Weapons of the Weak- Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance

by James C Scott

  If the poorest strata of the rural population in Muda is no longer an integral part of paddy production, if they are no longer necessary to the process of surplus appropriation, one may reasonably wonder why wealthy farmers even bother to justify their new pattern of behavior at all. Why rationalize an agrarian system to those who are mostly irrelevant to it? Two observations are germane here. The first is that the justifications offered for the new behavior of rich farmers are in fact rather cursory, makeshift, and transparent. They are at any rate hardly convincing to those who have been disadvantaged. The second is that wealthy farmers are themselves the product of the earlier agrarian system and the normative ideas that underpinned it; we should hardly be surprised if they choose to understand and explain the new arrangements in terms of the categories with which they are most familiar.

  It might be supposed, however, that if ideological hegemony is increasingly unnecessary as a part of day-to-day production relations in rice farming, it has nevertheless been historically important for surplus appropriation by the state itself. Even this supposition would, I believe, be largely mistaken for any period after, say, 1900 in the paddy sector. The remarkable thing about the colonial and independent states of peninsular Malaya is how little they have depended on systematic appropriations from paddy cultivators. Taxes on paddy land have typically been minimal, and the local producer’s price has often been above the world market price. State revenue in Kedah, even in the earlier colonial period, was derived largely from sources that impinged little on rural incomes. In 1918 and 1919, for example, the “tax farming” of the opium and gambling monopolies provided the major sources of provincial revenue.14 What the state has wanted, and continues to want, from the peasantry of the Muda Plain is a surplus of marketable rice at reasonable prices with which to feed the work force in mines, on plantations, and now in the urban areas. The vast majority of smallholders in Muda are, and have been, basically irrelevant even to this objective. We need only recall that the great bulk (roughly three-fourths) of the paddy marketed in Muda is sold by a small minority (11 percent) of cultivators, who farm more than 10 relong. The surplus can, of course, now be produced largely without the labor power of the poor. And this labor power is not required elsewhere. Recent estimates show that the natural increase of the existing labor force now on plantations and in the cities will be more than sufficient for the [Page 314] manpower needs of these sectors for the foreseeable future.15 The plain fact is that the poorest two-thirds of the rural population in Muda is now basically irrelevant to the process of production or appropriation, whether by wealthy farmers or by the state itself.

  If we wish, therefore, to understand the reasons for the continuing ideological efforts made by local elites and by the state to justify their domination, we will look in vain to production relations in the paddy sector. We must instead look to the realm of politics. In such a diversified, open, export economy, the revenue of the state is drawn mostly from export and import duties, the corporate income tax, licenses, concessions, excise taxes, and loans. If the conservative Malay elite is to continue benefiting from the privileges and opportunities the economy and the state provide, it must, as a basic precondition, maintain its political domination over that state. Given the semicompetitive election system that currently prevails, this objective requires the political support of the bulk of the Malay electorate.16 The largest Malay-majority states of Kedah and Kelantan, which also happen to be the main paddy-growing regions, are necessary for that support. It is in this context that one can understand the very considerable efforts in the field of development programs, grants, clinics, schools, loans, and infrastructure that the state has undertaken with an acute eye to maximizing political support. One might even say that it is now the state and the ruling party that have taken over the task of euphemizing domination by means of their discretionary subsidies to rural areas. This euphemization is accomplished of course through the mediation of the wealthy, landowning, local UMNO elites. In any event, the political control of the paddy-growing peasantry is not an end in itself nor a means by which to justify a pattern of direct appropriation. Political control is an essential precondition for appropriation, which takes place elsewhere.

  RETHINKING THE CONCEPT OF HEGEMONY

  Our examination of class relations in Sedaka suggests rather forcefully that the concept of hegemony-of ideological domination-merits a fundamental rethinking. Such a rethinking, as I hope to show, is required not only in the context of the seventy families that have preoccupied us in this account, but for subordinate classes in general.

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  The concept of hegemony, as it is used here, comes to us, of course, from the work of the remarkable Italian militant and scholar, Antonio Gramsci.17 Since his prison writings became widely known, the concept has been employed in one fashion or another by a large number of influential, revisionist, Marxist scholars, including Althusser, Miliband, Poulantzas, Habermas, and Marcuse. The ultimate source in Marx and Engels’s own writings from which this analytical tradition arises is the well-known passage from The German Ideology cited at length below:

  The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas: i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it. The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas; hence of the relationships which make the one class the ruling one, therefore, the ideas of its dominance. The individuals composing the ruling class possess, among other things, consciousness, and therefore think. Insofar, therefore, as they rule as a class and determine the extent and compass of an epoch, it is evident that they do this in its whole range, hence among other things, rule also as thinkers, as producers of ideas, and regulate the production and distribution of the idea of their age: thus their ideas are the ruling ideas of the epoch.18

  Hegemony is simply the name Gramsci gave to this process of ideological domination. The central idea behind it is the claim that the ruling class dominates not only the means of physical production but the means of symbolic production as well. Its control over the material forces of production is replicated, at the level of ideas, in its control over the ideological “sectors” of society-culture, religion, education, and the media-in a manner that allows it to disseminate those values that reinforce its position. What Gramsci did, in brief, was to explain the institutional basis of false-consciousness.

