200 sabotaged at every step,