Table-flipping as Political Action

From Cory Doctrow via BoingBoing:

There's a classic behavioral economics experiment called the ultimatum game in which one subject is asked to divide a pool of money, and the other subject can choose to take whatever the first one offers (no matter how little that is), or reject the offer and both of them get none. The "economically rational" approach is to take whatever you're given, even if it's just one penny, because one penny is more than you'd get if you rejected the offer. But in experiments, subjects confronted with "unfair" splits overwhelmingly choose to punish themselves in order to punish the person making the unfair offer. 

Neoliberal politics have been a long-term, iterated form of the ultimatum game: the capital class arrogates more wealth to itself while it offers less and less to working people, with fewer prospects for advancement, but points to an opposition that would give workers even less, and expects that they'll go on winning as the lesser of two evils. 

Brexit shows that in such a circumstance, table-flipping is a viable alternative to playing the game at all.