Weapons of the Weak- Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance

by James C Scott

  At a first approximation, I might claim that class resistance’ includes any act(s) by member(s) of a subordinate class that is or are intended either to mitigate or deny claims (for example, rents, taxes, prestige) made on that class by superordinate classes (for example, landlords, large farmers, the state) or to advance its own claims (for example, work, land, charity, respect) vis-a-vis those superordinate classes. While this definition, as we shall see, is not without problems, it does have several advantages. It focuses on the material basis of class relations and class struggle. It allows for both individual and collective acts of resistance. It does not exclude those forms of ideological resistance that challenge the dominant definition of the situation and assert different standards of justice and equity. Finally, it focuses on intentions rather than consequences, recognizing that many acts of resistance may fail to achieve their intended result.

  Where there is strong evidence for the intention behind the act, the case for resistance is correspondingly strengthened. Thus it is reasonably clear that the women in the share groups intended to deny machine users transplanting services and thereby force them to revert to hand harvesting. The mutuality among the poor that prevents them competing for tenancies is also clearly intended to prevent a scramble that would eventually harm all tenants. In each case, the intentions are not inferred directly from the action but rather from the explanations the participants give for their behavior. For “speech acts,” such as character assassination or malicious gossip directed against wealthy villagers, the act and the intention are fused into one whole; the condemnations of the stingy rich have inscribed within them the intention to recall them to a different standard of conduct or, failing that, to destroy their social standing and influence.

  The insistence that acts of resistance must be shown to be intended, however, creates enormous difficulties for a whole realm of peasant activity which, in Sedaka and elsewhere, has often been considered resistance. Take, for example, the questibn of theft or pilferage. What are we to call the poor man in Sedaka who “appropriates” a gunny sack of paddy from a rich man’s field: a thief, tout court, or a resister as well? What are we to call the act of a thresher who takes care to leave plenty of paddy on the stalks for his wife and children who will glean tomorrow: an act of petty pilfering or an act of resistance? There are two problems here. The first is the practical problem of obtaining evidence of the intentions behind the act, of what it means for the actor. The very nature of the enterprise is such that the actor is unlikely to admit to the action itself, let alone explain what he had in mind. That some poor men in Sedaka considered such [Page 291] thefts to be a kind of self-help zakat gift may count as circumstantial evidence that such thieves see themselves as taking what is theirs by right, but it is hardly decisive. Thus, while it may be possible to uncover a set of beliefs shared by a class that legitimize theft or pilfering, it will rarely be possible to uncover the beliefs of the actor in question. The “transcript” of petty thieves, especially those not yet apprehended, is notoriously hard to come by.

  The second problem concerns broader issues of definition and analysis. We tend to think of resistance as actions that involve at least some short-run individual or collective sacrifice in order to bring about a longer-range, beneficial goal. The immediate losses of a strike, a boycott, or even the refusal to compete with other members of one’s class for land or work are obvious cases inpoint. When it comes to acts like theft, however, we encounter a combination of immediate individual gain and what may be resistance. How are we to judge which of the two purposes is uppermost or decisive? What is at stake is not a petty definitional matter but rather the interpretation of a whole range of actions that seem to me to lie historically at the core of everyday class relations. The English poacher in the eighteenth century may have been resisting gentry’s claim to property in wild game, but he was just as surely interested in rabbit stew. The slaves in the antebellum U.S. South who secretly butchered their master’s hog may have been asserting their right to a decent subsistence, but they were just as surely indulging their fondness for roast pork. The Southeast Asian peasant who hid his rice and possessions from the tax collector may have been protesting high taxes, but he was just as surely seeing to it that his family would have enough rice until the next harvest. The peasant conscript who deserted the army may have been a war resister, but he was just as surely saving his own skin by fleeing the front. Which of these inextricably fused motives are we to take as paramount? Even if we were able to ask the actors in question, and even if they could reply candidly, it is not at all clear that they would be able to make a clear determination. Students of slavery, who have looked into this matter most closely, if only because such forms of self-help were frequently the only option open to slaves, have tended to discount such actions as “real” resistance for three reasons. All three figure in Gerald Mullin’s analysis of slave “rebelliousness”:

  In addressing these observable differences in slave behavior, scholars usually ask whether a particular rebellious style represented resistance to slavery’s abuses or real resistance to slavery itself. When slave behavior is examined in light of its political context, the most menial workers, the field slaves, fare badly. Speaking generally, their “laziness,” boondoggling, and pilferage represented a limited, perhaps self-indulgent type of rebelliousness. Their reactions to unexpected abuses or to sudden changes in plantation routine were at most only token acts against slavery. But the plantation slaves’ organized and systematic schemes to obstruct the plantation’s workings [Page 292] their persistent acts of attrition against crops and stores, and cooperative nighttime robberies that sustained the blackma-rkets-were more “political” in their consequences and represented resistance to slavery itself.93

