Weapons of the Weak- Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance

by James C Scott

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  A second obstacle to open protest is already implicit in the piecemeal impact of double-cropping. The impact of each of the changes we have discussed is mediated by the very complex and overlapping class structure of Sedaka. There are well-off tenants and very poor tenants; there are landlords who are (or whose children are) also tenants and laborers; there are smallholders who need wage work to survive but also hire the combines. Thus each of the important shifts in tenure and production creates not only victims and beneficiaries but also a substantial strata whose interests are not so easily discerned. Sedaka is not Morelos, where a poor and largely undifferentiated peasantry confronted a common enemy in the sugar plantation. It is in fact only in comparatively rare circumstances that the class structure of the countryside was such as to produce either a decisive single cleavage or a nearly uniform response to external pressure. The very complexity of the class structure in Sedaka militates against collective opinion and, hence, collective action on most issues.

  The obstacles to collective action presented by the local class structure are compounded by other cleavages and alliances that cut across class. These are the familiar links of kinship, friendship, faction, patronage, and ritual ties that muddy the “class waters” in virtually any small community. Nearly without exception, they operate to the advantage of the richer farmers by creating a relationship of dependence that restrains the prudent poor man or woman from acting in class terms. Thus Mansur, a poor landless laborer, is related to Shamsul, one of the richest men in the village, and can expect occasional free meals at his house as well as casual work now and then. While this does not prevent Mansur from privately complaining about the loss of work and the tightfisted rich in general, it does help explain his UMNO membership and his deferential profile in village politics. Mat “halus” is extremely poor, rather outspoken privately on class issues, and a member of PAS. But he rents a single relong from his father-in-law, Abdul Rahman, a fairly wealthy UMNO landowner, and takes care not to embarrass him by making trouble in the village. Other examples might be cited, but the point is clear. A small minority of the village poor are hedged in by links of kinship and/or petty economic dependencies they are reluctant to jeopardize. If they disagree with their relative, landlord, or employer, they are likely to do so with circumspection. It would be a mistake to overemphasize such ties, for they are certainly rarer and more fragile than they once were, and many of the poor are not constrained in this way at all. They do, nevertheless, neutralize a fraction of the poor.2

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  A third obstacle to open resistance is, perhaps, not so much an obstacle as a viable alternative. As Moore reminds us in quite another context, “throughout the centuries one of the common man’s most frequent and effective responses to oppression [has been] flight.”3 Nowhere has this option been more historically significant than in Southeast Asia in general and Malaya in particular. So long as there was a land frontier and so long as control over manpower rather than land was the basis of surplus extraction, the possibility of what one writer has awkwardly called “avoidance protest” has always proved more attractive than the risk of open confrontation.4 Much to the consternation of their indigenous leaders as well as their colonial rulers, the rural Malay population has always been exceptionally mobile-moving to another petty chiefdom, leaving one plot of land to make a new clearing and homestead in the forest, switching crops and often occupations in the process-and has classically “voted with its feet.” Because of its particular demography and social organization, it would not be an exaggeration to say that “exit” rather than “voice” had come to characterize the traditional and preferred response to oppression in Malay society.5 Fortunately for the contemporary losers in the green revolution, this traditional option is still available to many.

  For half a century at the very least, a substantial portion of the population increase in Kedah’s rice bowl has been moving away. They have contributed, as pioneers, to the opening up of new paddy areas in Perak, Perlis, Pahang, Johor, and the inland districts of Kedah itself. Virtually every poor family in the village has, at one time or another, applied for acceptance to government-sponsored settlement schemes (ranchangan), where incomes from rubber and especially oil palm are routinely more than can be wrested from even a substantial paddy farm. Only a few have been selected, and they are typically not from among the poorest villagers. Still, the slim chance of becoming a sponsored settler (peneroka) is a factor in preventing more open expressions of local conflict. For the children of modest and poor villagers, the option of factory work and domestic service (for women) and full-time urban contract labor (for men) are available. For the [Page 246] poor families who largely choose to remain, short-term contract labor in the cities offers a means to a viable, if unsatisfactory, livelihood. This last, and most common, resort not only reduces the economic pressure on poor families but also removes the head of household from active participation in village affairs for much of the year. Such semiproletarians still reside largely in the village and may even farm a small plot of paddy land, but they play an increasingly marginal role in the local issues that might provoke class conflict. A major slump in offfarm employment would, of course, change this picture dramatically by making local work and access to land that much more salient.6 For the time being, however, the ability to raid the cash economy to make good the local subsistence deficit continues to provide a less risky alternative to local conflict.

