Weapons of the Weak- Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance

by James C Scott

  It is not only that the initial capital outlay for any but the smallest leasehold tenancies is more than the annual net income of all but a few households in the village. Beyond this, the current rent levels for such leaseholds work out to [Page 110] between M$ 180 and M$220 per relong per season, a level that would leave little or no profit if the harvest were mediocre. It is a risk that most local cultivators, assuming they had the capital, would be fearful of running. Only those who already own tractors and/or combine-harvesters, which reduce their production costs, and who farm enough land to spread their risks and absorb short-term losses can compete in this market. In effect, what appears to be happening is that the owners of capital-machinery, rice mills, cash reserves-are now moving directly into the production process and cultivating themselves. The landowners who give over their land to pajak tenants may be rich or poor, but the new tenants leasing this land are increasingly drawn from the ranks of the wealthiest Malay and Chinese rural entrepreneurs. Ownership may remain basically unchanged while the concentration of operation, a kind of usufruct monopoly, grows apace.26

  CHANGES IN RICE PRODUCTION AND WAGES

  The five years following the beginning of double-cropping in Sedaka until roughly 1977 is now the object of justified nostalgia for the poorer households of the village: work was not only plentiful, with two crops to transplant, cut, thresh, and carry from the fields, but the peaks of labor demand at planting and harvesting time so improved the bargaining position of laborers as to substantially raise their real wages. From the vantage point of, say, 1976, there was ample cause for optimism-nearly everyone had gained. Large farmers and landowners, of course, were the major beneficiaries of the increased yields and higher paddy prices, even if higher production costs ate away a portion of that gain. Smallholders who had been barely making do found for the first time that doublecropping afforded them a modest surplus and some relief from growing debts. Even the poorest villagers, with little or no land to farm, who relied heavily on wage labor to feed their families, could find enough local work throughout the two rice seasons to make ends meet without leaving the village each year in search of wages.

  From the outside, it looked as if double-cropping had put the local peasantry [Page 111] on a sounder economic footing and provided a welcome breathing space from the pressures of demography, indebtedness, and labor migration. From the inside, the villagers of Sedaka responded with the classic signs of peasant optimism. They rebuilt their houses with sturdier materials; they celebrated marriages and other rites of passage more lavishly; they bought new bicycles or even small motorcycles; they treated themselves to small luxuries of food, clothing, furniture, and even jewelry; they traveled to visit relatives whom they had scarcely seen before. For the first time in their lives, the poorer households in the village found that the food, amenities, and ritual typical of the solid, middle peasantry before irrigation were within their grasp. Those who were already fairly well-to-do were in turn aspiring to styles of consumption, ritual, and investment that only the wealthiest might have considered possible a decade before. Small wonder that growing disparities in income were largely ignored in the general euphoria.

  By 1978, and certainly by 1979, much of that euphoria had dissipated along with many of the material conditions that had underwritten it. But if the euphoria had been rather general, disillusionment was more selective, affecting especially the poor. Farm-gate prices had not changed since 1974, while production costs had mounted to erode incomes-an inconvenience for large farmers but a serious blow to small tenants and owners. A drought forced the complete cancellation of the irrigated crop in 1978, thus cutting farm incomes in half and depriving the poor of the wage incomes on which they had come to depend. At the same time, the very economic forces that had been responsible for the brief spurt of relative prosperity had begun to foster changes in tenure patterns and production techniques which served to undermine that prosperity, especially for those in the community who had benefited least. Large landlords, as we have seen, were encouraged by greater profits either to resume cultivation themselves or to rent out large blocks of land to well-heeled leasehold tenants who paid premium rents in advance. In either case, the pool of land available for rental by smallholders and modest tenants was reduced.

  At about the same time, combine-harvesters began to make their appearance on the landscape. They were made possible in large part by the same economic forces that had earlier improved the incomes of village wage workers. Only in the context of relatively higher harvest labor costs and the possibility of harvesting virtually year round under double-cropping did the investment in large combine-harvesters become profitable.27 The direct and indirect impact of machine harvesting has been enormous. The biggest losers have been almost exclusively [Page 112] the poorer households, who have seen their economic security and incomes driven back almost to the levels that prevailed before 1970. Reeling from the lost income when the off-season crop of 1978 was cancelled outright, they soon realized that the entry of combine-harvesters would prevent them from recouping their losses by hand-harvesting in 1979. They tightened their belts again. Feasts (kenduri) and marriages were foregone, postponed, or celebrated on a much smaller scale; the small luxuries they had permitted themselves all but disappeared; and by 1979 many of the poor were once again leaving for temporary work in the city in the familiar effort to make ends meet.

  By examining the economic repercussions of these changes in Sedaka alone, it becomes possible to observe the larger changes described in the last chapter writ small. The local effects of this shift in production techniques also will reveal a variety of other, subsidiary consequences that are simply lost in any aggregate analysis of the Muda region as a whole. Here again we are concerned with the local “facts” and leave the all-important questions of their social meaning and the reaction to them for subsequent chapters.

