Workers are disciplined by the threat of having their ability to labor productively *sabotaged* by capitalist workers. This idea is, of course, identical to Marx’s reserve army of the unemployed—those people that capitalists deliberately keep hungry and homeless as an implicit threat to workers.

Nitzan and Bichler view unemployment not just as a threat for disciplining labor, but as part of a mechanism of wealth extraction that we can empirically model and measure. Take a look at the image below, in which they propose a model for sabotage through unemployment. A graph of the capital share of national income as a function of unemployment should produce a rough bell curve: too little sabotage and capitalists are eschewing income by leaving money on the table; too much sabotage and there’s not enough economic activity to skim off the top. The sweet spot of sabotage should be somewhere in the middle, an ideal but moving target of unemployment that maximizes capitalists’ income.

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