Weapons of the Weak- Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance

by James C Scott

  [Page 251]

  When it came time at the beginning of the irrigated season of 1977 to make good on this threat, circumspection again prevailed. None of the three groups refused outright to transplant paddy for those who had harvested with the combine in the previous season. Rather, they delayed; the head of the share group would tell the offending farmer that they were busy and could not get to his land just yet. Only a dozen or so farmers had used the combine the previous season, so the share groups had a good deal of work to occupy them just transplanting the crops of those who had not mechanized.15 The transplanters thus kept their options open; they avoided a direct refusal to transplant, which would have provoked an open break. Fully abreast of the rumors of a boycott, the farmers who had been put off became increasingly anxious as their nursery paddy was passing its prime and as they feared their crop might not be fully mature before the scheduled date for shutting off the supply of water. Their state of mind was not improved by the sight of their neighbors’ newly transplanted fields next to their own vacant plots.

  After more than two weeks of this war of nerves-the seeming boycott that never fully announced itself-six farmers “let it be known” that they were arranging for outside laborers to come and transplant their crops. By most accounts, these six were Haji Kadir, Haji Salim, Tok Kasim, Lazim, Kamil, and Cik Mah, who between them cultivate nearly 100 relong. They claimed in their defense that they had pressed for a firm commitment for a transplanting date from their local share group and, only after being put off again, had they moved. At this point, the boycott collapsed. Each of the three share groups was faced with defections, as women feared that the transplanting work would be permanently lost to outsiders. They hastily sent word that they would begin transplanting the land in question within the next few days. Three of the six farmers canceled their arrangements with the outside gangs, while the other three went ahead either because they felt it was too late to cancel or because they wished to teach the women a lesson. Transplanters came from the town of Yan (just outside the irrigation scheme) and from Singkir and Merbuk, farther away. Haji Salim, using his considerable political influence, arranged with MADA to bring in a gang of Thai transplanters-a practice he has continued and for which he is bitterly resented.

  The brief and abortive attempt to stop the combine by collective action was [Page 252] the subject of demoralized or self-satisfied postmortems, depending on which side of the fence one happened to be. Aside from the pleasure or disappointment expressed, the postmortems, for once, converged on the inevitability of the outcome. Those with most to lose from mechanization realized that the women could not really move beyond talk and threats. Thus, Wahid said that the rumored boycott was “just talk and they planted anyway.” “What could they do?” he asked, throwing up his hands. Tok Mahmud echoed this assessment: “Other people took the work; once the work is gone they couldn’t do anything.” “People are clever,” Sukur added, “If you don’t want to transplant, they’ll take the work and money.” It is for this reason, Samad claimed, that the women were careful not to burn their bridges and only talked of a boycott well out of earshot (kot jauh saja) of large farmers. Finally, in the same vein, Hamzah summed up the long odds against the women:

  Whether you complain or don’t complain, it’s no use. You can’t do anything; you can’t win. If you say anything, they won’t hire you to plant even. The women will even have to cut paddy for a farmer if the combine breaks down. If you’re hard up, you have to take the work. If you refuse (tolak), if you don’t do it, others will. Only those who are well-off (senang) can refuse.

  We could ask for no clearer exposition of the “dull compulsion of economic relations.” The well-to-do were not only aware of this “dull compulsion” but were counting on it. As Mat Isa noted, “They didn’t do anything; it was only idle talk (mulut saja).”16 Tok Kasim, whose stake in mechanization was higher because he was a machine broker as well as a farmer, realized the boycott would never be carried out, since “the poor have to work anyway; they can’t hold out (tahan).” And Lebai Hussein said that, although they were “angry,” the women could only talk about (sembang-sembang saja) a boycott, since they needed the money. He concluded with a Malay saying that precisely captured the difficulties the women faced: “Angry with their rice, they throw it out for the chickens to eat.”17 The closest English equivalent is “cutting off your nose to spite your face.”