  Although Eugene Genovese’s position on this issue differs in some important particulars, he too insists on distinguishing between prepolitical forms of resistance and more significant resistance to the regime of slavery. The distinction for him, as the following quotation indicates, lies in both the realm of consequences and the realm of intentions:

  Strictly speaking, only insurrection represented political action, which some choose to define as the only genuine resistance since it alone directly challenged the power of the regime. From that point of view, those activities which others call “day-to-day resistance to slavery”-stealing, lying, dissembling, shirking, murder, infanticide, suicide, arson-qualify at best as prepolitical and at worst as apolitical…. But “day-to-day resistance to slavery” generally implied accommodation and made no sense except on the assumption of an accepted status quo the norms of which, as perceived or defined by the slaves, had been violated.94

  Combining these overlapping perspectives, the result is something of a dichotomy between real resistance, on the one hand, and token, incidental, or even epiphenomenal activities, on the other. Real resistance, it is argued, is (a) organized, systematic, and cooperative, (b) principled or selfless, (c) has revolutionary consequences, and/or (d) embodies ideas or intentions that negate the basis of domination itself. Token, incidental, or epiphenomenal activities, by contrast, are (a) unorganized, unsystematic, and individual, (b) opportunistic and self-indulgent, (c) have no revolutionary consequences, and/or (d) imply, in their intention or meaning, an accommodation with the system of domination. These distinctions are important for any analysis that has as its objective the attempt to delineate the various forms of resistance and to show how they are related to one another and to the form of domination in which they occur. My quarrel is with the contention that the latter forms are ultimately trivial or inconsequential, while only the former can be said to constitute real resistance. This position, in my view, fundamentally misconstrues the very basis of the economic and political struggle conducted daily by subordinate classes-not only slaves, but peasants and workers as well-in repressive settings. It is based on an ironic combination of both Leninist and bourgeois assumptions of what constitutes political action. The first thr
ee of the paired comparisons will be addressed here while the final, and vital issue, of whether intentions are accom [Page 293] modationist or revolutionary will be touched on only briefly and examined in more detail in the next chapter.

  Let us begin with the question of actions that are “self-indulgent,” individual, and unorganized. Embedded in the logic of Genovese and, especially, of Mullins, is the assumption that such acts intrinsically lack revolutionary consequences. This may often be the case, but it is also the case that there is hardly a modern revolution that can be successfully explained without reference to precisely such acts when they take place on a massive scale. Take, for example, the matter of desertion from the army and the role it has played in revolutions.

  The Russian Revolution is a striking case in point. Growing desertions from the largely peasant rank and file of the army in the summer of 1917 were a major and indispensable part of the revolutionary process in at least two respects. First, they were responsible for the collapse of the main institution of repression of the tsarist state, inherited by the Provisional Government-an institution that had earlier, in 1905, put down another revolutionary upheaval. Second, the deserters contributed directly to the revolutionary process in the countryside by participating in the seizures of land throughout the core provinces of European Russia. And it is abundantly clear that the hemorrhage in the tsarist forces was largely “self-indulgent,” “unorganized,” and “individual,” although thousands and thousands of individuals threw down their arms and headed home.95 The June attack into Austria had been crushed with huge losses of troops and officers; the ration of bread had been reduced and “fast days” inaugurated at the front; the soldiers knew, moreover, that if they stayed at the front they might miss the chance to gain from the land seizures breaking out in the countryside.96 Desertion offered the peasant conscripts the chance of saving their skins and of returning home where bread and, now, land were available. The risks were minimal since discipline in the army had dissolved. One can hardly imagine a set of more “self-indulgent” goals. But it was just such self-indulgent ends, acted on [Page 294] by unorganized masses of “self-demobilized” peasant soldiers that made the revolution possible.97

  The disintegration of the Russian army is but one of many instances where the aggregation of a host of petty, self-interested acts of insubordination or desertion, with no revolutionary intent, have created a revolutionary situation. The dissolution of the Nationalist armies of Chiang Kai-shek in 1948 and of Saigon’s army in 1975 could no doubt be analyzed along similar lines. And long before the final debacle, acts of insubordination and noncompliance in each army-in the U.S. Army serving in Vietnam as well, it should be added-had set sharp limits on what the counterrevolutionary forces could expect and require of their own rank and file.98 Resistance of this kind is of course not a monopoly of the counterrevolution, as George Washington and Emiliano Zapata, among others, discovered. We can imagine that the eminently personal logic of Pedro Martinez, a sometime soldier with the Zapatista forces, was not markedly different from that of the tsarist troops leaving the front.

