Weapons of the Weak- Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance

by James C Scott

  Tok Mahmud, a semiretired widower living with his daughter, has experienced the same humiliations and is less reticent than Hamzah.83 The only way these days to get rice from the rich, he claims, is to take money and pay for it. “We are even embarrassed to ask now. They say ‘you grow rice, too.’ They say, ‘If you don’t have enough to eat, you’re lazy.’ They never help.” Like Pak Yah and others, he knows what the rich say about the poor. The village poor are caught in a situation where the old assumptions are no longer valid. Before, they could expect zakat from employers and ask for sedekah, or advance wages, with a reasonable expectation of receiving something. Now they may ask, but only at the potential price of a humiliating rebuff. A gift refused in this fashion is not simply grain foregone but, above all, a stark social signal that the relationship between the rich and poor, which the request assumed to be in force, has been unilaterally declared null and void. The rich have given notice that they are no longer responsible for the pressing needs of the village poor.

  In the decline of the feast-giving cycle in Sedaka, the poor see the same symptoms of social withdrawal and selfishness by the well-to-do. No longer, says Mat “halus,” are there feasts that last the whole night and at which three or four cows are eaten. Instead, the rich “think about money; they just want to invest their money.”84 “Before, rich people wanted to make a big name (buat besar). Now they do just a little bit; they’re clever. Before they wanted to show off (tunjuk-menunjuk) and now they don’t want to waste money.” Where they might have spent M$2,000, he adds, they now spend only M$200. Sukur, putting himself in the shoes of the rich, performs what he imagines to be their calculations. “If a kenduri will cost $500, they ask, ‘How many things can we buy for that?’” Instead of a kenduri, they decide to buy a television set. The rich, he concludes, “think only of this world.” For others, like Taib, what is most grating is to be hired for work but not invited to his employers’ feast. As he puts it, “If it’s a question of work, the well-off have to go looking for the poor; if it’s a feast they go look for a lebai or haji [someone who can lead chants and recite from the Koran], not poor people.”

  In this last comment by Sukur, we can capture the religious tone of his accusation. To think beyond this world is to think of Allah’s judgment (hukum Allah) and thus to be generous and sympathetic to those who are less fortunate. [Page 178] This perspective is reflected in the prestige enjoyed by those few comfortable villagers (notably Abdul Rahman but also Haji Jaafar and Lebai Pendek) who continue to honor the kenduri tradition. Moreover, according to folk beliefs among the poor, the punishment for a failure of generosity is not confined to Allah’s final judgment. Hamzah, with others, believes that generosity with feasts, zakat, and sedekah serves to protect rich people against such misfortunes as accidents and illnesses. This is why, he says, those who make the pilgrimage to Mecca always give a kenduri before setting out. When I wonder out loud how this applies to Haji Kadir, whose tightfistedness is renowned but who appears to enjoy robust health, Hamzah immediately reminds me of his wife’s long stay in the hospital, her fall down the steps, and Haji Kadir’s recurring back trouble. All of these misfortunes, he implies, are a sign of Allah’s displeasure. It is hardly far-fetched to read into this interpretation an attempt, albeit feeble, by the poor to exert their own modest form of social control over the rich. Nor is it farfetched to suggest that there is only a very short step between believing that the miserly rich will be punished in this world and the next and actually wishing on them the misfortunes and judgments which, by their conduct, they have called down on their own heads.

  THE REMEMBERED VILLAGE

  As we listen to the rich and poor of Sedaka attempting to make sense of the massive changes they have all experienced over the past decade, we find ourselves in the midst of an ideological struggle, however small in scale. It is a struggle over facts and their meaning, over what has happened and who is to blame, over how the present situation is to be defined and interpreted. Having lived through this history, every villager is entitled, indeed required, to become something of a historian-a historian with an axe to grind. The point of such histories is not to produce a balanced or neutral assessment of the decade but rather to advance a claim, to levy praise and blame, and to justify or condemn the existing state of affairs.

  As in any history, assessing the present forcibly involves a reevaluation of what has gone before. Thus, the ideological struggle to define the present is a struggle to define the past as well. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the accounts given by poor villagers, who have had the least to be thankful for over the past decade and whose current prospects are bleak. They have collectively created a remembered village and a remembered economy that serve as an effective ideological backdrop against which to deplore the present.85 They remember when rents [Page 179] were paid after the crop was in and reflected the actual harvest. They remember the time before mechanization, when large landowners sought them out as tenants and when rents were modest. They remember when harvest work was plentiful and larger farmers curried favor with them by giving advance wages, loans, and zakat gifts and throwing larger feasts to which they were always invited.