  The mechanization of rice cultivation naturally posed the most direct threat to the sector of the village that depended most heavily on agricultural wage labor as a source of income. The small class of pure wage laborers were most grievously affected. There are, however, only four such households in Sedaka; in Muda as a whole, the estimates of the proportion of pure wage labor households range anywhere from 7 to 10 percent. It is perhaps for this reason that so little attention has been devoted to the loss of wages brought about by mechanization. If the impact were confined to this class, such inattention might possibly be justified, given the buoyant labor market outside the rice economy. But the impact is far wider, embracing to some extent all those families historically dependent on farm labor for a portion of their income. The extent of this dependence in Sedaka during the main season of 1977–78 is striking, as can be seen in table 4.8.

  TABLE 4.8 • Proportion of Total Net Income Derived from Paid Paddy—Field Labor* by Households in Sedaka: Main Season, 1977–1978

  [Page 113]

  Fully one-quarter of the families in Sedaka should be considered predominantly wage laborers in the sense that over half their income derives from this source. All but two of these families are from among the poorest half of the village, and they typically have either so little land or such large families (or both) that only paddy wage labor allows them to keep their heads above water. Another nine households (12 percent) rely on such wages for more than one-quarter of their income, while a further twenty-four households receive at least some cash income from field labor. Thus more than two-thirds of Sedaka’s families have some stake in agricultural labor; for more than one-third, that stake is substantial. Even these figures may understate the vital importance of field work for wages.28 In fact, of the twenty-two households that have no income from wage labor, half are composed of retired or disabled members unfit for such work.

  The first step in the mechanization of rice cultivation was the use of tractors for field preparation. Tractor hire was widespread well before double-cropping began but usually in conjunction with the use of water buffalo for breaking up clods of the cla
yey soil (lanyak), leveling (menggiling), and harrowing (sisir menyisir). The importance of water buffalo in rice cultivation until as late as 1967 is reflected by Horii’s finding that there were nearly as many water buffalo as households in Sedaka and that most of the villagers who did not own an animal leased one. Double-cropping, by putting a premium on speed in ploughing, favored the use of tractors for nearly all stages of field preparation. The added expense and the loss of income to owners and drivers of buffalo were considerable, but the peasants of Sedaka saw no reason to dwell on what, at the time, seemed like petty losses in the context of far more substantial gains.

  The losses sustained by two of the poorer households in the village are fairly typical. Hamzah (#8), Razak’s younger brother, used to earn as much as M$200 a year before double-cropping by cutting stalks and secondary growth (merumput) [Page 114] in others’ fields and by occasionally harroving for wages with a leased water buffalo. By 1973, this work had all but evaporated. Samad (#17), who still owns a water buffalo, figured that he earned as much as M$500 a year by ploughing and harrowing over 20 relong for other farmers at a piece-rate of M$25 per relong. Now he is lucky to earn M$100 a year for such work and thinks he may soon sell his buffalo. It is nearly impossible to estimate the average losses suffered by the poorer households of Sedaka inasmuch as they were gradual and unevenly distributed. But an agroeconomic survey, which found that the labor input per unit of land per crop immediately following double-cropping in Muda fell by 17 percent, would probably not be far off the mark for income losses as well.29 The tractors that now do almost all the field preparation in Sedaka are nearly all large, four-wheeled machines owned by wealthy entrepreneurs, both Malay and Chinese, living outside the village. Only four villagers own tractors. Three are owned by the three richest villagers (Haji Kadir, Lebai Pendek, and Amin), although the machines are two-wheeled pedestrian tractors used largely on the owners’ paddy land. The ownership of water buffalo was, by contrast, much more evenly distributed throughout the village.30

  If the mechanization of field preparation in Sedaka was generally applauded amidst the new wage-labor opportunities provided by double-cropping, the mechanization of paddy harvesting was far more divisive, not to say explosive. It is no exaggeration to say that the commercial combine-harvesters swept through the rice plain around the village. They first made their appearance during the irrigated season harvest in mid-1976, but only one or two outside [Page 115] landowners used them. By the irrigated season of 1979, five seasons later, they were harvesting fully 60 percent of Sedaka’s paddy land. A year later they harvested more than 80 percent.

  The first villagers to hire combine-harvesters were almost exclusively large operators of 6 relong or more. Given their farm size, they seldom had sufficient family labor to harvest their crop themselves or to exchange labor (berderau) with other neighbors. The costs of hired labor for harvesting their paddy had grown appreciably in real terms due to the prohibition of Thai laborers and the curtailing of migrants from Kelantan.31 The new double-cropping regimen had also placed a premium on speed. The new high-yielding varieties shattered more easily when ripe; they were, in the irrigated season particularly, harvested under wet conditions that promoted spoilage; and, when the season had begun late, it was important to harvest quickly in order to ready the land for the next planting.

