It is impossible, of course, to divorce the material basis of the struggle from the struggle over values—the ideological struggle. To resist a claim or an appropriation is to resist, as well, the justification and rationale behind that particular claim. In Sedaka, this ideological resistance is generally kept from public view, but it forms a vital part of the normative subculture among the poor.
The inclination to dismiss “individual” acts of resistance as insignificant and to reserve the term “resistance” for collective or organized action is as misguided as the emphasis on “principled” action. The privileged status accorded organized movements, I suspect, flows from either of two political orientations: the one, essentially Leninist, which regards the only viable class action as one led by a vanguard party serving as a “general staff,” the other more straightforwardly derived from a familiarity and preference for open, institutionalized politics as conducted in capitalist democracies. In either case, however, there is a misapprehension of the social and political circumstances of peasant resistance.
The individual and often anonymous quality of much peasant resistance is of course eminently suited to the sociology of the class from which it arises. Being a class of “low classlessness” scattered in small communities and generally lacking the institutional means to act collectively, it is likely to employ those means of resistance that are local and require little coordination. Under special historical circumstances of overwhelming material deprivation, the legal protection of open political action, or a breakdown in the institutions of repression (more rarely, all three), the peasantry can and has become an organized, political, mass movement. Such circumstances are, however, extremely rare and usually short-livedeven if they contribute to a revolution. In most places at most times this political option has simply been precluded. The penchant for forms of resistance that are individual and unobtrusive are not only what a Marxist might expect from petty commodity producers and rural laborers, but have certain advantages. Unlike hierarchical formal organizations, there is no center, no leadership, no identifiable [Page 298] structure that can be co-opted or neutralized. What is lacking in terms of central coordination may be compensated for by flexibility and persistence. These forms of resistance will win no set-piece battles, but they are admirably adapted to long-run campaigns of attrition.
If we were to confine our search for peasant resistance to formally organized activity, we would search largely in vain, for in Malaysia as in many other Third World countries, such organizations are either absent or the creations of officials and rural elites. We would simply miss much of what is happening. The history of Malay peasant resistance to the state, for example, has yet to be written. When, and if, it is written, however, it will not be a history in which open rebellion or formal organizations play a significant role. The account of resistance in the precolonial era would perhaps be dominated by flight and avoidance of corvee labor and a host of tolls and taxes. Resistance to colonial rule was marked far less by open confrontations than by willful and massive noncompliance with its most threatening aspects, for example, the persistent underreporting of landholdings and crop yields to minimize taxes, the relentless disregard for all regulations designed to restrict smallholders’ rubber planting and marketing, the unabated pioneer settlement of new land despite a host of laws forbidding it. Much of this continues today. There is ample evidence for this resistance in the archives,105 but, inasmuch as its goal was to evade the state and the legal order, not to attack them, it has received far less historical attention than the quite rare and small revolts that had far less impact on the course of colonial rule. Even in advanced capitalist nations, the “movements” of the poor take place largely outside the sphere of formal political activity.106 It follows that, if [Page 299] a persuasive case can be made for such forms of political activity among the poor in highly industrialized, urban economies with high rates of literacy and a relatively open political system, the case would be far stronger for the peasantry in agrarian economy where open political activity is sharply restricted. Formal political activity may be the norm for the elites, the intelligentsia, and the middle classes which, in the Third World as well as in the West, have a near monopoly of institutional skills and access. But it would be naive to expect that peasant resistance can or will normally take the same form.
Nor should we forget that the forms of peasant resistance are not just a product of the social ecology of the peasantry. The parameters of resistance are also set, in part, by the institutions of repression. To the extent that such institutions do their work effectively, they may all but preclude any forms of resistance other than the individual, the informal, and the clandestine.107 Thus, it is perfectly legitimate-even important-to distinguish between various levels and forms of resistance: formal-informal, individual-collective, public-anonymous, those that challenge the system of domination-those that aim at marginal gains. But it should be made crystal clear that what we may actually be measuring in this enterprise is the level of repression that structures the available options. Depending on the circumstances they confront, peasants may oscillate from organized electoral activity to violent confrontations to silent and anonymous acts of foot dragging and theft. This oscillation may in some cases be due to changes in the social organization of the peasantry, but it is as likely, if not more likely, to be due to changes in the level of repression. More than one peasantry has been brutally reduced from open, radical political activity at one moment to stubborn and sporadic acts of petty resistance at the next. If we allow ourselves to call only the former “resistance,” we simply allow the structure of domination to define for us what is resistance and what is not resistance.
