Weapons of the Weak- Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance

by James C Scott

  What is also striking is the attempt in these opinions to “place” people both in terms of their actual economic situation and in terms of social reputation. Pak Yah derides the village leadership for willfully distorting the “facts” of poverty and affluence to serve their own purposes. Haji Kadir devotes a great deal of effort to showing how it is that many of the poor are responsible for their own poverty and to distinguishing real destitution from feigned destitution. Why this struggle over the “facts” should be such a central feature of the dialogue between rich and poor in Sedaka will become clearer as we proceed.

  TWO SUBJECTIVE CLASS HISTORIES OF THE GREEN REVOLUTION

  At the core of the social experience of class is the growth of a distinctive and shared understanding of history—an understanding that sets one class apart from others. Taken collectively, these perspectives amount to a shared worldview embodying both standards of justice and their application to events past and present. One could, for example, capture a great deal of the worldview of different classes in France from an examination of their outlook on the major watersheds of French history: the revolutions of 1789 and 1848, the Paris Commune, the Popular Front, Vichy, and May 1968. In the tiny world of Sedaka, the shifts in production relations associated with double-cropping define such a historical watershed. What makes these shifts decisive for class relations is simply the fact that their impact has marked out winners and losers largely along class lines. As a set of historical experiences they have provided both the basis and the occasion for muted struggles between rich and poor.

  Despite the painful setbacks the poor have suffered in the past few years, there is no question of a class war developing on the Muda Plain now or in the foreseeable future. The prospect is rather one of continuing class struggle, sporadic resistance, and the war of words we have already witnessed. There are several reasons why escalation is unlikely. First, it is undeniable that nearly half the village is better off than they were before double-cropping. Whatever their residual dissatisfactions and fears, they can be counted, by and large, as winners. Second, those who have seen their fortunes reversed are rarely at the brink of a crisis that would threaten their livelihood or subsistence. The options they face of belt tightening, temporary and permanent migration, a marginal subsistence in the village are surely painful but are nothing like the draconian choices faced by their counterparts in Indonesia or India. Third, the social structure of Sedaka [Page 148] and of other villages in Kedah is not one of dramatic and sharp contrasts between a small monopolistic landlord class on the one hand and a great mass of undifferentiated poor peasants on the other. This is not Morelos in 1910. The stratification of Sedaka, while not a seamless web from top to bottom, is diverse enough to militate against the creation of a solid phalanx of victims. The presence of bystanders and neutrals tempers what might otherwise be a sharper conflict. Finally, the local conflict that does exist is further tempered by the fact that virtually all paddy cultivators share certain interests (for example, Malay political domination and a high support price for paddy) despite their class antagonisms. All of these factors make for “ordinary” forms of class struggle rather than a conflagration.

  I turn, with these qualifications in mind, to a brief social history of Sedaka’s green revolution by class. I shall ask how each of the major changes in production relations has been experienced and interpreted by the rich and by the poor-by winners and losers. From these interpretations, which can be seen as two, class counterpoints to the economic facts presented in the previous chapter, it should be possible to construct a picture of village class relations.

  DOUBLE-CROPPING AND DOUBLE VISION

  There are by now scores of studies of the consequences of double-cropping in Muda, many of them quite sophisticated. Reflecting the interests of international donors and the Malaysian state, they are virtually all concerned with production, incomes, and growth. In their entirety, it might seem they offer a more or less exhaustive account of the consequences of the green revolution in Kedah.

  We should scarcely be surprised, however, if the overall assessment of doublecropping held by the actual participants in this drama differs significantly in tone and content from the official account. After all, the participants have their own narrow and homely concerns. Nor should it surprise us if the vantage point of the well-to-do should diverge sharply from that of the poor. If one asks villagers about the impact of double-cropping, what emerges is a core zone of general agreement that gives way to a zone of dispute as well as a zone of differences in perspective. It is in these last two zones that class is decisive.

  Virtually everyone agrees that double-cropping has brought with it some beneficial changes. They note the rebuilding and patching of houses, the fact that only two of the richest villagers had motorcycles before 1972 while many of the wealthier households now have them, that the roads and bus service now allow them to visit Alor Setar and nearby relatives. But the big news that completely overshadows these welcome conveniences is the simple fact that, for the first time in living memory, virtually everyone has enough rice to eat throughout the year. Even well-off villagers rarely fail to mention this, for they can remember crop failures when even their supply gave out. For the poor, of course, the basic fear that has always plagued the peasantry has been all but [Page 149] banished. It is the first thing that comes to their minds: “Even the poor can hold out now, they can eat” (Dullah); “There’s enough rice” (Sukur); “The rice is never used up.” (Wahid). Their subsequent complaints about recent hardships must be seen against the backdrop of this cardinal achievement. And yet, one may look in vain through piles of official reports to find any recognition of the single result of double-cropping that dominates all others so far as the peasants are concerned.

