No Interests in Common: Sabotage as Structural Analysis

Sabotage is a little word,Easily said and easily heard,Expresses much and means disasterWhen properly used against the master.

Sabotage is a thing that's banned,By labor fakirs throughout the land,By rebel workers used for agesTo make the bosses increase wages

Sabotage can always be usedTo gain justice when workers are abused:Bad bosses, too, are tamed in a dayWhen a little sab kitten strays their way.

If the strength of sabotage you should doubt,There are many ways of finding out,And if you think that is a lie,Ask pickhandle Johnson or Governor Spry.¹

"Sabotage" by Herbert Mahler, Industrial Worker, 16 April 1916

Very few workers went to jail for committing acts of sabotage but thousands were arrested for talking about it. The practice of sabotage was not new, but the word was, and there was something distinctly threatening about naming the disparate, rebellious practices of disgruntled workers. Sabotage gave an intellectual coherence and revolutionary meaning to activity that could easily be interpreted as irrational, impulsive, and apolitical. Much like the Industrial Workers of the World (I.W.W.), it organized the disorganized and legitimated what appeared illegitimate. It also became a lightning rod for legal repression. Following the 1913 silk workers' strike in Patterson, New Jersey, Frederick Sumner Boyd was tried for sedition, in part because he urged workers to incapacitate looms with vinegar. Boyd's trial inspired a heated defense of sabotage as "the guerilla warfare of the working class."² Elizabeth Gurley Flynn's pamphlet, "Sabotage," a direct response to the charges against Boyd, was one of many writings by I.W.W. organizers and worker intellectuals advocating sabotage as a nonviolent form of worker control and a legitimate means of coercion.³ Property destruction had long been a regular occurrence during labor conflicts in the United States, but its open defense was a disturbing novelty.

Sabotage literature consisted of songs, poems, allusions to "sab kittens," and endless images of black cats and wooden shoes. Its traces were everywhere. A handful of pamphlets functioned as the intellectual core of this discourse. They were not numerous, but they were among the I.W.W.'s most widely distributed literature.⁴ Sabotage was a sophisticated analysis of class conflict, presented in simple terms that was sung, recited, printed, stickered, and drawn across the complex landscape of American syndicalist thought. And it did not go unnoticed by the public at large. First mentioned in 1907, worker sabotage continued to generate headlines in major newspapers well into the 1920s.⁵

Sabotage, as both a theory and a practice, encompassed a critique of property, industrial progress, efficiency, and centralized bureaucratic control that enriched understandings of class conflict in the industrialized United States of the early twentieth century. It destabilized the well-established association between industrial efficiency and social progress by negatively reimagining that progress as something external to technological development and productive capacity. Indeed, it suggested that social progress would be achieved by the interruption of industrial progress, the disruption of production and the violation of property rights. Sabotage inverted one of modernity's foundational myths: "the story of the industrial revolution … as the triumph of new techniques, and the inevitable march of progress."⁶ According to Walker Smith, editor of The Industrial Worker, the word "sabotage" was so terrifying that the employer class did not even want to utter it for fear that the working class would learn what it was.⁷ This would appear to be true. Legal efforts to literally take the word out of circulation through the passage of state-level laws that made speaking or writing about "sabotage" a felony, began in earnest with the U.S. entrance into World War I.

Workers in the United States clearly knew what sabotage was before it was named and they continued to employ it after the term fell out of fashion. They had flooded mines, set fire to rail yards, disabled engines, and variously rebelled against attempts by owners to increase and deskill production. Sabotage had been, and would continue to be...