  Small farmers and tenants were understandably more reluctant to hire the combine-harvesters. It had been both more feasible and more impdrtant for them to do part or all of the harvesting themselves: more feasible because they were typically “richer” in labor than in land and more important because the potential savings in the cash costs of cultivation were of greater significance for them.32 They were also, of course, well aware that combine-harvesters could and did threaten the main sources of wage-labor earnings for the low-income families in the village. And yet, the matter was not quite so straightforward even for the small farmer. The harvest period was by far the most lucrative for the men and women of poor households; women working in small gangs could earn as much as M$7 a day cutting paddy, and strong men could, by threshing eight or nine gunny sacks, earn M$16-18 a day-provided they were available for work. Here was the rub. Each day that they harvested their own land or exchanged labor with their neighbors, they were foregoing the opportunity of earning high wages at the peak of harvest demand. Individually, it might make short-run sense to use the combine for their own small parcel, thus freeing themselves for many more days of wage labor on the land of others. Collectively, of course, it added up to a beggar-thy-neighbor policy in the long run as combine-harvesters replaced hand-harvesting on more and more of Sedaka’s paddy land. For some, [Page 116] but not all, of the village’s small farmers, the short-term logic prevailed, with the inevitable consequences.

  The overall results can be seen by comparing the net losses in net household income between the irrigated season of 1977, when only 15 percent of the paddy land was machine harvested, and the irrigated season of 1979, when 60 percent of the crop was gathered by combine. Inasmuch as the figures in table 4.9 rely on recollections of earlier wage earnings, they must be regarded as rough approximations.33

  TABLE 4.9 • Reported Losses of Net Household Income in Sedaka due to the Mechanization of Rice Harvesting: Irrigated Season, 1977, Compared with Irrigated Season, 1979

  The losses, as expected, fall heaviest on the poorest households in Sedaka. For the households of pure wage laborers, combine-harvesters represent an economic disaster. For an additional twenty-two families who rely on agricultural labor for more than one-fourth of their income, the consequences are severe and unambiguous given their generally low incomes. But for over half the village (forty-six families) the use of combine-harvesters is either a boon or, at worst, a mixed blessing. This fact helps explain both the general acceptance of combineharvesting and the class basis of support and opposition to it, which we shall examine in the next chapter.

  The pattern and variety of losses in the village is best reflected in a few concrete examples. Karim (#10) rents only 2 relong and counted on threshing wages for much of his cash income. Before the harvesters were widely used, he might earn as much as M$300 or M$400 a season by threshing paddy nonstop in Sedaka and nearby. Now he counts himself lucky if he can find enough threshing work to bring in M$100. As he details his losses, he adds, “If it [Page 117] weren’t for the machines, I’d be working and sweating just like you.”34 The losses for the family are still larger, since Karim’s wife has lost work cutting paddy as well. For some women who are heads of households, the combineharvesters have spelled great hardship. Rosni (#26) is a forty-five-year-old widow with five children at home, famous for her hard work, and the head of a gang of women from poorer households who transplant and cut paddy. Although she rents in 4 relong, the rent is high, and she depends heavily on wage work to keep her large family going. Working with her eldest daughter cutting paddy, the two earned M$350 during the main season of 1978, but these earnings had dropped to a mere M$70 by the irrigated season of 1979. Even their transplanting earnings were down, because two of their past employers had chosen to broadcast seed directly. She is afraid that the belt tightening now required will mean that her thirteen-year-old son will have to drop out of secondary school. For households with no farming land, the consequences of combineharvesting have been nearly catastrophic. Mat “halus” (#6), a poor landless laborer, could have expected to earn M$300 a season threshing paddy and his wife nearly the same amount cutting. Now their combined wages are only $200 a season. They have made up a portion of that loss by both planting rice35 nearly ten miles north of Sedaka but fear that he or the whole family will have to move out of Kedah to find work. Pak Yah (#11), another landless laborer with an even larger family (nine children at home), is in the same boat. He and his wife, together with the four of their children who are of working age, could collectively earn as much as M$ 1400 in harvest labor. Their combined income from cutting and threshing paddy has now dropped to roughly M$800, and o
ne of their sons has decided to strike out on his own and find work in the city.

  The wage losses recounted here became even more serious by the 1980 main season, when another 20 percent of the village land was harvested by combines. Some work hand-cutting and threshing paddy is still available, but villagers must range farther afield to find it, and in any case it is only a small fraction of the work once available. Contrary to what one might expect, the piece-rates for hand harvesting-roughly M$40 a relong for cutting and M$2.50 per gunny [Page 118] sack for threshing-have risen at about the same rate as the wages for transplanting in spite of competition from machines. But these piece-rates are deceiving, for they mask a diminishing return per unit of labor. Most of the paddy that is still hand harvested is planted in deep fields that are inaccessible to the machine or in which untimely winds or rain have caused widespread lodging of the plants. As a result, such hand labor is often done in water that is knee deep and where stalks cannot be easily cut or threshed. It may thus take nearly twice the usual time for women to cut a relong of paddy, and men who under good conditions might thresh four gunny sacks in a morning might be lucky if they manage two. As wages are still paid by the task rather than the hour, the effective wage rate has been substantially cut. As Mustafa (#45) complains, “These days they give poor people only the ditches to harvest.”36