Exploitation Quotes

“What does it mean to be a proletarian, really? [...] It means you are a cog in a process of production that relies on what you do and think, while excluding you from being anything but its product. It means the end of sovereignty, the conversion of all experiential value to exchange value, the final defeat of autonomy.”
― Yanis Varoufakis, Another Now: Dispatches from an Alternative Present

“The technical term that is often used for this is “interpersonally exploitative.” In short, because of the singular focus on fulfilling their needs, especially external needs, narcissists will use other people as objects to get those needs met. Other people often do serve literally as objects—a tool to get a job done. Because you are not in on this secret in the beginning, it can feel a bit depersonalizing—as though you are only valued when you are functional. It can feel manipulative, because your partner may compliment you excessively and then hit you with a difficult request or ask you to make uncomfortable requests.”
― Ramani Durvasula, Should I Stay or Should I Go?: Surviving a Relationship with a Narcissist

“I’m angry at them, but I still see their humanity and don’t wish them ill. I actually feel sympathy for those pulled and brainwashed into antifa’s twisted ideology. They are often exploited and used by a movement that explicitly rejects the value of individuals in favor of the cause.”
― Andy Ngo, Unmasked: Inside Antifa's Radical Plan to Destroy Democracy

“With all this hoarding, alarm, deceit, lack of information, plethora of disinformation, ambiguity, and confusion, I wonder whether it is time for us to start drafting a post-coronavirus manifesto? Perhaps it should contain all the things we don’t want the world to become after this pandemic is over. There are many alienating powers out there that thrived on keeping us quarantined, at distance, and distrustful of each other way before COVID-19. There are systems that thrive on our loneliness and fear. There are institutions dedicated to make sure that we don’t help each other so that we turn to them for help… Let’s not allow them to get their way once this pandemic is over! Let’s make sure that we create a world in which such blood suckers are not needed in the first place. Oh, my friends, let’s beware of the ways disaster capitalism is using the pandemic for its benefit.”
― Louis Yako

“Because most of us are shielded (or shield ourselves) from the unpleasant realities associated with the routine use of animals, we can maintain a view of ourselves as animal lovers by being kind to the few living animals we personally encounter.”
― Grace Clement

“eventually you just stop saying that. because you realize you're an idiot.”
― Chris Arnade

“Misogyny now has become so normalized,” says Paul Roberts, the Impulse Society author. “We can’t even see the absurdity and the inequity of it, it’s so pervasive. When the male gaze was digitized, it was almost as if it was internalized. With smartphones and social media, girls had the means of producing the male gaze themselves, and it was as if they turned it on themselves willingly in order to compete in a marketplace in which sex was the main selling point.
And the social media companies aren't going to do anything about it, as long as it's driving traffic.”
― Nancy Jo Sales, American Girls: Social Media and the Secret Lives of Teenagers

“It is perhaps a form of disillusionment similar to that experienced in many Eastern European countries the moment many people realized that they have lost whatever benefits they had under the former communist regimes without winning anything in return under the draconian, capitalist EU system of exploitation.”
― Louis Yako

“Very few things make a fool feel smart better than negotiating.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“So selfish. Chen Kaizong's first response upon hearing the elder's soliloquy was disgust.
He knew very well how people were exploited and oppressed. This was a common theme throughout history: take any group of people- it didn't matter if they were of different races or compatriots- some always set themselves apart as a higher class, and, in the name of gods, the nation, or 'progress,' made laws and constructed rules that allowed them to dominate the lives of the other classes, to own their bodies as well as their spirits.”
― Chen Qiufan, Waste Tide

“Control communication and you control the people communicating.”
― A.D. Aliwat, In Limbo