  Lest one gain the impression from the foregoing that the obstacles to class conflict in Sedaka are entirely a matter of the complex local stratification, the piecemeal character of changes in production relations, and the alternative sources of income, I hasten to add that repression and the fear of repression are very much involved as well. The chilling role of repression as it is experienced by poor villagers will become all too apparent in the accounts that follow. Here it is sufficient simply to note that the efforts to halt or impede the growth of combine-harvesting occurred in a climate of fear generated by local elites, by the police, by the “Special—Branch” internal security forces, by a pattern of political arrests and intimidation. There is good reason to believe that the local campaign against the combine would have assumed a more open and defiant course had it not been for the justifiable fears generated by coercion.

  The fifth and final obstacle to open resistance makes sense only against a background of expected repression. This obstacle is simply the day-to-day imperative of earning a living-of household survival-which Marx appropriately termed “the dull compulsion of economic relations.”7 Lacking any realistic possibility, for the time being, of directly and collectively redressing their situation, the village poor have little choice but to adjust, as best they can, to the circumstances they confront daily. Tenants may bitterly resent the rent they must pay for their small plot, but they must pay it or lose the land; the near landless may deplore the loss of wage work, but they must scramble for the few opportunities available; they may harbor deep animosities toward the clique that dominates village politics, but they must act with circumspection if they wish to benefit from any of the small advantages that clique can confer.

  At least two aspects of this grudging, pragmatic adaptation to the realities [Page 247] merit emphasis. The first is that it does not rule out certain forms of resistance, although it surely sets limits that only the foolhardy would transgress. The second is that it is above all pragmatic; it does not imply normative consent to those realities. To understand this is simply to grasp what is, in all likelihood, the situation for most subordinate classes historically. They struggle under conditions that are largely not of their own making, and their pressing material needs necessitate something of a daily accommodation to those conditions. Dissident intellectuals from the middle or upper classes may occasionally have the luxury of focusing exclusively on the prospects for long-term structural change, but the peasantry or the working class are granted no holiday from the mundane pressures of making a li
ving. If we observe, as we shall, a good deal of “conforming” behavior in daily social life in Sedaka, we have no reason to assume that it derives from some symbolic hegemony or normative consensus engineered by elites or by the state. The duress of the quotidian is quite sufficient. Durkheim and Weber recognized, as did Marx, “that human beings are forced to behave in certain directions regardless of their own preferences and inclinations.”8 Durkheim’s view of the daily constraints on the industrial working class could be applied with even greater emphasis to the peasantry:

  This tension in social relations is due, in part, to the fact that the working classes are not really satisfied with the conditions under which they live, but very often accept them only as constrained and forced, since they have not the means to change them.9

  In the long run, and in certain circumstances, the peasantry and the working class do have “the means to change” fundamentally their situation. But in the short run-today, tomorrow, and the day after-they face a situation that very sharply restricts their real options.10 The few opportunities for land and work remaining to Sedaka’s poor depend today, as always, on the sufferance of the wealthy. If much of the day-to-day public behavior of the poor reflects that fact, [Page 248] it can be explained by nothing more than a healthy and expedient regard for survival. “Going for broke” can have little appeal in a context in which the final word of this expression must be taken quite literally.

  THE EFFORT TO STOP THE COMBINE-HARVESTER

  The introduction of combine-harvesting, as the most sudden and devastating of the changes associated with double-cropping, also stirred the most active resistance. This resistance went well beyond the arguments about its efficiency, the complaints over lost wages, and the slander directed against those who hired it, which I have already described. Throughout the rice bowl of Kedah there were efforts physically to obstruct its entry into the fields, incidents of arson and sabotage, and widespread attempts to organize “strikes” of transplanters against those who first hired the machine. All of these actions ultimately failed to prevent the mechanization of the paddy harvest, although they undoubtedly delayed it somewhat. A close examination of the forms of resistance and the responses of large farmers can teach us a great deal about both the possibilities and limits that help structure this resistance.