  It is not that their memory is faulty. The older customs and practices to which they point did exist and worked to their advantage. Their memory is, however, quite selective. It focuses precisely on those beneficial aspects of tenure and labor relations that have been eroded or swept away over the last ten years. That they do not dwell upon other, less favorable, features of the old order is hardly surprising, for those features do not contribute to the argument they wish to make today. Their nostalgia, if one may call it that, is thus, like their memory, a highly selective affair. The central reason why the account of the village poor smacks of nostalgia is that so many of the innovations of the past decade have worked decisively against their material interests. They have ample cause to look back fondly at older arrangements. The well-to-do of Sedaka, as we have seen, are not above nostalgia themselves. But it is not so pronounced precisely because they have a far greater stake in the current arrangements, which are decisively in their favor.

  Such reconstructions of the past in the service of present interests recall Hegel’s dictum that “the owl of Minerva flies only at dusk.” There is no doubt, for example, that the losses suffered by Sedaka’s poor in the last few years have inspired them to cast a new and sympathetic eye on the older arrangements. Ten years ago these arrangements would not, in all probability, have elicited such praise; they were then part of the taken-for-granted practices that had governed rice production for some time. It is only against the background of the new threats posed by double-cropping that such routines have been elevated to the status of revered customs, rights, and entitlements. It is only now that the revalued past has become necessary to assess a menacing present.

  The ideological work of the poor can be seen as an attempt to right a world that has been almost literally turned upside down by double-cropping. Everywhere they look they see dramatic reversals of the traditional production relations-all of which undermine both their sources of livelihood and their status in the village. Before, large landowners rented land out to poorer tenants; now they rent increasingly to wealthy entrepreneurs or farm their land themselves with machinery. Before, large farmers hired poorer neighbors to plough and harrow their fields with water buffalo; now they hire wealthy tractor owners to prepare their land. Before, larger farmers hired poorer neighbors to transplant their paddy; now many of them broadcast their own seed. Before, these same farmers hired the poor to reap and thresh their crop; now they hire wealthy combine owners for the same job. Before, well-to-do villagers had good reason to provide advance wages and give zakat payments to their work force; now, if [Page 180] they have a work force at all, they see no need to be as openhanded. Before, the village rich had good reason to build a reputation with lavish feasts; now many of them regard such large feasts as a waste of money. Taken together, these reversals call into ques
tion virtually every assumption that governed the social relations of production before double-cropping.

  The new dispensation has also transformed the preexisting class structure of Sedaka and most other paddy villages on the Muda Plain. In that earlier class structure, rich peasants and larger landowners were joined to land-poor villagers in a symbiosis of dependency and exploitation. So long as land was reasonably plentiful and labor, at peak seasons, was reasonably scarce, there were limits to exploitation, although land concentration proceeded apace through moneylending and default. This symbiosis found expression in village ritual life-for example, zakat peribadi, kenduri, advance wages—and also in political life, where local party leaders, who were invariably well-to-do, could be relied upon to bring most of their dependent tenants and laborers into the fold. The middle peasantry was, by contrast, somewhat more autonomous, since they were less reliant on the rich for land to farm or for wages and they rarely hired workers, preferring to use (or exchange) household labor.

  The new relations of production have broken most of the direct dependencies that characterized the earlier class system. Economically marginalized by mechanization and shifts in tenancy, poor villagers increasingly find themselves ritually marginalized as well. Kinship and indirect patronage (distributed by the state through local elites) still tie many of them to the ruling party, but their subordination is no longer embedded in village relations of production. Before double-cropping, one might describe them as poor, second-class, citizens of Sedaka. Now, they remain poor-though spared the extremes of malnutrition and hunger-and certainly second-class, but it is increasingly difficult to justify calling them citizens.

  The question naturally arises, in this or in any other economic transformation in which a subordinate class has suffered a reversal in its fortunes, as to how such reversals are understood and interpreted. Later in my analysis I will want to examine the heavy consequences an answer to this question has for the larger issues of class consciousness, false-consciousness, resistance, and ideological hegemony. Here, however, it is sufficient only to note the general tenor of the answer as reflected in the discourse of the village poor.

  There is no way in which the participants’ interpretation of the impact of the green revolution in Kedah can be deduced from the crude economic facts. Such facts are compatible with any number of intepretations: they could be accepted as fatalistically as a drought or flood; they could be seen as the fulfillment of prophecy or of Allah’s punishment for straying from the true faith; they could be seen as the malevolent effects of government policy or the result of the greed and resources of Chinese syndicates.