  If we step back a few paces from our single village perspective, a wider and more melancholy pattern appears. The share groups of women in Sedaka were, in this same period, occasionally hired to transplant paddy fields as much as thirty miles away. Rosni told me that once a woman from Setiti Batu, where their share groups was planting, had told her that the farmer for whom they were working had not been able to recruit local transplanters because he had [Page 253] harvested last season with the combine. When she learned this, Rosni told the woman that she was “sick at heart” (sakit hati) but that the work was nearly finished anyway.18 It is only too likely that there were similar cases as well. Thus, from this wider perspective, the poorer women of Sedaka were inadvertently serving as “strike-breakers” in other Muda villages. And women from these villages, or others like them, were undoubtedly coming to break the boycott in Sedaka. What we have here is a nearly classic example of the crippling effect of class action by peasants when it is confined, as it typically is, to one or a few villages in a much wider labor market.19

  Similar attempts at a labor boycott occurred throughout much of the Muda region. An official at the state headquarters of MADA confided to me that he suspected most of the landlords, like Haji Salim, who applied there for permission to import Thai transplanters were actually attempting to get around a local labor boycott. Inasmuch as they were invariably quite large-scale farmers, they were the ones most likely to have hired the combine at the first opportunity. Talk of a boycott was certainly very common. Thus Rosemary Barnard writes of a village near the state capital of Alor Setar in which (in 1978) there was “talk of combining forces to attempt to block combine harvesters next season.”20 In Sedaka itself I frequently heard the names of villages that had, it was claimed, kept the combine harvesters off their fields. Lebai Pendek said that the village of Gelam Dua to the north still harvested all its local fields by hand. Kubang Jerai and other villages in the Bukit Raya district, a PAS stronghold, were often mentioned as places where the boycott and machine breaking had prevented the combines from coming. Mansur said that in Kangkong, to the north, the poor were “better organized” (lagi teratur) and hand harvesting was still the rule.21 [Page 254] In nearby Mengkuang, the police had to be called to prevent a near riot when a large landowner had, at the last minute, attempted to send his assembled harvest laborers home upon discovering that a nearby combine could be hired immediately.

  The village most often mentioned in this connection, however, was Permatang Buluh, about twelve miles to the north. In this kampung, many said, combines were still not used because the poor had banded together so successfully. The harvest workers and transplanters of Sedaka spoke of this community with something approaching awe, so I made a point of visiting Permatang Buluh to see for myself. My companion that day was Amin, who had an uncle living there. The uncle, who himself farmed over 10 relong, reported that he and most others now used combines and that the boycott had failed. It was only when I walked through the paddy fields unaccompanied that I heard a slightly different account from a small tenant. He said that the “poor” in Permatang Buluh had, in fact, prevented the combine from harvesting paddy for three seasons, until 1978. When I asked how they had done it, he replied that the large farmers had been “afraid.” And when I asked why they were afraid, he simply said golok putihputih, which might be translated as “the machetes were gleaming (or very sharp).” Perhaps sensing that he had already volunteered too much to a stranger, he declined to elaborate, but it was clear from his remark that the threat of violence was a factor. Two other characteristics of Permatang Buluh m
ay help account for its relative success in delaying mechanization. It appeared that the village had more than the usual proportion of landless and smallholders who depended heavily on wages. The headman of the village was also unusual in a way that might have facilitated solidarity among the poor. Although he was born, like most headmen, into a well-to-do household, his father had lost nearly all his land through gambling debts and thus the present headman was himself a part-time harvest worker. Even with those particular “advantages” the success of the Permatang Buluh had been short-lived.