  For my purposes, the critical implication of hegemony is that class rule is [Page 316] effected not so much by sanctions and coercion as by the consent and passive compliance of subordinate classes. Hegemony, of course, may be used to refer to the entire complex of social domination. The term is used here, however, in its symbolic or idealist sense, since that is precisely where Gramsci’s major contribution to Marxist thought lies. It is in fact the pervasiveness of ideological hegemony that normally suffices to ensure social peace and to relegate the coercive apparatus of the state to the background. Only “in anticipation of moments of crisis and command, when spontaneous consent has failed, is force openly resorted to.”19

  Exactly how voluntary and complete this hegemony is likely to be is not entirely clear, even on a close reading of Gramsci.20 At times he appears to imply that hegemony involves an active belief in the legitimacy and superiority of the ruling group; at other times he implies that the acceptance is a more passive act in which the main features of the social order are merely accepted as given. Gramsci does, however, draw a sharp distinction between thought and action.21 The concrete action of workers who defend their material interests may, for example, suggest a radical consciousness but, at the level of ideas-the level at which hegemony operates-that incipient ra
dical consciousness is undermined by the substratum of values and perceptions socially determined from above. This blockage implies, as Femia notes, that “left to their own devices then, the masses in Western countries are powerless to overcome their intellectual and moral subordination… The long and arduous process of demystification requires an external agency.”22 The function of the revolutionary party, then, is to provide the working class with the conceptual apparatus and “critical consciousness” it cannot produce on its own. Only such a party will be capable of breaking the hegemony of the bourgeoisie and replacing it with its own hegemony; this new hegemony is not, Gramsci insists, a consequence of revolution, but rather a precondition of an authentic revolution.23

  Gramsci and other twentieth-century Marxists have, of course, developed their analysis of ideological domination in large part to explain why the material contradictions of capitalism as depicted in Capital have thus far failed to produce socialist revolution in the industrialized democracies. It was the manifest durability of capitalism that directed their attention forcibly to ideology and “superstructure.” This attention was welcome and instructive in a number of ways. [Page 317] First, it avoided the pitfall of the more extreme forms of economic determinism and accorded the realm of ideology, broadly conceived, a certain degree of autonomy. The very terms hegemony and false-consciousness are, after all, a clear admission that culture, values, and ideology cannot be directly read off objective, material conditions.24 But in making long overdue room for the analysis of ideological domination per se, many of Gramsci’s successors have, it seems to me, substituted a kind of ideological determinism for the material determinism they sought to avoid. Curiously enough, Gramsci’s own work is less open to this charge than the more purely theoretical elaborations of those who have followed in this tradition (for example, Miliband and Althusser).25

  I hope to show in what follows that the notion of hegemony and its related concepts of false-consciousness, mystification, and ideological state apparatuses not only fail to make sense of class relations in Sedaka, but also are just as likely to mislead us seriously in understanding class conflict in most situations.26 The gist of the argument to be developed at some length is summarized very briefly below and will serve to order the subsequent discussion:

  First, the concept of hegemony ignores the extent to which most subordinate classes are able, on the basis of their daily material experience, to penetrate and demystify the prevailing ideology.

  Second, theories of hegemony frequently confound what is inevitable with what is just, an error that subordinate classes rarely, if ever, make. This conclusion stems from a surface examination of public action in power-laden situations that overlooks both the “hidden transcript” and the necessity of routine and pragmatic submission to the “compulsion of economic relations” as well as the realities of coercion.

  Third, a hegemonic ideology must, by definition, represent an idealization, which therefore inevitably creates the contradictions that permit it to be criticized in its own terms. The ideological source of mass radicalism is, in this sense, to be sought as much within a prevailing ideological order as outside it.

  Fourth, a historical examination of the rank and file of nearly any manifestly revolutionary mass movement will show that the objectives sought are usually [Page 318] limited and even reformist in tone, although the means adopted to achieve them may be revolutionary. Thus, “trade union consciousness” is not, as Lenin claimed, the major obstacle to revolution, but rather the only plausible basis for it.

  Fifth, historically, the breaking of the norms and values of a dominant ideology is typically the work of the bearers of a new mode of production-for example, capitalists-and not of subordinate classes such as peasants and workers. Thus, subordinate classes are often seen as backward looking, inasmuch as they are defending their own interpretation of an earlier dominant ideology against new and painful arrangements imposed by elites and/or the state.

