Sabotage

This much is certain: Marxists have never favoured sabotage as a form of political action capable of advancing the class struggle towards the goal of ending capitalism. The fate of sabotage in the Marxist imagination was more or less sealed by Engels’ and Marx’s assessment of Luddite machine-breaking during the onset of industrial capitalism in the 19th century (See Hobsbawn 1952). In his path-breaking account of the working class in Victorian England, Engels concluded of machine-breaking and factory destruction that, “This form of opposition was isolated, restricted to certain localities, and directed against one feature only of our present social arrangements. When the momentary end was attained, the whole weight of social power fell upon the unprotected evil-doers and punished them to its heart’s content, while the machinery was introduced none the less. A new form of opposition had to be found” (Engels 2009, 222). Two decades later, Marx would reiterate this assessment in Volume I of Capital, lamenting that the “enormous destruction of machinery” in England during this period served only to provide authorities with “a pretext for most reactionary and forcible methods” of quelling working class revolt. He continues: “It took both time and experience before the workpeople learnt to distinguish between machinery and its employment by capital, and to direct their attacks, not against the material instruments of production, but against the mode in which they are used” (Marx 1978, 404).