“We need to rationalize our existences, usually by doing something that feels “important.” Our inner worlds are devalued, because others cannot directly observe them. Many people remain “do-ers.” Doing things to make up for their belief that they themselves are “not enough.” In relationships when your partner is not engaging in a mutual way, and you feel that the only way to keep the relationship afloat and to keep your partner content is to keep doing things—stay fit, look good, clean the house, make his life easy, buy her things— then that becomes your pattern. In addition, you may need to be yet another bringer of admiration into your partner’s life telling him,“you are so attractive/smart/successful/sexy/cool/awesome.” All this stuff you need to bring, day after day after day, can be labeled narcissistic supply. Psychologically healthy human beings nourish themselves from the inside. They do not “need” supply, and other people in their worlds should not be in the role of having to serve them that way. You may get some insight into why this relationship has been so exhausting.”
― Ramani Durvasula, Should I Stay or Should I Go?: Surviving a Relationship with a Narcissist

“Addicting people to praise as a motivator puts them on a slippery slope toward a lifetime of fear and exploitation, always looking for some expert to approve of them.”
― John Taylor Gatto, The Underground History of American Education: An Intimate Investigation Into the Prison of Modern Schooling

“Exploitation was getting a bad name so Gamification was founded”
― Vineet Raj Kapoor

“WORRYING ABOUT LASTING
UP TILL THE EXPIRY DATE?
THINK IF YOU DIE UNUSED!
GIVE IN TO THE CAUSE.”
― Vineet Raj Kapoor

“Sometimes I wonder if it is too much of an imposition on earthworms to push them into polluted ground, or to force-feed them a particular bacteria because we'd like to see it spread around. Darwin noticed that humans tend to exploit any characteristic for their own good, writing that "in the process of selection man almost invariably wishes to go to an extreme point." Are we taking advantage of earthworms? Shouldn't we clean up our own messes, or learn not to make them in the first place?”
― Amy Stewart, The Earth Moved: On the Remarkable Achievements of Earthworms

“While an extreme and violent case, Bullets in Envelopes shows that the conditions of Iraqi academics in exile are part and parcel of global trends marked by the commercialization and corporatization of higher education adversely affecting academic, social, and political freedoms of writing, thinking, and speaking truth to power. As such, countries and societies are being totally reshaped (and destroyed) in alarming ways. Bullets in Envelopes is about academics, but it’s not written for academics only. The stories in the book prove that the Iraq war is far from over. Instead, it has been happening over and over in other countries too.”
― Louis Yako, Bullets in Envelopes: Iraqi Academics in Exile

“[T]he corporate customer service culture we currently have in place is neither about customers nor about those serving them. It is primarily geared to serve the pockets of those at the top of the corporate ladder.”
― Louis Yako

“If we pay attention, it becomes clear that many people have already internalized seeing themselves as ‘customers’. For example, when some express their discontent with any government or corporate policies or services, they often demand changes as ‘taxpayers’ rather than as citizens. Is it implied in this language that those who do not (or cannot) pay taxes, albeit temporarily, have no rights to object as citizens? Is this why poor neighborhoods in America are usually run down and unsafe? If so, we must be careful about accepting this reality, because each one of us at any given point in our lives may be in a place where we may not be deemed as worthy consumers or taxpayers by the system. Seeing oneself as a customer is more about one’s income and payment to exist in the system than it is about their basic human rights or even their real value.”
― Louis Yako

“[W]e are asked to present or use our bank cards, gym cards, grocery store cards, work ID, and so on, a lot more than we use our state or government IDs. We rarely use our State IDs, unless we are in trouble or to prove that we are ‘legal’ or entitled to some meager benefits. Our existence in the system is measured by many different cards issued by corporate America. As a result, as soon as any card expires, you are denied entrance into places. You are valid only for as long as the expiration date on your credit card, the money you have in your bank account, or the expiration date of your gym membership/card. You become invisible in the society once your cards expire. You are nobody when you can no longer afford to renew your memberships of all these expensive corporate cards.”
― Louis Yako