  That’s where [battle of Tizapan] I finally had it. The battle was something awful: The shooting was tremendous! It was a completely bloody battle, three days and three nights. But I took it for one day and then I left. I quit the army… I said to myself, “It’s time now I got back to my wife, to my little children. I’m getting out.”… I said to myself, “No, my family comes first and they are starving. Now I’m leaving.”99

  The refreshing candor of Pedro Martinez serves to remind us that there is no necessary relationship between the banality of the act of self-preservation and of family obligations, on the one hand, and the banality of the consequences of such acts, on the other.

  While the consequences of peasant self-serving are essential to any larger analysis of class relations or of the state, I do not wish to argue that resistance [Page 295] should be defined with reference to its consequences alone. Such a view runs into formidable difficulties, if for no reason other than the “law of unintended consequences.” Many acts that almost any reasonable observer would call acts of resistance may backfire and produce the very opposite of what was intended. The terrorism of revolutionary movements that explicitly aim at crippling the state may instead usher in a more terrible and permanent dictatorship. The effective strike of peasant laborers explicitly intended to raise wages and increase employment may instead prompt a wholesale mechanization of production, thereby eliminating jobs.100

  The problem with existing concepts of resistance is therefore not that they must inevitably deal with intentions and meaning as well as with consequences. Rather, the problem lies in what is a misleading, sterile, and sociologically naive insistence upon distinguishing “self-indulgent,” individual acts, on the one hand, from presumably “principled,” selfless, collective actions, on the other, and excluding the former from the category of real resistance. To insist on such distinctions as a means of comparing forms of resistance and their consequences is one thing, but to use them as the basic criteria to determine what constitutes resistance is to miss the very wellsprings of peasant politics.

  It is no coincidence that the cries of “bread,” “land,” and “no taxes” that so often lie at the core of peasant rebellion are all joined to the basic material survival needs of the peasant household. Nor should it be anything more than a commonplace that everyday peasant politics and everday peasant resistance (and also, of course, everyday compliance) flows from these same fundamental material needs. We need assume no more than an understandable desire on the part of the peasant household to survive-to ensure its physical safety, to ensure its food supply, to ensure its necessary cash income-to identify the source of its resistance to the claims of press gangs, tax collectors, landlords, and employers.

  To ignore the self-interested element in peasant resistance is to ignore the determinate context not only of peasant politics, but of most lower-class politics. It is precisely the fusion of self-interest and resistance that is the vital force animating the resistance of peasants and proletarians. When a peasant hides part of his crop to avoid paying taxes, he is both filling his stomach and depriving the state of grain.101 When a peasant soldier deserts the army because the food is bad and his crops at home are ripe, he is both looking after himself and [Page 296] denying the state cannon fodder. When such acts are rare and isolated, they are of little interest; but when they become a consistent pattern (even though uncoordinated, let alone organized) we are dealing with resistance. The intrinsic nature and, in one sense, the “beauty” of much peasant resistance is that it often confers immediate and concrete advantages, while at the same time denying resources to the appropriating classes, and that it requires little or no manifest organization. The stubbornness and force of such resistance flow directly from the fact that it is so firmly rooted in the shared material struggle experienced by a class.

  To require of lower-class resistance that it somehow be “principled” or “selfless” is not only utopian and a slander on the moral status of fundamental material needs; it is, more fundamentally, a misconstruction of the basis of class struggle, which is, first and foremost, a struggle over the appropriation of work, production, property, and taxes. “Bread-and-butter” issues are the essence of lower-class politics and resistance. Consumption, from this perspective, is both the goal and the result of resistance and counterresistence. As Utsa Patnaik has noted, “Consumption is nothing but the historically ‘necessary labor,’ the share of net output allowed to be retained by the petty producers as the outcome of their struggle with the surplus-appropriating classes.”102 This is then the self-interested core of routine class struggle: the often defensive effort to mitigate or defeat appropriation.103 Petty thefts of grain or pilfering on the threshing floor may seem like trivial “coping” mechanisms from one vantage point, but, from a broader view of class relations, how the harvest is actually divided belongs at the center.

  A further advanta
ge of a concept of resistance that begins with self-interested material needs is that it is far more in keeping with how “class” is first experienced by the historical actors themselves. Here I subscribe wholeheartedly to the judgment reached by E. P. Thompson on the basis of his own fine analysis of working-class history:

  In my view, far too much theoretical attention (much of it plainly [Page 297] ahistorical) has been paid to ‘class’ and far too little to ‘class-struggle.’ Indeed, class struggle is the prior, as well as the more universal, concept. To put it bluntly, classes do not exist as separate entities, look around, find an enemy class, and then start to struggle. On the contrary, people find themselves in a society structured in determined ways (crucial, but not exclusively, in productive relations), they experience exploitation (or the need to maintain power over those whom they exploit), they identify points of antagonistic interest, they commence to struggle around these issues and in the process of struggling they discover themselves as classes, they come to know this discovery as class-consciousness. Class and class-consciousness are always the last, not the first, stage in the real historical process.104