Weapons of the Weak- Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance

by James C Scott

  The rich of Sedaka thus find themselves in an anomalous, though powerful, position. The precondition of their new wealth has been the systematic dismantling of the practices that previously rationalized their wealth, status, and leadership. Their economic domination has come at the cost of their social standing and of their social control of their poorer neighbors-the cost implied by their having broken their own hegemony. The poor, by contrast, find themselves with an ideologically serviceable past; they have a vital stake in defending both the norms and practices of the earlier agrarian order. It is useful, in this context, to distinguish two sorts of tradition: one that is taken for granted-what Bourdieu [Page 346] calls doxa-and is thus not perceived as tradition but is simply what is done and another that is the imaginative reconstruction of the past in the service of current interests.93 It is this latter form of tradition that the poor are both creating and defending. It is not, of course, constructed out of whole cloth. If it were, it would have little ideological value. It is instead a recognizable but partisan facsimile of earlier values and practices drawn up to legitimize essential class interests.

  If the ideological situation in Sedaka is at all characteristic of early capitalism, as I believe it is, then the usual argument about dominant ideologies will have to be fundamentally recast. Gramsci and many others assume that the key task for any subordinate class is to create a counterhegemony that will ultimately be capable of transforming the society.94 This position may have some merit for mature capitalist societies, where an elaborated ideology may already be in place. But it ignores the central fact that it has been capitalism that has historically transformed societies and broken apart existing relations of production. Even a casual glance at the record will show that capitalist development continually requires the violation of the previous “social contract” which in most cases it had earlier helped to create and sustain. The demystification of an existing hegemony is thus accomplished at least as much by the inevitable disregard for custom inherent in capitalism as by the “penetration” of subordinate classes themselves. The history of capitalism could, in fact, be written along just such lines. The enclosures, the introduction of agricultural machinery, the invention of the factory system, the use of steam power, the development of the assembly line, and today the computer revolution and robots have all had massive material and social consequences that undermined previous understandings about work, equity, security, obligation, and rights.

  The conflict in Sedaka can be grasped only against this background of the transforming power of capitalism-its tendency to undermine radically the past and the present. Raymond Williams vividly captures the process:

  Since it has become dominant in one area after another, it has been uncontrollably disturbing and restless, reaching local stabilities only almost at once to move away from them, leaving every kind of social and technical debris, disrupting human continuities and settlements, moving on with brash confidence to its always novel enterprises.95

  This is also what Brecht must have had in mind when he claimed that it was not socialism, but capitalism, that was revolutionary.

  The backward-looking character of much subordinate class ideology and pro [Page 347] test is perfectly understandable in this context. It is the revolutionary character of capitalism that casts them in a defensive role. If they defend a version of the older hegemony, it is because those arrangements look good by comparison with the current prospects and because it has a certain legitimacy rooted in earlier practice. The defense and elaboration of a social contract that has been abrogated by capitalist development is perhaps the most constant ideological theme of the peasant and the early capitalist worker96-from the Levellers and Diggers of the English Revolution to the craftsmen and weavers threatened with extinction to the “Captain Swing” rebels fighting the use of threshing machines. The same defense of beleaguered traditional rights is found at the core of popular intellectual attacks on capitalism by figures as ideologically diverse as Cobbett, Paine, and Carlyle.97

  In Sedaka, as in nineteenth-century England, the attack is directed less against capitalism per se than against capitalists. The violation of hard-won earlier arrangements appears to its victims as a heartless and willful choice of concrete individuals and not as the impersonal working out of some larger systematic logic. As in the case of Andalusian laborers, described by Alier, the victims see malevolence when nothing more than economic rationality is involved:

  My point is that there is and has been unemployment, and that labourers have attributed, and still do attribute unemployment to the unwillingness of landowners to give them work. As we have seen, there is some substance to this view, even though it is not as much a matter of bad will on the part of the landowners as of decisions which are economically rational from the point of view of the individual enterprise.98

  At another level, however, the personalization of the causes of distress is not a misperception at all. The choices made by the large farmers in Sedaka or Andalusia-though they may be constrained by economic logic-are also, manifestly, the result of conscious individual choice. In seeing that things might be otherwise, those who personalize the issue also perceive the larger fact that even capitalistic logic is a social creation and not a thing. What is certain, moreover, is that the personalization evident in charges of stinginess, greed, and hardheartedness, whether in the novels of Dickens or in the mouths of Sedaka’s poor, are far more generative of anger and possible action than if the causes were seen as impersonal and inevitable. If personalization is partly a myth, then it is a powerful, politically enabling myth.

