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.
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
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
