> They relocate to regions with cheaper labor and fewer regulations [...] and they automate or restructure the workplace to disempower workers.

That's a total, unqualified victory. If your regulation is intended to stop people exploiting your customers or labor base, the best possible outcome is that exploitative fuckbags pack up their stuff and leave. This is what we're seeing in California, where every single Fortune 500 company is writing about how awful their taxes are, without acknowledging the damage that private capital did.

Regulatory capture is always going to be a matter of perspective, but that doesn't stop me from advocating for it. This is a zero-sum argument and you wouldn't need to reach for it if revolution was a successful premise.

> Capital will simply shift to a new product cycle or a new geography to escape the new laws.

It's a free country, let them. Someone has to water-test reality, and I'm fine letting private capital waste money on terrible ideas that they can be fined for in the long run. I don't weep for the world we might live in if Microsoft was allowed to bully Netscape and Java. They made the terrible idea, and they earn their just desert.

> By systematically withdrawing labor, obedience, and technical skills, [...] it cuts off the very sources of the ruler's power, paralyzing the system.

You haven't cited a single instance of this working. I have cited four distinct counterexamples, now.

I'm glad that you're engaging with theory, but it's not my job to simulate the myriad reasons why this hasn't worked. We have 30 years of postmodern software capitalism to examine, and at the end it says "Palantir" in extra-bold typeface. Conscientious objection didn't seem to do much in WWII, didn't change after the Snowden revalations, and today we are deeper-entrenched in anti-human software than ever.

Appealing to workers isn't enough. You have to convince the top, and revolution is how you hand them consent to exercise their monopoly on violence.