Weapons of the Weak- Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance

by James C Scott

  The impact of the combine-harvesters is by no means confined to the hand work they directly replace. For mechanization of the harvest has also set in motion a series of second-order consequences-new possibilities that, once grasped, have been nearly as devastating for the poor of the village. The first of these consequences is the virtual elimination of gleaning as a subsistence strategy of the poor. In 1978, before combine-harvesters were widely used, women and children from at least fourteen families regularly descended into the paddy fields, armed with mats (tikar mengkuang) and flails to collect the paddy grains that still clung to the threshed stalks. Such gleaning was more common in the main season when the ground was dry at harvest time than during the off-season when rain and mud made gleaning more difficult. A poor family might typically glean three or four gunny sacks of paddy in this fashion.37 This represented a vital addition to the food supply of landless or near-landless households; it involved no cash outlay, and the work of gleaning occurred at a time when there were few other wage opportunities for women. For at least one family, gleaning was the main source of food supply. Mat “halus,” his wife, and his daughter managed, by diligent gleaning for the better part of a month, to collect as much as fifteen sacks of paddy-enough to feed the family for much of the year. As one might expect, the gleaners in Sedaka came typically from the poorest families; eleven of the fourteen families that gleaned were from among the half of the village households with the lowest incomes.

  Now that combine-harvesting has all but eliminated gleaning, it is rare to see gleaners after the harvest except in those few plots that have been threshed by hand. Only Mat “halus” and his wife, spurred on by the food needs of their large family, have managed to recoup a portion of their losses. Observing that [Page 119] combine-harvesters occasionally spill grain when they make sharp turns, stall, or jam, he and his wife have taken to following the machines and winnowing (kirai) the small deposits they leave.38 This ingenious substitute for traditional gleaning can yield them as much as two gunny sacks a day when he is lucky, but the return is uncertain and irregular. Aside from this rather unique adaptation, gleaning has all but evaporated.

  Once the greater part of harvesting work had been mechanized, the way was prepared for other, more subtle, changes in the pattern of the remaining wage work. Hired labor, generally speaking, had typically taken two forms. The first, which prevailed for the transplanting and cutting of paddy (locally defined as women’s work), was a group, piece-work system in which the head (ketua kumpulan share) negotiated a price per relong with the farmer doing the hiring. The proceeds were then divided by the members of the labor gang. Threshing typically was by piece-work as well but was paid individually, or to a group of two working at the same tub, on the basis of the amount threshed. Other work done outside the busy planting and harvesting seasons-for example, repairing of bunds, weeding, replanting, digging pits to catch water during the dry seasonwas paid according to what is known as the kupang system: a fixed cash wage for a morning or day of work. Occurring at slack times in the paddy cycle, these wages were, and are, well below the effective wage rate for harvesting and transplanting.

  Over the past two years, however, the kupang system has increasingly been used for the reaping of paddy that must still be done by hand. This shift is made possible precisely because combine-harvesting has displaced enough labor to strengthen substantially the bargaining position of the farmer doing the hiring. If he must have his paddy cut by hand, the farmer can now hire women by the morning. The effect is twofold. First, it is cheaper; the standard gang labor price for cutting a relong of paddy was in 1979 at least M$35, while under the kupang system the cost is M$30 or less. Second, it allows the hiring farmer to select laborers individually and to avoid having to negotiate with a group that is ready-made and led by women with something of an incipient trade-union ethos. By the main season harvest of 1980, nearly half the hand-reaped paddy in Sedaka was cut in this fashion. In some nearby villages, the kupang system has become standard practice for reaping. It is less commonly found in transplanting labor, but here too it appears to be making small inroads, and the savings to the farmers (losses to laborers) seem comparable.39 For threshing, [Page 120] kupang labor is even rarer but not unheard of. How widespread kupang payment will become for planting and threshing is difficult to foresee but already, in the case of reaping, it has served to lower wages somewhat and to weaken one of the few forms of informal labor organization in the village.

  The stronger bargaining position now enjoyed by the farmer who employs labor is reflected in other aspects of the informal “labor contract” in the village. Until 1978, it had always been customary for the farmer hiring a transplanting group to feed them a full midday meal. By the off season of 1979, such meals were conspicuous by their absence. In some cases the employing farmers unilaterally scaled down what had been an ample fish curry or glutinous rice with prawns to dry bread and tea. In response, women began bringing their own food along. Other farmers offered the women two transplanting piece-rates: M$35 a relong without food or M$32 a relong with food. Inasmuch as M$35 had been the standard wage the season before and had included the meal, the new dispensation effectively lowered the cost of planting. Most groups preferred to forego the food, which had been in any case reduced to the barest essentials, and it now can be safely assumed that food for transplanters is past history.

  In the days of single-cropping and during the halcyon period at the beginning of double-cropping it was common for farmers, especially large landowners, also to advance wages to transplanters and harvesters well before the work began. The advance might be in the form of rice or cash. This practice had advantages for both parties, for the farmer assured himself field labor during the peak season, while the worker, especially under single-cropping, received a welcome infusion of cash or rice at that point during the agricultural cycle when his family was most strapped financially and when his rice supply was nearly exhausted. The laborers, of course, paid a price for taking their pay early inasmuch as the wage was discounted by as much as 30 percent from the prevailing wage at harvest time. By 1979, when combine-harvesting had made significant inroads into the demand for harvest labor, almost all farmers had abandoned the practice, reasoning that, even if hand harvesting was necessary, laborers could easily be recruited on the spot.