  Combines were, of course, not the first machines that had threatened the livelihood of poorer villagers in Muda. As we have seen in the preceding chapter, the use of tractors and trucks to haul paddy directly from the field to town had earlier sparked spirited and successful resistance in some villages. The threat posed by combines, however, was of a far greater magnitude. Sporadic resistance began as early as 1970, when the first small experimental machines, adapted from a Japanese prototype, were used in field trials near the town of Jitra. Officials of the Muda Agricultural Development Authority, who conducted the trials, recalled several incidents of sabotage, all of which they chose to call “vandalism.”11 Batteries were removed from the machines and thrown in irrigation ditches; carburetors and other vital parts such as distributors and air filters were smashed; sand and mud were put into the gas tank; and various objects (stones, wire, nails) were thrown into the augers. Two aspects of this sabotage deserve particular emphasis. First, it was clear that the goal of the saboteurs was not simple theft, for nothing was actually stolen. Second, all of the sabotage was carried out at night by individuals or small groups acting anonymously. They were, furthermore, shielded by their fellow villagers who, if they knew who was involved, claimed total ignorance when the police came to investigate. As a result, no prosecutions were ever made. The practice of posting a night watchman to guard the combine dates from these early trials.

  Starting in 1976, when combine-harvesting began with a vengeance, peasant [Page 249] acts of vengeance likewise spread throughout the paddy-growing region. Poorer villagers in Sedaka can remember several incidents, which they recount with something akin to glee. Tok Mahmud, for example, told me that he knew exactly how to jam a combine’s auger-where to put the barbed wire or nailsbecause he had friends (kawan) who had done it. He declined to elaborate because, he said, if he talked openly his friends might be arrested (tangkap). Sukur described a more dramatic incident, two seasons before I arrived, near Tokai, just a few miles south of Sedaka, where a combine was set on fire. A number of poor people (orang susah), he said, surrounded the Malay night watchman and asked him who owned the machine (Jentera siapa?). When he replied that it belonged to a Chinese syndicate, they ordered him to climb down and then poured kerosene over the engine and cab and set it alight. Two Malay young men were arrested the next day but were quickly released for lack of evidence. Villagers report several other incidents of trees being felled across the combine’s path into one village or another and of wire being jammed into the auger, particularly near Selangkuh.

  I made no effort to assemble a complete inventory of reported incidents, although it was a rare peasant who could not recall one or two. No one, however, could recall any such incident in Sedaka itself. This may merely reflect an understandable reluctance to call attention to themselves. And at no time did the overall volume of sabotage reach anything like the level of machine breaking that accompanied the introduction of mechanical threshers into England in the 1830s.12

  At the same time that individuals and small groups of men were attacking the machines, there were the beginnings of a quiet but more collective effort by women to bring pressure to bear on the farmers who hired the machines. Men and women-often from the same family-had, of course, each lost work to the combine, but it was only the women who still had any real bargaining [Page 250] power. They were, for the time being, still in control of transplanting.13 The group of women (kumpulan share, from the English) who reaped a farmer’s land were typically the same group that had earlier transplanted the same field. They were losing roughly half their seasonal earnings, and they understandably resented transplanting a crop for a farmer who would use the combine at harvest time. Thus, in Sedaka and, it appears, throughout much of the Muda region, such women resolved to organize a boycott (boikot) that would deny transplanting services to their employers who hired the combine.

  Three of the five “share groups” in Sedaka evidently made some attempts to enforce such a boycott. Those groups of anywhere from six to nine women were led by Rosni (a widow), Rokiah (the wife of Mat Buyong), and Miriam (the wife of Mat Isa). The remaining two groups, led by the wives of Tajuddin and Ariffin, appear not to have been involved, but neither group would agree to plant paddy for a farmer who was being boycotted by one of the other three gangs. Why the groups of Rosni, Rokiah, and Miriam took the initiative is not entirely clear. They are composed of women from families that are, on average, slightly poorer than those in the remaining two groups, but only slightly. The first two are, as well, largely from PAS households, but this may be as much due to kinship and neighborhood as to factionalism per se, and in any case they were frequently boycotting farmers from their own political faction. If we rely on local explanations for the pattern of resistance, the consensus is that Rosni and Rokiah depend heavily on wage labor to support their families and are at the same time “courageous” (berani).14

  The forms the boycott took were very much in keeping with the kinds of cautious resistance I have so far described. At no time was there ever an open confrontation between a farmer who used the combine and his transplanters. Instead, the anonymous and indirect approach of cara sembunyi tau with which we are familiar was employed. The women “let it be known” through intermediaries that the group was dissatisfied (tak puas hati) with the loss of harvest work and would be reluctant (segan) to transplant the fields of those who had hired the combine the previous season. They also let it be known that, when and if a combine broke down in the course of the harvest, a farmer who wanted then to get his crop in by hand could not count on his old workers to bail him out.