SOCIAL SCIENTIST 'sabotage' just as workers drag their feet (the clog, or French wooden shoe, the 'sabot') in strikes. Sabotage is essential to maintain prices at profitable levels: "the ways and means of this necessary control of the output of industry are always and necessarily something in the nature of sabotage - something in the way of retardation, restriction, withdrawal, unemployment of plant and workmen, whereby production is kept short of productive capacity" in order to secure profit for the few at the expense of the many (Veblen 1919:8). Drawing upon Veblen (1921), Douglas observed that the objective of large capitalist corporations is "to obtain the maximum amount of money for the minimum amount of goods" (Douglas 1924:46-49) which results in periodic failures of distribution. The apparently simplistic underconsumptionist message is, however, given a subtle twist by Douglas. Seven years before the 1931 UK financial crisis, which brought down the Labour government (Bassett 19587 Hutchinson and Burkitt 1997: 110-111), Douglas observed that no government can continue in power without money, which it is powerless to create under the present system. (I)t is not necessary to labour the point that the visible government of a country is obliged to take its orders and to shape its policy, and particularly its financial policy, in accordance with the instructions of the dealers in this indispensable implement, so long as they [money dealers] hold a practical monopoly of it (Douglas 1924:48). Douglas argued that although land, labour and capital were essential to the wealth-creation process, the vital ingredient "may be expressed in the words of Mr. Thorstein Veblen (although he does not appear to have grasped its full implication) as "the progress of the industrial arts'" (Douglas 1924:49). Ownership of cultural and intellectual social resources should by rights be held in common, unrestricted by powerful capitalists or a dominant state bureaucracy. The collective "cultural inheritance' enables people to associate together in industry to gain the "unearned increment' of such association. In this way goods and services can be created with far less effort than through "isolated endeavour' (Douglas 1920:19). Referring to The Engineers and the Price System (Veblen 1921), Douglas observed that control over the vital collective element of wealth creation had been wrested from the community by the institutions of finance. To Veblen, the "Captains of Industry" were mere "captains of business... those absentee owners who control the country's industrial