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  Another custom, one closely related to the payment of advance wages, has also been discontinued or sharply curtailed since the appearance of combineharvesters. This was the common practice of farmers making a small gift of paddy over and above wages to laborers who had helped with the harvest. The gift was made as a kind of “private Islamic tithe” (zakat peribadi) and, although the practice was never universal, it was widespread enough to become part of the anticipated wage for many harvest workers. For the farmer, such a gift served much the same purpose as an advance against wages; it was a kind of premium that increased the likelihood that he could recruit the necessary work force when his next crop was ready. The practice has not entirely disappeared, but it has become the exception to the rule. Of course, in the case of machine harvesting, the question of tithe gifts or prior wages is irrelevant, for there is no labor force save the machine operators, who are well-paid outsiders. But even in the cases of hand harvesting, the bagging of paddy, or the hauling of sacks, it is now extremely rare for the farmer to make any additional gift to workers.

  In an indirect and somewhat perverse way, combine-harvesting has also contributed to the growth of broadcasting (tabor kering), a technique that now has made substantial inroads into the last major wage-labor opportunity in paddy growing: transplanting. Fields sown in this fashion have, unlike transplanted seedlings, no rows whatever, and the plants are far more likely to be of unequal height. For these reasons, they are more difficult to cut and thresh by handa difficulty that would be reflected normally in the costs of hand harvesting.40 Neither the absence of rows or unevenness in growth, however, is an obstacle to the combine-harves
ters, which charge a standard fee per relong regardless of how it has been sown. A farmer can now broadcast his seed, secure in the knowledge that he will not thereby simply raise the cost of gathering the crop.

  The advantages of dry sowing are manifest. First and foremost, the cultivator saves the cash costs of transplanting as well as the time and labor devoted to raising, tending, uprooting and transplanting the seedlings to the main field. Cash savings at this point in the paddy cycle are particularly important, since transplanting costs must come from past savings while harvesting costs may be paid from the proceeds of the crop. Dry sowing also has special advantages in the Sedaka area, which is among the last areas to receive irrigation water. By broadcasting during the irrigated season, the farmer has a better chance of [Page 122] harvesting in good time to have his fields cleared and prepared for the rain-fed main season. If erratic rains or poor drainage should ruin part or all of the broadcast crop, the farmer still has the alternative of reploughing and rebroadcasting or of buying surplus seedlings from neighbors and going back to transplanting.41

  Since the irrigated season of 1979, the progress of broadcasting in Sedaka has been striking to all and disquieting to many. In the previous season, at least three large landowners in the neighboring village of Sungai Bujur, all of them Hajis incidentally, tried broadcasting in an effort to get their crop in early.42 Two achieved better-than-average yields and their experience encouraged Abdul Rahman (#41), an owner of 16.5 relong, to try it himself on a portion of his land. His yield was not satisfying (eight gunny sacks per relong), but this was attributed more to his failure to tend the crop closely than to the technique itself. By the main season of 1979–80 seventeen households in Sedaka were broadcast sowing roughly 50 relong, or 15 percent of the acreage cultivated by villagers.

  Four seasons later (main season 1981–82), nearly 40 percent of Sedaka’s land was broadcast. A clear majority of those who broadcast are relatively well-todo;43 these are normally the villagers who first innovate and who are best able [Page 123] to assume the risks of a variable yield. Even they were unlikely to broadcast more than half their land.44

  What is more surprising is that a few of the poorest villagers have also resorted to dry sowing. In each such case, the decision to broadcast seems less of a calculated gamble than a response to the force of circumstances. Lacking the cash to pay transplanting costs and lacking the family labor either to exchange transplanting labor (berderau) or to transplant their own land, a few poor households have chosen to broadcast. For Bakri bin Haji Wahab (#7) who rents 4 relong from his father and whose wife has just given birth, broadcasting 3 relong was a means of conserving cash. For Wahid (#2), whose wife is ill and who felt he would earn more by leaving the village to do urban construction work at the time when the nursery is usually prepared, broadcasting half of his 6 rented relong both saved money and freed him for wage labor. Most of the poor in Sedaka, however, are reluctant to take such risks unless they are forced to, and broadcasting is likely, for the time being, to be confined largely to big operators. By the same token, it is precisely by transplanting the land of the larger farmers that poor women have earned most of their transplanting wages. As broadcasting gains ground, poor households lose ground. How general broadcasting will become is impossible to predict, but it appears to have the backing of the agricultural authorities in Muda.45