“I believe that whether we live in America or in any part of the world, we need to stand against turning ourselves into customers. We are first and foremost humans and citizens, and those attributes allow us to have a dialogue with each other, to fight injustice and violence together, to hold those in power accountable together, to protect the vulnerable and the disempowered members in our society together, and to help each other in times of need collectively. As customers, we are just lonely and isolated individuals measured by our paychecks, the expiration dates on our corporate cards, and the ability to afford or not afford this or that corporate service. It weakens our collective power. Being a customer or a consumer turns everything human, beautiful, and enjoyable into an unpleasant job responsibility. It robs us the pleasure of living.”
― Louis Yako

“For decades, the exploitative capitalist system and neoliberalism have been trying to persuade the world that it is for our best interest to reduce (or even erase) the public sector and give more power to the greedy private sector. They have been pushing -with great success – for the privatization of every service that can benefit the poor and marginalized people. They have and still are trying to get rid of universal healthcare anywhere their hands can reach. Why do they do so? The answer is simpler than we think: it is to keep people at the mercy of the greedy capitalist system that sees individuals as either potential cheap laborers to benefit from or a burden to dispose of when no longer usable. This global pandemic should be a wake-up call to all of us about how duped the world has been all along by this narrative. How many more disasters and pandemics will it take for the world to wake up?”
― Louis Yako

“To be an anarchist is to deny authority and reject its economic corollary: exploitation — and that in all the domains where human activity is exerted.”
― Émile Armand, Mini-Manual of Individualist Anarchism

“People fight foe equality but to the first chance for domination.”
― Ljupka Cvetanova, The New Land

“What's the endgame of capitalism, if not a big fat white man sitting on top of a pile of bloody bones [after cannibalizing everyone else] with no one around him, crying because no one's around to make him a sandwich? [quoting Adam Franz]”
― Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling, A Libertarian Walks into a Bear: The Utopian Plot to Liberate an American Town

“From its first day to this, sheer greed was the driving spirit of civilization; wealth and again wealth and once more wealth, wealth, not of society but of the single scurvy individual – here was its one and final aim. If at the same time the progressive development of science and a repeated flowering of supreme art dropped into its lap, it was only because without them modern wealth could not have completely realized its achievements.”
― Friedrich Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State

“As a scholar of Iraqi origin, the West not only reduces me into a token or an informant to write about Iraq, but even more damaging than that, I have to write about Iraq on their terms, if I am to be acknowledged or given the ‘honor’ of getting a place in their ‘prestigious’ institutions and publications. I understood this game early in my intellectual life and chose to opt out (to delink) to save my mind and to preserve my value and self-respect. I did not see a point in reaching ‘prestigious’ institutions while losing self-respect, knowing that I am not really writing, thinking, and doing knowledge conscientiously on my own terms.”
― Louis Yako

“For example, the colonized people have ‘regimes’ and ‘dictators’, whereas the West has ‘democracies’; the people in the ‘first world’ ‘tolerate’ cancer chemotherapy and ‘tolerate’ refugees or other religions and beliefs; if you go to work and settle in the West, you are an ‘immigrant’, but when Westerners come to plunder your country and get overpaid jobs (often despite mediocre qualifications), they are ‘expats’; and on goes the list of how we devalue ourselves and glorify our killers and plunderers without even realizing it simply through the language we use daily.”
― Louis Yako

“Economists have always recognised that some kind of initial accumulation was necessary for the rise of capitalism. Adam Smith called this ‘previous accumulation’, and claimed that it came about because a few people worked really hard and saved their earnings– an idyllic tale that still gets repeated in economics textbooks. But historians see it as naïve. This was no innocent process of saving. It was a process of plunder.”
― Jason Hickel, Less Is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World

“Many people imagine that any higher human development, if it exists at all, must follow a pattern whose form (or at least whose beginning) is instantly perceptible to them as such.
In making this assumption these people expose themselves to control by any systems which can take advantage of this expectation. And systems do take advantage of this,”
― Idries Shah, Caravan of Dreams