People resist exploitation. They resist as actively as they can, as passively as they must.
Interpretation
People fight against being taken advantage of, using both active and passive methods of resistance.
This quote by Immanuel Wallerstein highlights the innate human tendency to resist exploitation in various forms. Whether through overt action or subtle, passive resistance, individuals strive to safeguard their dignity and autonomy against those who seek to take advantage of them, reflecting a fundamental aspect of human nature and social dynamics.
In practice
In a speech on social justice, one might quote this to emphasize the need for activism.
If we return to the two faces of individualism - individualism as the spur of energy, initiative, and imagination; and individualism as the limitless struggle of all against all - it can be seen how the two practices emerge from and limit the extend of the disequilibrating impact of the contradiction involved in the geocultural agenda.
Scientific culture created a framework within which individual mobility was possible without threatening hierarchical work-force allocation. On the contrary, meritocracy reinforced hierarchy. Finally, meritocracy as an operation and scientific culture as an ideology created veils that hindered perception of the underlying operations of historical capitalism.
The break from the supposedly culturally-narrow religious bases of knowledge in favor of supposedly trans-cultural scientific bases of knowledge served as the self-justification of a particularly pernicious form of cultural imperialism.
This is a steady, ceaseless process, impossible to contain as long as the economy driven by the endless accumulation of capital. The system may prolong its life by slowing down some of the activities which are wearing it out, but death always looms somewhere on the horizon.
What is different in capitalist civilization has been two things. First, the process of meritocracy has been proclaimed as an official virtue instead of being merely a de facto reality. The culture has been different. And secondly, the percentage of the world's population for whom such ascent was possible has gone up. But even though it has grown up, meritocratic ascent remains very much the attribute of a minority.
Historical capitalism is a materialist civilization.
I have no fear, for fear is the little death that kills me over and over. Without fear, I die but once.
You have seen how a man was made a slave; you shall see how a slave was made a man.
I have decided to give up competition. I cannot train properly for the Tour de France which I had hoped to ride for the last time as apotheosis to my career. Doctors are forbidding me to ride anymore in high level competition and I bow to them.
If I or my soldiers have plundered or done injury to the houses or to the ministers of religion, I repent me of my sin - but it is not of Edward of England that I shall ask pardon.
It isn't important to come out on top, what matters is to be the one who comes out alive.
Every start on an untrodden path is a venture which only in unusual circumstances looks sensible and likely to succeed.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.