Weapons of the Weak- Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance

by James C Scott

  Finally, it would be a mistake to ignore the element of sheer pride and stubbornness that keeps PAS members from switching parties, despite the price they pay in foregone patronage. Having held out for so long, they now make a virtue of what UMNO leaders might call necessity and are unwilling to give up the public and private satisfaction of having followed a political path without material rewards for the sake of principle. This atmosphere is strong and reinforcing enough so that Taib, a poor man who told friends he was thinking of switching at the urging of his wife, has not taken the plunge because he says he fears the contempt for his opportunism that will come from his PAS friends. Recent episodes of blatant partisanship in the village, such as drought relief and the “village improvement scheme” have served, if anything, to increase the bitterness and resolve of PAS members.

  Arrayed against PAS is a formidable coalition of well-to-do families who have come to monopolize UMNO affairs in the community. (See appendix C, table 4) The eleven villagers who are now, or have recently been, officers or members of the Village Development Committee farm an average of nearly 13 relong (close to three times the local average) and are, with a single exception, from among the wealthiest half of households.66 The other link that fuses their politics is that all but two of the eleven are tied to the government by employment, licenses, or loans.67 In one or two cases these ties antedated their political activity; for [Page 136] the remainder, these ties represent the welcome fruits of having made an advantageous choice. What had initially, perhaps, been a mere political preference has become so cemented by the flow of material benefits as to make the choice all but irreversible.

  The “inner circle” of four men, noted earlier, who control not only UMNO but also the local unit of the Farmers’ Association and the Prayer House (surau) Committee, are connected by a dense network of kinship ties. Thus, for example, Basir is: the nephew of the village headman, whose son, in turn, is part of the inner circle; the uncle of another member and, beyond this, also the nephew of Haji Salim, who is head of the district-level party. Basir’s grandfather was a subdistrict official (penghulu), and his brother is a full-time local employee of the Ministry of Information. He has parlayed his wealth, his family connections, and his considerable personal energy into a nearly unchallenged dominance of the local UMNO and the village unit of the Farmers’ Association. He sits on the executive committees of the government primary school, the private religious school (Sekolah Arab), the mosque, the cooperative rice mill, and the nearby market, all located in nearby Kepala Batas. His preeminence is not only acknowledged by other members of the inner circle but his role has far eclipsed that of the nominal village headman, Haji Jaafar, who chooses to remain a respected bystander.

  The UMNO leadership, then, is distinguished from its local competitor not only, or even primarily, by its wealth. The PAS leadership is also well-to-do, although it represents but a small minority of the “substantial” households.68 What has come to distinguish Sedaka’s UMNO leaders is their increasing reliance, as households, on various forms of state patronage and its privileged access to the institutions that distribute that patronage: the Farmers’ Association, the subdistrict chief (penghulu), the primary school, the district office, and so forth. To be sure, their influence is not exclusively based upon patronage. Kinship relations continue to tie many of the leaders to one another and to a portion of the rank and file. Such family ties are further elaborated and extended by traditional village institutions such as a death benefit society (khairat Kematian), a “plate and bowl society” (syarikat pinggan mangkuk), which lends crockery for feasts, and rotating credit associations (kut)-all of which function basically along party lines.

  What is largely missing from the village party today, however, is the social cohesion provided a decade ago by the enduring material ties of tenancy, employment, and charity. Before double-cropping, patronage was a largely village [Page 137] affair in which the leading families in UMNO brought along, as a matter of course, those whom they hired, those to whom they rented land, and those (often the same people) to whom they made small loans and gifts. As we have seen, the economic opportunities presented by double-cropping have served to weaken, if not eliminate, this more traditional basis of leadership. Having become well-nigh redundant in village rice production, the village poor have become, in turn, more socially redundant as well. Put differently, if the rich peasants of Sedaka now spend less time and effort “cultivating” their poorer neighbors, it is precisely because their poor neighbors are no longer cultivating their fields.

  The votes of the poor are still important, but they can no longer be secured quite so automatically through pre-existing economic and social ties. Politically, at least, the rich peasantry, which has always dominated Sedaka, is now composed increasingly of dependent brokers rather than patrons in their own right. They now operate largely with “borrowed” resources that emanate directly from the state. These resources may provide them with the wherewithal to reinforce their waning social domination of village life, but by the same token they have become far more vulnerable. Their fate is now largely out of their own hands. So long as Malaysian growth, state revenue, and a national leadership solicitous of its rural constituency continue to prevail, they are in no real danger. Should any or all of these assumptions, which now underwrite their position, cease to exist, however, they would find themselves in serious difficulty.