  Beyond this narrow but important zone of consensus, evaluations diverge. Neither the rich nor the poor of Sedaka are uniformly enthusiastic about the changes double-cropping has brought about. Given the recent setbacks the poor have experienced, their complaints are to be expected. The complaints of the larger farmers, however, are curious, since they have been the principal beneficiaries of this highly touted scheme. At first one is tempted to refer their grumbling to a universal human (at any rate, peasant) perverseness that only grudgingly admits to good fortune, but the nature of their complaints betrays an unmistakeable class perspective. They are resentful, above all, that it is no longer possible to buy land. Thus Haji Kadir says that things were “better before” irrigation when “we could save money and buy land at only M$1,000 a relong.” Kamil, who rents 15 relong, grumbles that he is no better off now than he was ten years ago and that land is now out of reach. What is involved here is not only a nostalgia for the days when land went for M$ 1,000 a relong but also for the days when poor smallholders were forced by debts (jualjanji) to forfeit their land to creditors. This is, in fact, how Haji Kadir and others made their small fortunes. Kamil senses that this avenue of mobility is now closed to him.

  This does not exhaust their complaints. They grumble about the high cost of living, the difficulty and expenses of getting fieldhands when they need them, and the fact that even they often need loans. In more reflective moods, prosperous villagers occasionally regret the loss of leisure and the entertainment they once enjoyed between the harvest and the next planting-a time when most of their poorer neighbors were off looking for work. Now they are busy all year round. They miss especially the small feasts, games, and Islamic chanting that had graced the off-season before 1972.18 Seldom is this lament terribly acute, for no one would be willing to forego a second crop of rice in order to recover these cultural amenities. [Page 150] When it comes to the effects of double-cropping on their own economic situation, the comments of the substantial farmers in the village are oddly out of keeping with the narrow facts of the matter. All these families have benefited substantially, to judge from their incomes and possessions. And yet, many of them acknowledge no improvement; they say things are about the same as before.


  If pressed, they may admit to some slight easing: “I’m a bit better off”; “We don’t have to scrimp so”; “We can just get enough to eat.”19 When it comes to what irrigation has done for the village poor, though, these men are far more expansive. To hear them tell it, the poor have done very well. One of them says, “Since the change in seasons, even coolies (that is, landless laborers) are using motorcyles.” Another, complaining of the cost of labor, insists that wage workers have become so comfortable that they can afford to be choosy. They often claim that nowadays the poor are as comfortable (senang) as the rich were before doublecropping. In effect, they greatly underplay their own gains and at the same time overdramatize the new prosperity of the poor-a pattern that we shall see repeated.

  For villagers in more precarious circumstances, matters are more straightforward. After acknowledging that their basic food supply is secure, they generally go on to emphasize how their prospects have worsened. As Hamzah notes, “I work nonstop, [but] there’s not a chance of becoming comfortable.” He and others in the same boat contrast the substantial gains of the well-off with their own difficulty in providing their families with necessities such as fish, clothing, and school expenses. While the rich complain that they have no leisure, the poor have the mirror-image complaint: that they have no work. They can and do recite in minute detail who hired them and how much they earned in the past, comparing that income with the current lack of work. For them, unlike the rich, the watershed is not the beginning of double-cropping but the entry of combine-harvesters. Their sense of time, the significant dates in their lives, are necessarily different, as is their experience. A majority of them, it is true, are almost certainly no worse off than they were prior to the irrigation scheme. But their point of reference is now the first four or five years of double-cropping (1972–76) when work was plentiful and wages high. It is from that point that they measure their current hardships and it is perhaps only in the context of these hardships that the early years of irrigation have become “the good old days.”

  At the core of this reversal of fortunes, in their view, is not simply the impersonal working out of technological change, but the elimination of human dependencies. Karim, whom Haji Kadir once cited as a rare example of the hard-working poor, captures the perspective of many poor villagers. Before, he [Page 151] explains, “those who were hard up depended on people who were well-off.”20 He mentions, as did Pak Yah, wages paid in advance as an example and tells me that they are no longer given and instead poor villagers have only the Chinese pawnshop as a creditor of last resort. “They [the landowners],” he continues, “don’t need us any more; if we don’t come to thresh paddy, they can just call the machine.” Mansur, another landless villager, covers much the same ground as he deplores the evaporation of postharvest zakatperibadi he once received from cultivators for whom he threshed but who no longer need his help. The village poor, then, not only realize precisely what they have lost in wages, in work, and in gifts but are quite well aware that they are no longer an integral part of rice production at all.21

  FROM LIVING RENTS TO DEAD RENTS

  Fixed cash rents payable before planting were not unknown before double-cropping, but it was only with the expanding cash economy after 1971 that they became the rule rather than the exception. We encounter once again a nearly intractable zone of disagreement about the facts when it comes to determining how many tenants actually lost part or all of their farms when the switch to prepaid rents was made. Estimates range from a maximum of about ten to a minimum of three or four. The higher figure is closer to the village consensus while the lower figure finds support among a handful of wealthy villagers. There seems no way to decide the matter. Razak, for example, had rented 5 relong under the traditional arrangements from his older brother (an outsider) until 1972, when his brother announced that he was taking it back to give to his own son to cultivate. Razak claims that his brother used this as an excuse to kick him off the land and gives as evidence the fact that two seasons later his brother rented the land out again to a new tenant, with the rent to be paid in advance. The story is plausible, in part, because dismissing a tenant to give the land to one’s own child is one of the few ways of displacing a tenant that is seen as legitimate. For precisely that reason, it is often viewed as a ploy used by landlords who wish to act discreetly. But it is impossible to be certain of the facts in this case or in many others, where the landlord claims that the tenant simply decided to give up the land. In any event, the “damage estimate” attributed to the shift to sewa tunai is extensive if one listens to most villagers and relatively paltry if one listens to a few of the wealthiest.

