10 ideas
Most subordinate classes through most of history could never afford open, organized political activity, because it would be met with violence. Studying only visible movements therefore misses nearly all of their political life. Quiet non-cooperation is what remains when fighting back openly would get you killed.
Outward conformity by the powerless is calculated, not unthinking. Beneath ritual compliance runs ideological resistance, voiced as a veiled discourse of dignity that is kept muted for safety. Observers who watch peasants only in front of their masters mistake this performance for consent.
Elite values do not simply soak down into the lower classes. People can accept that an arrangement cannot be changed while still refusing to see it as just. Ruling ideas are always contested and constantly rebuilt, never settled.
The powerless usually care less about overturning the state and the law than about working the system to their minimum disadvantage. Their struggle is over the daily claims made on their labor, food, rent, taxes and interest. Its aims are material, closer to trade unionism than to revolutionary consciousness.
Peasants rarely confront authorities head-on over taxes, crop rules or onerous new laws. Instead they nibble policies away through noncompliance, foot-dragging and deception. Unpopular collective farming in socialist states was blunted and even undone this way.
Most of the political life of subordinate groups is neither open collective defiance nor complete compliance. It sits in the vast territory between those two poles. Looking only for rebellion or obedience makes that whole middle ground invisible.
In a stratified village, the visible class struggle is mostly talk. It runs on feints, threats, gossip and propaganda, with only a rare skirmish. The contest over who deserves what is waged through reputation and argument.
Foot-dragging, false compliance, pilfering, feigned ignorance, desertion, slander, arson and sabotage share one design. They need little coordination, run on unspoken understandings and informal networks, and work as individual self-help. Above all, they avoid any direct, symbolic challenge to authority.
Over the long run, patient and silent resistance often achieves more than open rebellion. Millenarian movements and doomed revolts like Nat Turner's are flashes in the pan. The real contest between slaves and owners, or peasants and lords, is a constant grinding conflict over work, food and autonomy.
The poor resist by appealing to the moral framework they share with those above them, and hold the powerful to its terms. That is why they blame richer neighbours, who owe them obligations of community, rather than distant landlords or the state, who owe them nothing. Often it is the rich who are trying to break the moral consensus of the poor.