CONCEPT
Sabotage (Veblen)
Not destruction but deliberate restriction of productive output to maintain scarcity and profit — the 'conscientious withdrawal of efficiency.'
In Veblen's framework, sabotage is not the deliberate destruction of machinery but the systematic restriction of productive capacity below what the state of the industrial arts permits, undertaken to maintain the conditions of scarcity upon which profit depends. Business enterprises restrict output when unrestricted production would drive prices below profitable levels, withhold productive capacity to maintain market position, and manipulate supply to sustain margins. Veblen catalogued mechanisms including crop destruction to maintain agricultural prices, factory shutdowns during low demand, maintenance of excess capacity deployed or withheld as conditions required, and patent systems granting monopolies over techniques derived from collective knowledge. In each case, restriction was not aberration but normal functioning of the price system — the mechanism through which business maintained the scarcity its profit depended upon.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Veblen introduced the concept in The Engineers and the Price System (1921), arguing that productive capacity of the industrial system was systematically underutilized not because of technical limitation but economic calculation. The business enterprise, organized around profit rather than production, found unrestricted