Where everyday resistance most strikingly departs from other forms of resistance is in its implicit disavowal of public and symbolic goals. Where institutionalized politics is formal, overt, concerned with systematic, de jure change, everyday resistance is informal, often covert, and concerned largely with immediate de facto gains. From J.C. Scott 1990 Domination and the Arts of Resistance . Just as traditional Marxist analysis might be said to privilege the appropriation of surplus value as the social site of exploitation and resistance, our analysis here privileges the social experience of indignities, control, submission, humiliation, forced deference, and punishment. The choice of emphasis is not to gainsay the importance of material appropriation in class relations.
Appropriation is, after all, largely the purpose of domination.
The very process of appropriation, however, unavoidably entails systematic social relations of subordination that impose indignities of one kind or another on the weak. Resistance, then, originates not simply from material appropriation but from the pattern of personal humiliations that characterize exploitation. If the personal aspect of submission is crucial to relatively impersonal forms of wage labor performed by workers who enjoy political rights and who are formally free to quit their job, then it ought to be far more relevant to those forms of domination that are more direct and personal. The World the Slaves Made . The slaves' response to paternalism and their imaginative creation of a partially autonomous religion provided a record of simultaneous accomodation and resistance to slavery.