The French Connection - "Sabotage!.."

The word sabotage is a genuine “drama picture”. It can conjure machines grinding noisily to a halt, partisans blowing up railway lines, or each of us inexplicably wrecking our own best chances.. It feels shivering, cinematic and rebellious. But sabotage has much humbler roots, in the clatter of a wooden shoe…

In France, “un sabot” was a simple wooden clog worn for centuries by peasants and workers. Sturdy, practical and inexpensive, it was a shoe for everyday labour — for field, farm, and eventually factories. When workers moved across industrial floors in their big old “sabots”, the sound was heavy, awkward, clumsy. Out of this came the verb saboter — “to walk noisily and clumsily” - which - in the shifty way words do shift, eventually came to mean “to bungle, or generally make a mess of things.”

By the 19th century, as industry transformed France, saboter took on a sharper edge. It described workers deliberately botching jobs — slowing down or damaging production in protest against harsh conditions. The act was no accident; it was intentional disruption. From this, the noun sabotage was born. There is no real evidence that the fabled “spanner in the works” began as a clog thrown into a cog, but the first political uses of the word sabotage did start to appear in the first debates of newly-formed workers unions in the 1880’s. The ethics of deliberately slowing production to protest at workers conditions, pay and harsh treatment. The word was duly gathered up and taken into both World Wars as a descriptive for deliberate acts of resistance - derailing trains, blowing up bridges, and ruining the calibration of munitions - always deliberate; a choice, never an accident.

A Platform 13 Reflection...

Sabotage can offer us more than a story of wooden shoes and disgruntled workers. It can also be a mirror for our inner lives. Sometimes the worst saboteur, the most ardent de-railer and general blower-up of shit, is not elsewhere but right here inside us.

We sabotage ourselves when we flirt with that enemy called "perfection". We detonate our best chances when we don't rumble with our own voice, or when we choose comfort over courage. These spanners of doubt and fear jam the works of our personal growth. They keep the production line running, but our product is limited and unevolved.

Yet just as sabotage once gave workers a language of resistance, naming our own acts of self-sabotage can be the beginning of liberation. To acknowledge how we recognise how we dynamite ourselves is the first step to better chapters of choices. We can begin choosing differently. Taking off the wooden clogs, happy with the odd hole in our socks, and step into a more genuine way of being ourselves.