  When the would-be boycotters and machine breakers of Sedaka spoke about their own experience or about the relative success of others, what one heard was not just a litany of discouragement and despair. There was also more than just a glimmer of what might have been (or might be) if the poor had acted with more unity and force. Thus Samad saw Permatang Buluh as something of an inspiration: “If we had done the same thing here, the machines wouldn’t have come. It would have been good (bagus) if we had, but we weren’t organized (tak teratur).”22 Rokiah herself spoke with disdain of the share groups in Sedaka compared with Permatang Buluh: “Here they didn’t want [to carry it through].” “If they had all agreed, if they had struck, [the machinesi would not have been brave enough to come in.”23 Mansur, one of the few pure landless laborers in [Page 255] the village, echoed these sentiments precisely. “People here weren’t unified; they were afraid and only followed [the rich]; if they were stronger, then they could lift themselves up.” The same assessment of present disunity together with a faint promise of greater solidarity is evident when talk turned to the possibility that there will one day be transplanting machines that will replace the women. Bakri bin Haji Wahab said that if such machines came the women would then charge a dollar for uprooting each small bundle (cap) of seedlings from the nursery bed. “It could become a war,” he added.24 Then Ishak more realistically pointed out that if the women charged M$ 1 for each bundle then others would agree to do it for 90 cents, others for 80 cents or 70 cents and that “would be the end of it.”

  As the large farmers see it, the attempted boycott was “all talk”-virtually a “nonevent.” There is something to this view, inasmuch as the boycott was never openly declared and collapsed without fanfare. The use of delays and barely plausible excuses meant that the intention to boycott itself could be disavowed. As the losers see it, however, it was an effort in the right direction that fell short. They are under no illusions about their own weak position or the obstacles in their path, but they do look to the modest successes elsewhere as something of a goad and inspiration.

  “ROUTINE” RESISTANCE

  The attempt to halt combine-harvesting, while hardly the stuff of high drama, was at least out of the ordinary-a new, if largely futile, initiative. It took place against a rarely noticed background of routine resistance over wages, tenancy, rents, and the distribution of paddy that is a permanent feature of life in Sedaka and in any stratified agrarian setting. A close examination of this realm of struggle exposes an implicit form of local trade unionism that is reinforced both by mutuality among the poor and by a considerable amount of theft and violence against property. Very little of this activity, as we shall see, poses a fundamental threat to the basic structure of agrarian inequalities, either materially or symbolically. What it does represent, however, is a constant process of testing and renegotiation of production relations between classes. On both sides-landlordtenant, farmer-wage laborer-there is a never-ending attempt to seize each small advantage and press it home, to probe the limits of the existing relationships, to see precisely what can be gotten away with at the margin, and to include this margin as a part of an accepted, or at least tolerated, territorial claim. Over the past decade the flow of this frontier battle has, of course, rather consistently favored the fortunes of the large farmers and landlords. They have not only swallowed large pieces of the territory defended by wage workers and tenants, but in doing so they have thereby reduced (through marginalization) the perim [Page 256] eter along which the struggle continues. Even along this reduced perimeter, however, there is constant pressure exerted by those who hope to regain at least a small patch of what they have grudgingly lost. The resisters require little explicit coordination to conduct this struggle, for the simple imperative of making a tolerable living is enough to make them dig in their heels.

  My goal here is only to convey something of the dimensions and conduct of this routine resistance, not its full extent, for that could fill a volume in itself. Inasmuch as a great deal of this resistance concerns the disposition of the proceeds of paddy farming, the best place to begin is in the paddy field itself, with threshing.

  Trade Unionism without Trade Unions

  Threshers, unlike reapers, are hired and paid by the farmer as individuals. They work in pairs at a single threshing tube and then divide the piece-rate earnings at the end of the day. In 1979, the average piece-rate per gunny sack was M$2. The piece-work organization of the work produces a conflict of interest between the thresher and the farmer whose paddy is being threshed. The farmer naturally wants all the rice from his field and, for that reason, prefers to have the threshers beat each bundle of cut paddy until virtually all the grains are in the tub. The thresher, in contrast, is interested in the cash he can earn for a day’s work.25 Depending on the ripeness of the paddy, roughly 80-90 percent of the grains are dislodged in the first two or three strokes. To dislodge most of the remaining paddy may require as many as six or seven strokes. The tub fills up faster, and the thresher earns more for the day’s work, if he beats each sheaf only two or three times and moves quickly to the next sheaf.26 If he were to work in this fashion, he might thresh as many as ten gunny sacks (M$20) in a day, compared with, say, M$10 or M$12 if he were to thresh each sheaf thoroughly. The difference is vital when one recalls that, for poor men, threshing is the bestpaid work of the season, and there is a premium on making the most of it while it lasts. Nor does the conflict of interest between the thresher’s wages and the farmer’s paddy end here. A thresher can, in fact, recover the paddy he has left on the stalks if there is someone in his family who gleans. The more paddy poor men leave lying beside the threshing tubs, the more paddy the women in [Page 257] their household can collect once the harvest is over. This provides them with a further incentive to leave some behind.