Many of the forms of resistance I have been examining may be individual actions, but this is not to say that they are uncoordinated.108 Here again, a [Page 300] concept of coordination derived from formal and bureaucratic settings is of little assistance in understanding actions in small communities with dense informal networks and rich, and historically deep, subcultures of resistance to outside claims.109 It is, for example, no exaggeration to say that much of the folk culture of the peasant “little tradition” amounts to a legitimation, or even a celebration, of precisely the kinds of evasive and cunning forms of resistance I have examined. In Malay society this tradition is captured in the Sang Kancil, or mouse deer tales familiar to all peasants. The mouse deer is the stereotypical “trickster” figure: a small and weak but agile creature who survives and triumphs over far more powerful beasts by his wits, his deceit, and his cunning. It takes no literary legerdemain to recognize Sang Kancil as a popular metaphor for the necessary survival skills of the peasantry. They have of course their cultural equivalents in the popular traditions of other historically subordinate groups Til Eulenspiegel and Brer Rabbit, to name only two. At the very least, they encourage the kind of resistance celebrated in this South Carolina slave saying: “De bukrah (white) hab scheme, en de nigger hab trick, en ebery time the bukrah scheme once, the nigger trick twice.”110
In this and in other ways (for example, tales of bandits, peasant heroes, religious myths) the peasant subculture helps to underwrite dissimulation, poaching, theft, tax evasion, avoidance of conscription, and so on. While folk culture is not coordination in the formal sense, it often achieves a “climate of opinion” which, in other more institutionalized societies, would require a public relations campaign.111 The striking thing about peasant society is the extent to which a whole range of complex activities-from labor exchange to house moving to wedding preparations to feasts-are coordinated by networks of understanding and practice. It is the same with boycotts, wage “negotiations,” the refusal of tenants to compete with one another, or the conspiracy of silence surrounding [Page 301] thefts. No formal organizations are created because none are required; and yet a form of coordination is achieved that alerts us that what is happening is not just individual action.
In light of these considerations, then, let us return briefly to the
question of intention. For many forms of peasant resistance, we have every reason to expect that actors will remain mute about their intentions. Their safety may depend on silence and anonymity; the kind of resistance itself may depend for its effectiveness on the appearance of conformity; their intentions may be so embedded in the peasant subculture and in the routine, taken-for-granted struggle to provide for the subsistence and survival of the household as to remain inarticulate. The fish do not talk about the water.
In one sense, of course, their intentions are inscribed in the acts themselves. A peasant soldier who deserts the army is in effect “saying” by his act that the purposes of this institution and the risks and hardships it entails will not prevail over his family or personal needs. A harvest laborer who steals paddy from his employer is “saying” that his need for rice takes precedence over the formal property rights of his boss.
When it comes to those social settings where the material interests of appropriating classes are directly in conflict with the peasantry (rents, wages, employment, taxes, conscription, the division of the harvest), we can, I think, infer something of intentions from the nature of the actions themselves. This is especially the case when there is a systematic pattern of actions that mitigate or deny a claim on the peasant surplus. Evidence about intentions is, of course, always welcome, but we should not expect too much. For this reason, the definition of resistance given earlier places particular emphasis on the effort to thwart material and symbolic claims from dominant classes. The goal, after all, of the great bulk of peasant resistance is not directly to overthrow or transform a system of domination but rather to survive-today, this week, this seasonwithin it. The usual goal of peasants, as Hobsbawm has so aptly put it, is “working the system to their minimum disadvantage.”112 Their persistent attempts to “nibble away” may backfire, they may marginally alleviate exploitation, they may force a renegotiation of the limits of appropriation, they may change the course of subsequent development, and they may more rarely help bring the system down. These are possible consequences. Their intention, by contrast, is nearly always survival and persistence. The pursuit of that end may, depending on circumstances, require either the petty resistance we have seen or more dramatic actions of self-defense. In any event, most of their efforts will be seen by appropriating classes as truculence, deceit, shirking, pilfering, arrogance-in short, all the labels intended to denigrate the many faces of resistance.
It should be apparent that resistance is not simply whatever peasants do to [Page 302] maintain themselves and their households. Much of what they do, as we have seen, is to be understood as compliance, however grudgingly. Survival as petty commodity producers or laborers may impel some to save themselves at the expense of their fellows. The poor landless laborer who steals paddy from another poor man or who outbids him for a tenancy is surviving, but he is surely not resisting in the sense defined here. One of the key questions that must be asked about any system of domination is the extent to which it succeeds in reducing subordinate classes to purely “beggar-thy-neighbor” strategies for survival. Certain combinations of atomization, terror, repression, and pressing material needs can indeed achieve the ultimate dream of domination: to have the dominated exploit each other.