  Penetration27

  If there were a dominant, hegemonic ideology in Sedaka, it would make its presence known in several ways. At a minimum, it would require that the beliefs and values of the agrarian elite penetrate and dominate the worldview of the poor so as to elicit their consent and approval of an agrarian order which, materially, does not serve their objective interests. Its function would be to conceal or misrepresent the real conflicts of class interests that we have examined and to make of the poor, in effect, coconspirators in their own victimization.

  We have surely heard enough from the poorer farmers in Sedaka to reject, out of hand, such a summary characterization of their ideological situation. If there is any penetration to be accounted for here, it is less the penetration of elite beliefs among the poor than the capacity of the poor to pierce, in almost every particular, the self-serving picture presented by wealthy farmers, landlords, and outside officials. It is true, of course, that the rights and claims the poor assert are essentially those prevailing before double-cropping. Perhaps, in this sense, they can be seen as appealing to a (pre-)existing hegemonic order. I shall return to this issue later, but here I should note at once that such an appeal is in their material interest and that the rich subscribe, in their own way, to the same values, although their economic behavior is now predicated along more nearly capitalist lines. Ironically, it is the wealthy of Sedaka who fail to subscribe to the ideology that would best explain how they behave and provide a plausible rationale for that behavior.

  There is every good reason to suppose that the effective penetration of “official” realities by Sedaka’s poor is not unique or rare but, in fact, commonplace. To view the peasantry of Sedaka as particularly insightful is grossly to overestimate [Page 319] the power, weight, and cohesiveness of any dominant ideology. Here I subscribe fully to Paul Willis’s trenchant critique of Althusser:

  Structuralist theories of reproduction present the dominant ideology (under which culture is subsumed) as impenetrable. Everything fits too neatly. Ideology always pre-exists and preempts any authentic criticism. There are no cracks in the billiard ball smoothness of process. All specific contradictions are smoothed away in the universal reproductive functions of ideology…. on the contrary, and in my view more optimistically… there are deep disfunctions and desperate tensions within social and cultural reproduction. Social agents are not passive bearers of ideology, but active appropriators who reproduce existing structures only through struggle, contestation, and a partial penetration of those structures.28

  The penetration of official platitudes by any subordinate class is to be expected both because those platitudes are unlikely to be as cohesive or uniform as is often imagined and because they are subject to different interpretations depending on the social position of the actors. Such divergent understandings are, in turn, rooted in daily experience. The platitudes are not received as disembodied symbolic messages but are given meaning only in the context of a continuing struggle to defend material interests.29

  The process by which any system of political or religious beliefs emanating from above is reinterpreted, blended with pre-existing beliefs, penetrated, and transformed is characteristic of any stratified society. In this sense, one can speak in an agrarian society of “folk” socialism, “folk” nationalism, and “folk” communism just as one speaks of folk religion. If the form of Christianity believed in and practiced in the slave quarters is quite distinctive from the form of Christianity believed in and taught by the masters, we should not be surprised if tenants have an understanding of paternalism that is not at all like the one [Page 320] held by their landlords.30 The principles by which these belief systems originating outside the peasantry are transformed are varied, but it is clear that, in large part, they are reinterpreted in line with the material and symbolic interests of the class receiving them. Deviant interpretations-ideological heterodoxy-are hardly astonishing when they arise among subordinate classes which, by definition, have the least stake in the official description of reality.31
/>   One may perhaps take this logic one step further and contend, as some have, that the normative incorporation of subordinate classes is simply “not a necessary requirement of social order.”32 Abercrombie and his collaborators, in their general critique of “the dominant ideology thesis,” make a persuasive case that neither capitalism nor feudalism has been successful in achieving the internalization of the dominant ideology by subordinate classes. They explain this failure by the weakness of the mechanisms of socialization (another name for the strength of resistance?) and by the effectiveness of other forms of coercion, including the constraints that produce what we have earlier called “routine compliance.” From this perspective, the function of the dominant ideology may be largely to secure the cohesion of dominant classes, while the conformity of subordinate classes rests instead primarily on their knowledge that any other course is impractical, dangerous, or both.

  If this logic is applicable to the working class in advanced capitalist nations, as is claimed, then it is surely more forcefully applicable to the working class of early capitalism and to the peasantry of the Third World. This is so because the institutional bases of hegemony-for example, schools, media-are simply thicker on the ground in late capitalism and presumably therefore more effective.33 By contrast, the early working class was, by most accounts, virtually [Page 321] outside the institutional framework of capitalism in nearly every respect except their work. As Engels observed in his study of the nineteenth-century English working class: