Weapons of the Weak- Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance

by James C Scott

37. This is the case even when other reasonably legitimate grounds exist for dismissing a tenant. Razak’s other brother (not Hamzah), who lives outside the village, once rented land to Razak. Villagers claim, plausibly, that Razak seldom actually paid the agreed rent for the land. Although the brother would have been justified, in terms of local values, if he had taken back the land for that reason alone, he also told Razak that he had to take the land for his son. So strong is the obligation to provide sons or sons-in-law with land whenever possible that parents are criticized when they fail to do it, and not a few sons fail to pay rents regularly knowing that it will be difficult for parents, even if poor, to revoke their tenancy. Parents, for their part, rarely transfer the land legally long before their death, since the question of inheritance is one of the few material sanctions they have to ensure that they are adequately provided for in their old age.

  38. Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971), 97.

  39. No one seems to remember exactly when it was erected, but most agree that it was the gradual improvement of the road near the village and the attendant growth of lorry traffic that explain its construction. Thus it is not as if villagers decided to protect this opportunity for wage work only in early 1960; it is rather that no real threat to bicycle hauling had existed until that time. Villagers also agree that their initial concern was that farmers who cultivated land near the village but did not live there would be the first to avail themselves of trucks to haul paddy.

  40. Tanah merah, literally “red earth,” is not available in the immediate vicinity. Local soils of marine clay, while they harden to the consistency of concrete during the dry season, are not suitable for roads because they become extremely viscous and slippery when wet. It is common to use tanah merah not only for roads and heavily trafficked paths but also to build up the elevation of the compound around and under the house.

  41. There is some evidence that similar customs are observed outside Kedah as well. Fujimoto, for example, reports that in the Province Wellesley village of Guar Tok Said, “There was an agreement among the villagers that a rice dealer’s lorry should be parked outside the village, at the time of the sale of padi, so that sacks of rice must be carried to the lorry, thus providing jobs especially to young boys in the village…. The road was narrow and it was difficult for a lorry to enter the village, but it was certainly possible.” “Land Tenure,” 196.

  42. The reasoning here is significant, as it manifests a belief that the piece-rate should be tied to the cost of living-to need-and that any increase in the cultivator’s profits, as reflected in the farm-gate price, should be shared with laborers.

  43. This report, Basir later confided, had been worked out that morning between himself, Daud bin Haji Jaafar, and Akil.

  44. Orang yang bergantung kepada upah tarik padi sudah hilang. Lari ka-bangsa asing.

  45. A few adjustments in the gate’s operation were discussed. Lebai Pendek would continue to hold the key and would get 20 percent of the fees from the trucks permitted to enter. Shamsul and Tok Ahmad, whose fields were immediately inside the gate, would be exempted from the rule.

  46. Factional feeling was at a high pitch during this period, not only because of the gate issue but because of the highly partisan distribution of benefits from the Village Improvement Scheme (Ranchangan Pemulihan Kampung, RPK), which had just concluded. The RPK episode is described and analyzed below.

  47. A single well-to-do family can contain both winners and losers. Thus Lebai Pendek is a large farmer but also has two sons who earn money hauling paddy with their motorcycles. Fadzil’s position is more comprehensible when one realizes that he is a large farmer without any children who haul paddy. Middle peasant households stand to gain less from the reduction in transport costs simply because they market less paddy, but they may still oppose the gate, especially if they have no one in the family who can haul paddy.

  48. Strictly speaking, the poor continue to haul paddy, particularly after the offseason when the fields are wet, from the field itself to a path that will accommodate a motorcycle. This hauling is necessary, however, regardless of whether the gate exists or not.

  49. Gibbons and De Koninck have shown empirically that, in Muda, loyal villagers and loyal farmers, that is, those aligned with UMNO, are systematically favored as beneficiaries of government assistance. D. S. Gibbons, Rodolphe de Koninck, and Ibrahim Hassan, Agricultural Modernization, Poverty, and Inequality: The Distributional Impact of the Green Revolution in Regions of Malaysia and Indonesia (Farnborough: Saxon House, 1980), chap. 7.

  50. Other villages, besides Sedaka, included Sungai Kering, Bedong, Setiti Batu, Dulang Besar, Peropuk, Sinkir Genting, Raga, Kampung Kubang Pasu, and Selankuh.

  51. The third fence-sitter, Mustapha, is Kamil’s son-in-law; since he was staying with his wife in his father-in-law’s house while preparing to move his wife and young child to his parent’s village, he was seen as ineligible on those two counts. If that were not enough, he is also known to sympathize strongly with PAS.

  52. Some of the terms most commonly used include makan rasuah, tumbuk rusuk, penyelewengan, berselinkuh, suap, cari kepentingan diri, tipu, pileh-kasih.

  53. For many local PAS members, the decision of Datuk Asri and the other leaders of PAS to enter the ruling coalition was an act of betrayal. Their sense of having been sold out was so strong that when he later returned to opposition they were skeptical. It did not change their membership in PAS, which was firmly rooted in local realities, but did shake their confidence. As many put it, “He took government wages” (Sudah makan gaji kerajaan).

  54. Kalau masyarakat kampung rosak, tak jadi aman.

  55. As one might expect, the worst case of partisanship that villagers can imagine is when kin of different parties refuse to come to one another’s funerals. It is as if the solidarity surrounding funeral rites is the ultimate repository of both village and religious values; once this is breached something irretrievable has been lost. See a similar lament from Kelantan in Kessler, Islam and Politics, 154.

  56. Depa tau masyarakat lain dulu campur sekali masyarakat dengan politik.

  57. Kira masyarakat saja.

  58. Negotiations about such matters were delicate, since most PAS members were too proud to accept such secondhand assistance.

  59. In the five or six villages about which I was able to gather reliable information, it appears that the distribution was also largely along partisan lines. Mansur’s comment is nonetheless true, for Sungai Kering is known to be something like 90 percent in the UMNO camp.

  60. Cara rata lagi patut.

  61. She added, incidentally, that they had been avoiding her recently, presumably because they would be hard put to justify their behavior to her.

  62. As reported secondhand to me, one of them said, “Let’s go in a crowd to meet the D.O.” (Mari kita pergi ramai jumpa D.O.).

  63. I did not actually see the letter, as no copies were kept, but was told by all four men of its contents. They were particularly proud of having had the courage to sign it with their names and identity card numbers.

  64. Among them, the families of Sukur, Rosni, Ishak, Samat Tok Mahmud, Tok Kasim, Osman Haji Ismail, and Nor.

  65. Those who were conspicuously absent included Pak Yah, Dullah, Mat “halus,” Bakri bin Haji Wahab, Dzulkifli bin Haji Wahab, Shahnon, and Mat Isa. Samat and Taib, however, went.

  66. The number of people one can assemble for such an occasion is an important reflection on the prestige and friendship network of the host family. In this case, however, the sparse turnout was more a reflection on the JKK than on Cik Tun.

  67. Depa yang mau pecah kampung.

  68. Once or twice the argument was made that, even if PAS members were helped, they would not return the kindness (balas budi) or ever say “thank you.” Here the principle of reciprocity was invoked and joined to the metaphor of the ungrateful or rebellious child.

  69. Ini bukan masyarakat, politik lain sikit, dunia macham it
u.

  70. Lama-lama depa kena lembut. Orang kaya boleh tahan, tetapi, orang susah tak boleh tahan.

  71. In Basir’s case this praise is tempered with a realization by villagers that his dual role as shopkeeper and political leader requires him to make a greater effort than others-an effort that, in large part, is seen to be self-interested.

  72. That social pressure, of course, is not purely symbolic, since the labor of villagers is still necessary for some phases of paddy cultivation. Beyond that, as we shall see, the social pressure is reinforced by threats of violence and theft as well.

  73. This effort to delay capitalist relations of production is often and, I believe, mistakenly used to demonstrate the superior historical role of the proletariat. See Georg Lukacs, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1971), 59. For a critique of this position, see my “Hegemony and the Peasantry,” Politics and Society 7, no. 3 (1977): 267-96, and chap. 8 below.

  74. “Eighteenth-Century English Society: Class Struggle without Class,” Social History 3, no. 2 (May 1978): 158-59.

  75. Kessler, in his study of the social basis of PAS opposition in Kelantan, puts the matter persuasively by emphasizing the fusion of symbolic and material action: “It [this study] has also dispensed with the equally forced distinction between instrumental and symbolic political actions and goals, between material and ideal factors. Local issues are but national issues in a particular guise, concrete and immediately apprehendable, and the articulation of responses to them, in the distinctive dialects of particular contexts, is far from unreal…. Symbols and symbolic action are viable only when they relate to real issues and popular experience of them…. They have a real basis and also real consequences.” Islam and Politics, 244.

  76. Injustice: The Social Bases of Obedience and Revolt (White Plains: M. E. Sharpe, 1978).

  77. Perhaps the comparable humiliation for poor Christian Americans is the inability to provide their children with the presents that have come virtually to define what Christmas means. The sacrifices they will make, including mortgaging their own future, to achieve the minimal decencies are no less than what poor Malays will make to provide an acceptable Hari Raya fare. Along these same lines, it is frequently said that conversion to Protestantism in Central and South America appeals particularly to the poor, who are unable to finance the ritual cycle that has become associated with Catholicism. By doing so, they make a virtue of necessity and dignify their nonparticipation.

  78. Quite a few of them who have no farming land-either rented or ownedare thereby excluded both from the practice of exchanging labor and from feasts such as kenduri tolak bala designed to pray for rain or ward off specifically agricultural disasters.

  79. David Gilmore, “Patronage and Class Conflict in Southern Spain,” Man (N.S.) 12 (1978): 449. In his detailed history of the German working-class movement from 1848 to 1920, Barrington Moore emphasizes how frequently the demand for what he calls “decent human treatment” appears in the accounts of workers themselves. Writing of the workers councils after the First World War, he concludes:

  The source of the workers’ anger was essentially a combination of two things: certain material deprivations and what they themselves called lack of decent human treatment. Lack of decent human treatment offended their sense of fairness. In their terms it apparently meant the failure to treat the worker as a human being in the course of ordinary routine contacts, such as excessive gruffness, failure to use polite forms, and the like.

  80. Wan Zawawi Ibrahim, A Malay Proletariat: The Emergence of Class Relations on a Malay Plantation (Ph.D. diss., Monash University, 1978), 398 et seq.

  7 • Beyond the War of Words: Cautious Resistance and Calculated Conformity

  [Page 241]

  Whatever happens Schweik mustn’t turn into a cunning, underhanded Saboteur, he is merely an opportunist exploiting the tiny openings left him.

  Bertolt Brecht, Journal, May 27, 1943

  The damned impertinence of these politicians, priests, literary men, and what-not who lecture the working class socialist for his “materialism”! All that the working man demands is what these others would consider the undispensable minimum without which human life cannot be lived at all…. How right the working classes are in their “materialism”! How right they are to realize that the belly comes before the soul, not in the scale of values but in point of time.

  George Orwell, “Looking Back on the Spanish War” (1943)

  From the account thus far, one might justifiably assume that the struggle between rich and poor was largely confined to a war of words. That assumption would not be entirely wrong, but it would be misleading. For the poor and wealthy peasants of Sedaka are not merely having an argument; they are also having a fight. Under the circumstances, the fight is less a pitched battle than a lowgrade, hit-and-run, guerrilla action. The kind of “fight” to be described and analyzed in this chapter is, I believe, the typical, “garden variety” resistance that characterizes much of the peasantry and other subordinate classes through much of their unfortunate history. More specifically, however, we are dealing here with the undramatic but ubiquitous struggle against the effects of statefostered capitalist development in the countryside: the loss of access to the means of production (proletarianization), the loss of work (marginalization) and income, and the loss of what little status and few claims the poor could assert before double-cropping. Most readings of the history of capitalist development, or simply a glance at the current odds in this context, would conclude that this struggle is a lost cause. It may well be just that. If so, the poor peasantry of Sedaka finds itself in distinguished and numerous historical company.

  After considering the major reasons why open collective protest is rare, I examine the actual patterns of resistance to changes in production relations: arson, sabotage, boycotts, disguised strikes, theft, and imposed mutuality among the poor. I then assess the role of coercion—of what might be called “everyday forms of repression”—in producing such disguised forms of struggle 241 [Page 242] amidst overt compliance. Finally, I take a step backward to explore, in more general terms, the definition of resistance and the reasons why many of the actions considered here might justifiably be termed resistance.

  OBSTACLES TO OPEN, COLLECTIVE RESISTANCE

  An observer need not look long and hard to find examples of further resistance in Sedaka. In fact, they abound. They are, however, forms of resistance that reflect the conditions and constraints under which they are generated. If they are open, they are rarely collective, and, if they are collective, they are rarely open. The encounters seldom amount to more than “incidents,” the results are usually inconclusive, and the perpetrators move under cover of darkness or anonymity, melting back into the “civilian” population for protective cover.

  To appreciate why resistance should assume such guises, it is helpful to pause briefly to consider a few of the major “givens” that determine the range of available options. This will anticipate somewhat the material that follows, and a few of the issues raised only schematically here will be developed at greater length later in this chapter and the next.

  Perhaps the most important “given” that structures the options open to Sedaka’s poor is simply the nature of the changes they have experienced. Some varieties of change, other things equal, are more explosive than others—more likely to provoke open, collective defiance. In this category I might place those massive and sudden changes that decisively destroy nearly all the routines of daily life and, at the same time, threaten the livelihood of much of the population. Here in Sedaka, however, the changes that constitute the green revolution have been experienced as a series of piecemeal shifts in tenure and technique. As painful as the changes were, they tended to come gradually and to affect only a small minority of villagers at any one time. The shift from rents collected after the harvest (sewa padi) to fixed rents paid before planting (sewa tunai), for example, affected
only tenants and was pushed through over several seasons, so that only a few tenants found themselves simultaneously in jeopardy. Furthermore, most of them were able to hang on to their tenancy even if it meant an additional burden of debt. If we could imagine a single, large landlord insisting on sewa tunai from all the village tenants in the same season, the response might have been very different. The loss of tenancies that resulted when landlords decided to resume cultivation themselves or to lease (pajak) their land to wealthy commercial operators followed a similar pattern. Much the same can be said for the raising of rents and for the substitution of broadcasting for transplanting. The screws were turned piecemeal and at varying speeds, so that the victims were never more than a handful at a time. In this case as in others, each landlord or farmer insisting on the change represented a particular situation confronting one or, at most, a few individuals.

  The only exception to this pattern was the introduction of combine-harvesting [Page 243] and, as we shall see, it provoked the nearest thing to open, collective defiance. Even in this case, however, the impact was not instantaneous, nor was it without a certain ambiguity for many in the village. For the first two or three seasons the economic impact on the poor was noticeable but not devastating. Middle peasants were genuinely torn between the advantage of getting their crop in quickly and the loss of wage earning for themselves or their children. A few of the smallest farmers, as I have noted, succumbed to the temptation to use the combine in order to hasten their exit for contract labor in the city. At no single moment did combine-harvesting represent a collective threat to the livelihood of a solid majority of villagers.

  Another striking characteristic of the agricultural transformation in Kedah—one that serves very powerfully to defuse class conflict—is the fact that it removes the poor from the productive process rather than directly exploits them. One after another, the large farmers and landlords in the Muda Scheme have eliminated terrains of potential struggle over the distribution of the harvest and profits from paddy growing. In place of the struggle over piece-rates for cutting and threshing, there is now only a single payment to the machine broker. In place of negotiations over transplanting costs, there is the option of broadcasting the seed and avoiding the conflict altogether. In place of tense and contentious disputes over the timing and level of rents, there is the alternative of hiring the machines and farming oneself or leasing to an outsider for a lump sum. Even the shift to sewa tunai eliminates the tales of woe and ruin that previously dominated the post-harvest claims for rent adjustment. The changes themselves, of course—dismissing a tenant, switching to the machines, moving to fixed rents before planting-are not so simple to put across. But once they have been put across, the ex-tenant or ex-wage laborer simply ceases to be relevant; there is no further season-by-season struggle. Once the connection and the struggle in the realm of production have been severed, it is a simple matter also to sever the connection—and the struggle—in the realm of ritual, charity, and even sociability. This aspect of the green revolution, by itself, goes a long way toward accounting for the relative absence, here and elsewhere, of mass violence. If the profits of the green revolution had depended on squeezing more from the tenants, rather than dismissing them, or extracting more work for less pay from laborers, the consequences for class conflict would surely have been far more dramatic. As it is, the profits from double-cropping depend much less on exploiting the poor directly than on ignoring and replacing them.1 Class conflict, like any conflict, is played out on a site—the threshing floor, the assembly line, the place where piece-rates or rents are settled-where vital interests are at stake. What doublecropping in Muda has achieved is a gradual bulldozing of the sites where class conflict has historically occurred.