  Expectations have of course developed concerning how many times each sheaf of paddy, depending on the variety and its ripeness, should be beaten. But these expectations require constant pressure and constant supervision to enforce. The first few times I threshed, I wondered why the farmer, even if he was relatively poor, did not thresh himself. After all, I reasoned, he could save as much as M$20 in wages he was paying to others. When I asked a farmer (Mat Isa) at the end of the day, he said that if he did not watch the threshers he would lose half his paddy. This was surely an exaggeration, but it explains why most small farmers supervise their threshers rather than work themselves. As the laborers work, the farmer circulates slowly and makes his presence felt. And when he is at the far corner of the field, when the matting inserted high around the tub to catch flying grains blocks his view, or when he is busy preparing a snack, the number of times each sheaf is beaten diminishes appreciably. The advantage to be gained is marginal and limited, since the farmer-or, as he is called in Malay, “paddy owner” (tuan padi)-will notice how fast the tub fills, may casually check the threshed sheaves, and in any event can always decide not to invite the worker back the following season.27 It has, I was told, occasionally happened that a thresher whose work has displeased the farmer is told he will not be needed the next day, but this is extremely rare. The farmer also avoids, whenever possible, hiring a thresher who has many gleaners in his household. Thus Mat “halus,” whose entire family does a prodigious amount of gleaning, is seldom if ever invited to thresh in Sedaka. Other poor men will occasionally send their wives or daughters to glean fields they have threshed, but they are careful not to make a practice of
it lest they jeopardize their employment.

  Now that there is considerably less threshing work available, the margin for such routine resistance has narrowed. It has not, however, disappeared entirely. The actual number of times a sheaf of paddy is beaten is still a compromise between what the farmer would like and what he is able to enforce-a compromise determined not only by the overall balance of power but by a daily, unremitting struggle in the paddy fields.

  Another focus of routine resistance is the determination of the rates of pay for transplanting, reaping, and threshing. The scope for movement is relatively [Page 258] small, since something like a going rate based on labor market conditions is established in the course of each season. But there is some variation and room for maneuver both early in the particular phase before the rates have settled or when a temporary labor shortage develops. The share groups of women and the men who thresh are incredibly alert to news that any farmer is paying even fractionally more than the rate for the previous season. As Rosni noted, “once someone gets it [a higher wage], the others will have to follow.”28 What in fact is the going rate for given tasks is the object of heated debate nearly every season, with the head of the share group quoting the highest rate she has heard of (or can plausibly invent) and the employer quoting the lowest in the same fashion. The workers are restrained by the possibility of losing the job to others and the farmer is restrained by his concern for having his crop transplanted or harvested in good time. So far as the laborers are concerned, the Chinese who farm in the area play a beneficial role in this negotiating process inasmuch as they are the most likely to break ranks and pay more.29 It is fairly common to hear complaints by large farmers about how their workers lie and cheat (bohong, tipu), when it comes to quoting the going-rate. They keep their ears to the ground as well and attempt, whenever possible, to dispute a report of higher wages or to explain it away by reference to special conditions (for example, deep water, or lodging, in the case of reaping and threshing) that do not apply to their own fields. The advantage to be gained through these contesting representations of the labor market may seem trivial but, for those at the margin, the possibility of a marginal gain is never trivial. What appears in Muda statistics as the seasonal “labor market”-the average price for transplanting, reaping, and threshingis, at the village level, the outcome of constant maneuvering.