  In fact, as we have seen, none of these interpretations figures very prominently, [Page 181] if at all, in the record. Instead, the poorer strata of Sedaka see the causes of their present distress as primarily personal (that is, a result of human agency), local, and largely confined to the Malay community. The increasing use of leasehold tenancy and the dismissal of smaller tenants, for example, is seen as caused by the desire of large landowners (mostly Malays) to capture more of the profits of cultivation for themselves. The growth of labor-displacing combine hire is similarly viewed as a result of large farmers hoping to save the money and bother of hiring harvest hands. The reduction in local charity likewise reflects the new willingness of the rich to protect their wealth at the expense of their reputation. In each case, the logic of blame and condemnation is much the same as that applied to the class of landowning Hajis who were held responsible for the loss of mortgaged land. The more distant and impersonal causes that most assuredly play a role here are upstaged by a perspective that emphasizes moral lapses, selfishness, and the violation of social decencies. As the poor see it, the rich have callously chosen to ignore their obligations to their neighbors. How else are we to understand the tendency of the poor to focus at least as much on the disrespect and contempt they now confront as on the material losses they have suffered?

  The poor are, of course, not the only ones in the village to make use of such logic. While wealthier farmers acknowledge the speed and profitability of combine-harvesters, they also insist that the poor have become unreliable, choosy, and indolent workers who are no longer entitled to their consideration. In this fashion, the rich, too, find a personal and moral rationale for the dramatic reversals in village social relations.

  Neither the rich nor the poor, however, fail to see the broader and more impersonal forces that have shaped their circumstances. The poor, and many of the well-to-do, understand that the desire for accumulation and investment lies behind the new dispensation. Both understand the new possibilities that doublecropping and mechanization have made available. Every villager carries in his head an impressive personal and collective economic history replete with time series for fertilizer, seed, rents, paddy, rice, fish, consumer durable prices, wage rates, and crop yields that may, for older peasants, go back as much as half a century. As in any oral history of this kind, the dates are tied to events-“the Japanese period” (masajepun), “when my first child was born,” “before doublecropping” (se-belum dua kali padi), and the focus is on the consequences of these figures-for example, income, access to land, the availability of work. The poor know exactly how much they have lost to the combines; the rich know exactly how much they have gained. Within the ambit of their local experience, they understand the workings of capitalism. Rich and poor alike see that Chinese entrepreneurs pay premium rents for land leases because they own farm machinery and because they cannot let their capital lie idle. As they say: “the Chinese have to keep their money circulating (pusing duit).” They understand that the owners of the new means of production-tractors, combines, trucksnow capture the returns previously destined for water buffalo owners, harvest [Page 182] laborers, and porters, and that part of the profit now goes to overseas manufacturers. The poor fully understand that many of them have been proletarianized as they have lost their tenancies. Rokiah is not by any means the only one who has noted that “they want to make coolies of us,” though she adds defiantly, “They can’t do it.” The poor also understand that they are being progressively marginalized; they talk about having no work, of being pushed aside (tolak tepi), of facing the prospect of leaving the village altogether.

  If the poor dwell upon the local and personal causes of their distress, it is thus not because they are particularly “mystified” or ignorant of the larger context of agrarian capitalism in which they live. They do not, of course, use the abstract, desiccated terminology of social science-proletarianization, differentiation, accumulation, marginalization-to describe their situation. But their own folk descriptions of what is happening: being made into coolies, the rich getting richer and the poor becoming poorer, and being “pushed aside”-are adequate and, at the same time, far richer in emotive meaning than anything academic political-economy could possibly provide.

  The choice—for it is a choice—to fasten on the more immediate sources of their difficulties contains elements of both convenience and strategy. It is convenient for the poor to blame those who are most immediately and directly responsible for their recent reverses. They observe their Malay landlord taking his land from them to farm himself or to rent out to a Chinese entrepreneur; they do not directly observe the concentration of capital in land use. They observe the large farmer who stops hiring his neighbors and calls in the combineharvester; they do not directly observe the syndicates or government policies that have made this possible.

  Their choice is also strategic because it focuses on precisely those human agents who are plausibly within their sphere of social action.86 They have some hope of influencing their landlord or the larger farmer for whom they work; they do not have a prayer of influencing either the Chinese commercial farmer or the syndicates of machine owners. After all, those who rented them land or hired them in the past described their action as “helping them out” (tolong), thus implying a kind of noblesse oblige in keeping with village norms. It is only [Page 183] logical that rich v
illagers and landlords should now be hoisted on their own petard and accused of callous disregard, if not contempt, for those whom they once claimed to assist. The village poor thus choose to direct their anger primarily at those from whom they have some claim to consideration, however tenuous. In the context of the capitalist transformation of agriculture in Muda, their claims fall on increasingly deaf ears. Their victories-a few landlords who continue to rent to small tenants, a few who hire harvest hands when they can, a few who still observe the tradition of charity and large feasts-are meager and, in all probability, temporary. The sense of community and obligation on which their claims depend is a rapidly wasting asset. It is, however, virtually the only asset they have87 in this rearguard action and one to which they would be expected to turn in preference to more quixotic goals.