Allowing that only those survival strategies that deny or mitigate claims from appropriating classes can be called resistance, we are nevertheless left with a vast range of actions to consider. Their variety conceals a basic continuity. That continuity lies in the history of the persistent efforts of relatively autonomous petty commodity producers to defend their fundamental material and physical interests and to reproduce themselves. At different times and places they have defended themselves against the corvee, taxes, and conscription of the traditional agrarian state, against the colonial state, against the inroads of capitalism (for example, rents, interest, proletarianization, mechanization), against the modern capitalist state, and, it must be added, against many purportedly socialist states as well. The revolution, when and if it does come, may eliminate many of the worst evils of the ancient regime, but it is rarely if ever the end of peasant resistance. For the radical elites who capture the state are likely to have different goals in mind than their erstwhile peasant supporters. They may envisage a collectivized agriculture, while the peasantry clings to its smallholdings; they may want a centralized political structure, while the peasantry is wedded to local autonomy; they may want to tax the countryside in order to industrialize; and they will almost certainly wish to strengthen the state vis-a-vis civil society. It therefore becomes possible to an astute observer like Goran Hyden to find remarkable parallels between the earlier resistance of the Tanzanian peasantry to colonialism and capitalism and its current resistance to the institutions and policies of the socialist state of Tanzania.113 He provides a gripping account of how the “peasant mode of production”-by foot dragging, by privatizing work and land that have been appropriated by the state, by evasion, by flight, and [Page 303] by “raiding” government programs for its own purposes-has thwarted the plans of the state. In Vietnam also, after the revolution was consummated in the south as well as in the north, everyday forms of peasant resistance have continued. The surreptitious expansion of private plots, the withdrawal of labor from state enterprises for household production, the failure to deliver grain and livestock to the state, the “appropriation” of state credits and resources by households and work teams, and the steady growth of the black market attest to the tenacity of petty commodity production under socialist state forms.114 The stubborn, persistent, and irreducible forms of resistance I have been examining may thus represent the truly durable weapons of the weak both before and after the revolution.
1. As a recently sacked factory worker once remarked ruefully to me, “The only thing worse than being exploited is not being exploited.”
2. It goes virtually without saying that the meager possibilities for joint action among the village poor all but evaporate once we leave the community. Even the values that the poor use to justify their claim to work, land, and charity are meant to apply largely within the village itself. While kinship links join most of the poor to relatives elsewhere, these are links of family and not of class. If there were a national or even regional political vehicle that gave effective voice to the class interests of the poor on such issues as land reform, mechanization, and employment, it would undoubtedly find a large following. But Partai Islam (PAS) is not that vehicle, dominated as it is by large landowners, and the socialist party (Partai Rakyat), for reasons of repression and communalism, has never established a real foothold in Kedah.
3. Barrington Moore, Jr., Injustice. The Social Bases of Obedience and Revolt (White Plains: M. E. Sharpe, 1978), 125.
4. For an illuminating discussion of this pattern in the region generally, see Michael Adas, “From Avoidance to Confrontation: Peasant Protest in Precolonial and Colonial Southeast Asia,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 23, no. 2 (April 1981): 217-47.
5. The terms “exit” and “voice” are taken from the analysis in Albert O. Hirschman, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty.’ Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations and States (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1970).
6. Malaysia’s strong foreign-exchange position and its diversified exports make it less vulnerable than many other Third World economies, but it is nevertheless vulnerable to any deep and prolonged slump. Shortfalls in private investment and in export earnings and the resulting need to trim public spending over the past two years (1981–82) have made this vulnerability increasingly apparent.
7. Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970): 737.
8. Nicholas Abercrombie, Stephen Hill, and Bryan S. Turner, The Dominant Ideology Thesis (London: Allen & Unwin, 1980), 46. In their analysis of feudalism, early capitalism, and late capitalism these three authors present a persuasive case that the concept of “the dominant ideology” or “hegemony,” as expounded by such well-known contemporary Marxist scholars as Althu
sser, Poulantzas, Miliband, and Habermas, are neither logically convincing nor empirically persuasive. I will return to the issue of “hegemony” and “false-consciousness” in the next chapter.
9. Emile Durkheim, The Division of Labour in Society (New York: Free Press, 1964), 356, quoted in Abercrombie et al., Dominant Ideology Thesis, 43.
10. For two studies which, in different contexts, emphasize both repression and “the compulsion of economic relations,” see Juan Martinez Alier, Labourers and Landowners in Southern Spain, St. Anthony’s College, Oxford, Publications, No. 4 (London: Allen & Unwin, 1971), and John Gaventa, Power and Powerlessness: Quiescence and Rebellion in an Appalachian Valley (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1980).
11. The term sabotage is precise descriptively as we shall see, originating as it does with the wrecking of machinery by nineteenth-century French workers who threw their wooden shoes (sabots) into the works.
12. For the now classic study of this movement, see E. J. Hobsbawn and George Rude, Captain Swing (New York: Pantheon, 1968). Without attempting an inevitably strained comparison, I note that the rural Luddites of the early nineteenth century had several advantages over the peasantry of Kedah when it came to mobilizing against threshing machines. They were far more fully proletarianized and dependent on wage labor; they could look to a set of traditional legal protections that reinforced their claim to a living wage; and they faced a repressive apparatus that was less firmly planted in the countryside. They too, of course, were overcome, but only by a military force that by the standards of the time was unprecedented. The resistance in Kedah was much more sporadic and abbreviated, although the saboteurs shared with their English counterparts a preference for the anonymity that acting under cover of darkness provided. By 1979, public warnings by officials and more rigorous guarding of the machines themselves had reduced the incidence of this form of resistance to negligible proportions.
Weapons of the Weak- Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance Page 47