  For those who rent out land on any appreciable scale, the advantages of sewa tunai are obvious. As the rent is no longer denominated in paddy equivalents, [Page 152] the landlord’s return is not hostage to farm-gate prices. Should the paddy price increase, the cash rent can simply be raised the following season; should it decrease, the tenant absorbs the loss. Prepaid rents, of course, arrive five or six months earlier under the new arrangement, giving the landlord the use of the capital for that much longer. Above all, sewa tunai avoids disputes and confrontations on the threshing floor in the case of crop damage or failure. It was never an easy matter to determine the cause of a harvest shortfall, whether it was due to the negligence of the cultivator, in which case no remission was granted, or whether it was due to weather or pests, in which case a remission was ordinarily negotiated. The size of the remission was also a source of acrimonious exchanges that often left both sides feeling shortchanged. Now the landlord need never even look at his fields or listen to the dubious pleas of his tenants after a bad season. Only one option is open to a dissatisfied tenant: giving up the tenancy.

  Those who adopt a landlord’s perspective are naturally delighted. Kamil, himself a large tenant, but whose rents are very modest (M$120 per relong, per season), notes that “cheating” was common under the older, sewa padi system.22 The cheating might take the form of surreptitious harvesting at night before the official harvest began, spiriting away some of the grain at the actual harvest if supervision was lax, shoddy threshing so as to leave much paddy on the stalks to be gleaned and kept later, and above all spurious claims of crop damage to cover any or all of these subterfuges and thereby reduce the rent. Tenants, to be sure, walked a fine line in pursuing these strategies which, if pushed too far too often, might lead to their dismissal. Under sewa tunai, however, all of these ploys are simply irrelevant. Haji Salim, a very large landowner and entrepreneur who lives just outside the village, makes it clear that prepaid cash rents provide an element of labor discipline. “These people [tenants] are scoundrels,” he says.23 Before sewa tunai, he adds, they could cultivate carelessly and then ask for a reduction in rent, claiming that worms or caterpillars had damaged the paddy. Now, however, “If they give the money first, they have to look after the crop carefully, they can’t just play around. They have to take it a bit more seriously.”24

  The disadvantages of sewa tunai for tenants are as palpable as the advantages for landlords. Those who know most poignantly about the disadvantages are, of course, those who actually lost their tenancy when the shift was imposed. Even for the majority who managed to raise the cash in time, the costs were considerable. They typically took loans on their wives’ gold jewelry (given to most [Page 153] women by their parents upon marriage) and paid 2 percent a month to the pawnshop in Yan until it was redeemed, hopefully, after the harvest. If the paddy crop was good, this proved a minor inconvenience; if the crop was poor, however, it became a financial crisis.25 The jewelry might be forfeit, the husband might have to leave the village to find work elsewhere, or debts might simply accumulate. As sewa tunai has become more prevalent, it has also exerted a subtle but unmistakable influence on other forms of tenancy. Those lucky enough to have tenancies in which the rent is payable after the harvest and thus, in principle, is negotiable are increasingly reluctant to avail themselves of this privilege for fear that the
landlord will retaliate by moving to prepaid rents.26

  The key objection from the tenants’ perspective is simply that the rent is fixed and bears no relation to the paddy yields of a particular season, that is, to the tenant’s ability to pay. As they say, “You can’t take it into account, you can’t bargain, you can’t compromise, you can’t do anything.”27 This, is not simply a statement of fact delivered in an impersonal way. The phrase most often heard in connection with sewa tunai—often enough to have become almost a sloganis, “If the paddy is ruined, that’s your [the tenant’s] lookout.”28 It is spoken with gestures and facial expressions to imitate a callous landlord announcing the facts of life to his tenant. It implies, of course, that the state of the paddyand therefore of his tenant—most definitely ought to concern any self-respecting landlord.

  What is involved here, as most villagers see it, is thus a shift in rents that mirrors a portentous shift in the quality of class relations. The attitude of landlords when rents were adjustable was described as magnanimous (senang kira).29 This term is the opposite of berkira, or “stingy” and “calculating,” which is normally the most devastating charge made against the rich, as we have seen. To be senang kira is to inhabit a social world in which an amicable reciprocity prevails and in which no one is trying to take undue advantage of others. It is a value as much breached as observed but is no less powerful for that reason. The contrast between how things were and how they are is apparent from Amin’s description. “Before they said, ‘If the harvest is bad, [we’ll] reduce [the rent] a [Page 154] bit.’” “Then you could bargain, there was compassion.” “Now they only care about the money.” “They say, ‘If you don’t like this price, I’ll find someone else.’” “It’s done quite openly.”30