  The second-order effects of combine-harvesting have thus been at least as massive as their direct impact. In addition to the virtual elimination of cutting and threshing, the combine-harvesters have made gleaning impossible. They have facilitated the shift to a new form of labor payment (kupang), which effectively lowers wages for what little work is left. They have favored the growth of broadcast planting, thereby reducing by nearly half the wages for transplanting. They have encouraged large landowners to dismiss small tenants in order to cultivate directly, and they have helped to create a commercial class of tenants with the cash and machinery to lease in large tracts for long periods at premium [Page 124] rents. Most of these changes, though not all, have raised the incomes of the better-off households in Sedaka. All, without exception, have driven down the incomes of poor households.46

  Taken collectively, however, we are not simply dealing with a quantitative growth in relative inequality but rather with a series of quantitative changes that amount to a qualitative change-where “degree” passes into “kind.” It is enough to observe that a large farmer who broadcasts his seed and hires a combine-harvester when the crop is ripe need never employ a single poor villager for wages. A large landlord, for his part, need never rent land to his poor neighbors nor hire them to work on his fields. The traditional economic connection between rich and poor-that is, wage labor and tenancy-has been all but sundered. We have on one side an increasingly commercial class of large operators and on the other side a far more numerous class of what might only loosely be called “semiproletarians.” The “looseness” is necessary because, although they continue to hold on to their small paddy fields, they are decidedly less and less an agrarian proletariat, since production is now conducted largely without them. If they are to be a proletariat at all it will be in the cities and plantations of Malaysia and not in the paddy fields where their services are no longer required.

  In the meantime, a process of quasi proletarianization has already set in-a process that links many villagers not to rice production at all, but to the urban economy outside Sedaka and indeed outside Kedah. If the first stage of doublecropping allowed smallholders to stay at home, the second stage has proven to be a dramatic reversal. The steady exodus that was a permanent feature of agrarian Kedah after World War II has again become a hemorrhage. Eight heads of households, seven from among the poorer village households, have since 1978 regularly left the village to find temporary construction work in Kuala Lumpur, Penang, and other urban centers. Still more would have left if they were not, as they see it, too old for such work or were assured of finding jobs. Twelve married men have applied for resettlement schemes outside Kedah, although [Page 125] their chances of success are slim.47 Nearly thirty unmarried men and women have left-many temporarily, a few permanently-to seek work elsewhere. No doubt quite a few of them would have left eventually in any case, but the changes in local land tenure and employment since 1977 precipitated their early departure.

  The proximate cause for the exodus was the outright cancellation of the 1978 irrigated season due to drought. Losing an entire crop and the wage labor it might have brought was enough to send many small farmers and laborers to the city temporarily. Those who stayed on in the village, accumulating debts, not only found that the next harvest was mediocre but that their harvest earnings had been substantially reduced by competition from combine-harvesters. Many of them left with their grown sons immediately after planting the subsequent crop, in the hope of recouping their losses and repaying debts to pawnbrokers and shopkeepers.

  The result was probably the largest emigration of villagers seeking work in memory.48 In a month or two of work most married men among them were able to save M$200 or more from their earnings to support their families back in Sedaka. Although it is something of an exaggeration, one small tenant who joined the exodus said that “the only ones remaining were those who were not up to the work.”49 In nearby villages the exodus has been, if anything, even more pronounced, and there is little doubt that, for those poor households and small farmers who remain in Sedaka, temporary wage-labor migration is becoming a way of life. So long as the urban economy provides this safety valve, it will be the only means by which Sedaka’s marginal families can maintain a foothold in the community.

  LOCAL INSTITUTIONS AND ECONOMIC POWER

  The Farmers’ Association

  The enormous impact that double-cropping in Muda has had on tenure, incomes, and social relations has inevitably found expression in the character of local institutions. In Sedaka, this process can be seen most palpably in the brief history of the Farmers’ Association, established by law in
1967 and designed originally to provide extension and credit facilities for paddy production for all farmers in the locality. It may never quite have lived up to its original promise, [Page 126] but it has served other uses admirably. The local branch in nearby Kepala Batas theoretically serves over twenty villages and a population of some eighteen hundred families. Only six hundred families have ever become members. The vast majority of smallholders and tenants have never joined, judging the costs too great and the benefits too small. Local members of the Malay opposition political party (PAS), including many who are quite well-to-do, have never joined, judging-in most cases correctly-that the Farmers’ Association was run by the state in the interests of the ruling party. The Kepala Batas branch has, like most others, thus become the creature of rich peasants affiliated with UMNO.

  When farmers speak of the Farmers’ Association they call it MADA, referring not to the Farmers’ Association or its elected leadership, but to the government agency that directs its activities. Its main function, both as they view it and in practice, is the provision of production credit and fertilizer. Credit is allocated to members, on the basis of area farmed, to cover tractor costs (M$30 a relong for two passes in 1979) and fertilizer, which is supplied in kind.50 When the 1978 irrigated season was cancelled, creating much hardship, MADA also served as the manager of a large program of drought relief (bantuan kemarau) consisting of generous wages paid to labor gangs for clearing draining and irrigation canals. MADA also makes small loans for such ventures as fish ponds and beef cattle raising as well as organizes occasional “study tours” at state expense to such farflung places as Sumatra and Singapore. MADA is thus seen not so much as the seat of an autonomous Farmers’ Association but as the font of credit and patronage distributed, above all, to its membership.