  1. Sample data collected in 1982 indicate that the district of Yan, which was relatively poor by Muda region standards before double-cropping, appears to have benefited less in the past decade than other districts. In 1982 it had the highest proportion of poor households; more than 75 percent of Yan’s households were below the official poverty level. Furthermore, only one of the other four districts studied had fared as badly in reducing the poverty rate. More of Yan’s households, by far, described themselves as “hardup” (susah), despite the likelihood that real incomes for a majority of households in the district have improved somewhat. The fact that Yan is so heavily monocultural (paddy) that man/land ratios are comparatively high and that it is rather isolated from urban employment may help account for its relatively lackluster performance. For details see Sukur Kasim, “Evolution of Sources of Income in the Muda Irrigation Project (1972/73-1981/82)” (Paper presented at Conference on Off-Farm Equipment in the Development of Rural Asia, Chengmai, Thailand, August 1983, mimeo.). In this respect, Yan and Sedaka may be somewhat poorer than more representative districts within the Muda scheme.

  2. Afifuddin in Haji Omar, “Irrigation Structures and Local Peasant Organisations,” MADA Monograph No. 32 (Alor Setar: MADA, 1977).

  3. Sama-sama duduk kampung.

  4. Hari-hari tengok muka.

  5. I was not the first foreigner to settle in Sedaka. Dr. Kenzo Horii, a Japanese researcher, had lived there for two months in late 1966 and mid-1967, collecting basic economic data on landholding, tenure, and social organization. Although his stay was briefer than mine and his interests necessarily more limited, his research provided me with invaluable base-line data from which to draw inferences about the effects of double-cropping. Many of the historical comparisons that follow are based on the information he has generously supplied. The two most important published reports in English drawing on these data are Kanzo Horii, “The Land Tenure System of Malay Padi Farmers: A Case Study… in the State of Kedah,” Developing Economies 10, no. 1 (1972): 45-73, and Rice Economy and Land Tenure in West Malaysia: A Comparative Study of Eight Villages. I.D.E. Occasional Papers Series No. 18 (Tokyo: Institute of Developing Economics, 1981).

  6. This finding places Sedaka close to the region-wide norm for the percentage of pure tenants and pure wage laborers in Muda’s paddy sector, which is 37 percent. See chap. 3.

  7. It is far more common for those who leave for settlement schemes to retain their local land and rent it out.

  8. The exceptional circumstances were that still another brother who lives on a government rubber estate elsewhere in
Kedah and who inherited adjacent land, which he came to farm, simply took over these two small plots and farmed them himself. All entreaties failed and the two sisters, afraid to go to the police or courts, given their brother’s reputation for violence, finally decided to sell their plots to another brother, since they had been unable to cultivate them for five seasons. The brother who bought the land was, as of 1981, still unable to farm it and had begun a costly law suit to enforce his title. The case illustrates the tenuous influence of the state and its agents in enforcing property law where anyone is willing to use violence to frustrate its working. According to villagers, however, it is quite an exceptional case.

  9. I have included ten families who farm no land at all. While the usual practice in computing farm-size distributions is to include only those families who cultivate at least some land, the results of this procedure underestimate the extent of land hunger. Seven of the ten families in question would jump at the chance to rent in land if it were available; only three are retired cultivators who choose not to farm.

  10. Double-cropping does not, other things equal, simply double income. The necessary inputs for double-cropping, including fertilizer, tractor preparation, and increased labor costs, drain away a portion of the new gains. In Kedah, it was initially estimated that the net return for rice land was raised by 60 percent because of irrigation. Thus 1.6 relong would, if double-cropped, be equivalent to 2.66 relong of single-cropped land. The decline by half in the average holding of small farmers in Sedaka has thus left them worse off in terms of farm income despite the fact that they harvest two crops a year.

  11. Expansion from fifty-six to seventy-four households would yield an increase of 32 percent, but my household figures include four “frontier” households that Horii chose not to consider as falling in Sedaka.

  12. The 1979 average farm size of 4.7 relong under double-cropping would represent the equivalent of 7.5 relong under single-cropping (see n. 10 above). The average farmer in Sedaka in 1967, however, had 6.9 relong to farm, or 92 percent of that figure.

  13. See Horii, “Land Tenure System,” 57, 58, who writes, “In connection with fixed rent in kind (sewa padi) it is important to note that the actual payment is made in cash received from the sale of the stated amount of padi. Tenants will sell the amount of padi determined in the agreement to merchants right after the harvest and use the money thus obtained to pay the landowner.”

  14. Ibid., 57.

  15. It is not, of course, simply a matter of how good one’s memory is for the facts, but a question of interpretation. One villager, typically well-to-do, may claim that the change of tenants was due to a personal dispute about other matters or that the previous tenant no longer wanted to farm the land. Another villager, typically poorer, may claim that the point at issue was precisely paying the rent in advance. For more discussion of how “social facts” are the subject of varying class-based interpretations, see chapter 5.

  16. See appendix C, table C3 and figure C3 a for typical returns to village cultivators under various assumptions.

  17. For 1967 I have combined the cash value of paddy-denominated rents with cash-denominated rents to arrive at an average.

  18. The question of rent-free tenancies, nearly always between parents and their children, is not straightforward. Many quick surveys of land tenure using formal interview schedules seem to indicate that quite a lot of land is “rented” in this fashion. It is common for parents to claim that they charge no rent to their children and for children to say that they are charged no rent. This situation is in keeping with village-wide values concerning the relations that ought to obtain between parents and children. In practice, however, closer inquiry reveals that very few tenancies of this sort are actually free of rent. The one exception is the common practice of parents with sufficient land to rent a plot to a newly married son or daughter free of charge for the first year of their marriage, as a wedding present to the new couple. Aside from this exception, children nearly always pay something for the land each season whether in kind, if they live in the same household, or in cash. This payment is viewed by both parties as a gift and not rent, as the amount is often left to the discretion of the son or daughter. Even when no payment at all is made, it is usually the case that labor services in the household or farm or occasional gifts are given that are in part linked to the provision of land. For evidence of this practice elsewhere in Kedah, see Mohd. Shadli Abdullah, “The Relationship of the Kinship System to Land Tenure: A Case Study of Kampung Gelung Rambai” (Master’s thesis, Universiti Sains Malaysia, Penang), 108, 134-35, and Diana Wong, “A Padi Village in North Malaysia” (1980, mimeo.).

  19. Rent Levels for Tenancy in Sedaka by Kinship and Residence

  20. Even the exceptions to the pattern are instructive. Only four of twenty-seven close kin pay rents before the season begins, and in three of these cases the parents who rent out the land are so poor that their children pay the rent in advance in order to help them out. The spirit of making a concession is still at work, but in these cases it is a concession made by tenants to their parents. Of non-kin tenants, only six of twenty-one are permitted to pay rents after the harvest, and here special circumstances are at work as well. In five cases the land has been rented to the same family for over twenty years, thus providing for a degree of familiarity and trust that is rare in most tenancy agreements between non-kin. The remaining anomalous case is one in which the land is so subject to flooding and harvest losses that no one would take the risk of renting it if the rent were not negotiable after the harvest.

  21. Two of these three cases involved Chinese landlords who have written contracts, governed under the Padi Cultivators Act, with their tenants. In these two cases the element of trust is supplemented by the landlord’s possible fear that, if the timing of the rent were changed, the tenant might question the illegally high rents currently being charged for these plots.

  22. Horii, “Land Tenure System,” 62.

  23. See chap. 3, n. 50. It is possible, though there is no evidence on the subject, that a portion of the higher rents (when calculated seasonally) may be accounted for by leasehold land being, on average, more productive.

  24. The tenant, of course, will insist on a written lease to protect his rights to cultivate for the specified number of seasons. There are a few stories circulating about leasehold tenants in the past who failed to insist on a written contract (surat perjanjian) and discovered one fine morning that their landlord had sold the land before the agreement had lapsed.

  25. There are no reliable data available, locally or for the Muda region as a whole, that would indicate how significant the Chinese business class is in the leasehold market. Until there are, it is impossible to know whether local impressions are accurate or, if accurate, representative.

  26. This usufruct monopoly seems to be taking another form as well: the selling of “green” rice in the fields to syndicates that own combine-harvesters. Under this practice, called jual pokok padi by villagers, the crop in the fields, after transplanting but before harvest, is sold at a discount. It is resorted to not only by cultivators in financial difficulties but by large-scale farmers who want cash before the harvest. In Mengkuang, directly to the south, it is said to be widespread, and there were at least six cases in Sedaka as well during my period there. As with pajak, the seller may be poor or rich, but the buyer is nearly without exception rich. In this connection, it should be added that there is no evidence that small farmers and small tenants with less capital have inferior yields to those of larger farmers, although of course they market a smaller proportion of their production.

  27. These were not, of course, the only factors. Both the large increase in paddy prices in 1973–74 and the restriction of Thai harvest labor, coupled with the decline in migrant labor for Kelantan, were instrumental as well. The federal government, by lowering or eliminating import duties on harvesting machines, also lowered their capital cost to the syndicates that purchased them.

 
; 28. First, when the rice yield is poor, many more villagers seek paddy wage work both inside and outside the village. The figures in table 4.8, however, reflect the importance of wage labor following a good season. Furthermore, combine-harvesters had already put in a modest appearance by 1977–78, thereby slightly cutting the wage-labor receipts of some households. Exchange labor (derau), which was a fairly common practice at this time for smallholders for both transplanting and cutting paddy, is also not calculated here since no cash changes hands. If it were counted, on the premise that it is labor that is in a sense “paid” in the amount by which it reduces production costs, the reliance on labor income would appear to be greater. I have also chosen not to include wage labor receipts by youngsters, which are typically kept as pocket-money and not given over to the household. Since such earnings, especially in poorer households, reduce expenses for the upkeep of children to some extent, they might arguably have been included in the figures, thus further increasing the importance of farm wages. Finally, the figures in the table were collected after the combine had already made inroads into wage work. Figures from 1973–74 would thus show more dependence on wage work.