  The conquest of this sense of inevitability is essential to the development [Page 348] of politically effective moral outrage. For this to happen, people must perceive and define their situation as the consequence of human injustice: a situation they need not, cannot, and ought not to endure. By itself of course such a perception… is no guarantee of political or social changes to come. But without some very considerable surge of moral anger such changes do not occur.99

  The personalization I observed in Sedaka is to a large degree the natural consequence of the capitalist transformation experienced there. For the victims as well as the beneficiaries of the large abstractions we choose to call capitalism, imperialism, or the green revolution, the experience itself arrives in quite personal, concrete, localized, mediated form.

  Let us suppose for a moment that poor peasants in Sedaka had instead chosen to emphasize the larger causes of their difficulties. They are not, as we have seen, unaware of these larger issues. But what if they had, as an intellectual critic (or supporter) of Malaysian development might have, focused on such matters as the accumulation of wealth, the growth of capital-intensive agriculture, and the policies of the state, which favor the interests of rich farmers to ensure the provision of cheap wage goods to the enclaves of urban industry? Can one imagine a rural protest movement with banners proclaiming “stop agrarian capitalism” or “down with the cash nexus”? Of course not. Such undeniable facts are far too abstract and remote; they fail completely to capture the texture of local experience. Were they in fact the center of attention, one imagines that the smallholders and landless laborers of the village might simply stand aside in recognition of the apparently inextricable forces that will shape their future. To see the causes of distress instead as personal, as evil, as a failure of identifiable people in their own community to behave in a seemly way may well be a partial view, but it is not a wrong view. And not incidentally, it is quite possibly the only view that could, and does, serve as the basis for day-to-day resistance.

  Resistance in Sedaka begins as, I suspect, all historical resistance by subordinate classes begins: close to the ground, rooted firmly in the homely but meaningful realities of daily experience. The enemies are not impersonal historical forces but real people. That is, they are seen as actors responsible for their own actions and not as bearers of abstractions. The values resisters are defending are equally near at hand and familiar.
Their point of departure is the practices and norms that have proven effective in the past and appear to offer some promise of reducing or reversing the losses they suffer. The goals of resistance are as modest as its values. The poor strive to gain work, land, and income; they are not aiming at large historical abstractions such as socialism, let alone MarxistLeninism. The means typically employed to achieve these ends-barring the rare crises that might precipitate larger dreams-are both prudent and realistic. [Page 349] When flight is available-to the frontier, to the cities-it is seized. When outright confrontation with landlords or the state seems futile, it is avoided. In the enormous zone between these two polar strategies lie all the forms of daily resistance, both symbolic and material, that we have examined.

  Such resistance, conceived and conducted with no revolutionary end in mind, can, and occasionally does, contribute to revolutionary outcomes. The end in such cases is ironically likely to appear to the peasantry or the working class not as an end at all, but rather as the necessary means to their modest goals. Even when such slogans as “socialism” take hold among subordinate classes, they are likely to mean something radically different to the rank and file than to the radical intelligentsia. What Orwell had to say about the English working class in the 1930s is almost surely true for lower classes in general:

  The first thing that must strike any outside observer is that socialism in its developed form is a theory confined entirely to the middle class.

  For it must be remembered that a working man… is seldom or never a socialist in the complete logically consistent sense…. To the ordinary working man, the sort you would meet in any pub on Saturday night, socialism does not mean much more than better wages and shorter hours and nobody bossing you about. To the more revolutionary type who is a hunger-marcher and is blacklisted by employers, the word is a sort of rallying cry against the forces of oppression, a vague threat of future violence…. But I have yet to meet a working miner, steelworker, cottonweaver, docker, navvy, or whatever who was “ideologically” sound.

  One of the analogies between Communism and Roman Catholicism is that only the educated are completely orthodox.100

  The observation is of course nothing more than the intellectual division of labor one might expect in any class-based movement between workers or peasants whose struggle must grow directly from the realities of material life and an intelligentsia whose sights are set on a more distant horizon. The division of labor in this case, as in others, is not only a complimentarity but carries within it the possibility of conflict as well.

  It is true, as Lukacs has argued, that the peasantry as a class is unlikely to envision a new plan for the total organization of society:

  The outlook of other classes (petty bourgeois or peasants) is ambiguous or sterile because their existence is not based exclusively on their role in the capitalist system of production but is indissolubly linked with the vestiges of feudal society. Their aim, therefore, is not to advance capitalism or to transcend it, but to reverse its action or at least to prevent it from devel [Page 350] oping fully. Their class interest concentrates on symptoms of development and not on development itself.101

  What he might have added, however, is that the working class itself, for different reasons perhaps, is in the same boat. That class too, if Moore, E. P. Thompson, Orwell, and Luxemburg are at all correct, deals with the “symptoms” of development as they are manifested in daily life. There is no point in aspiring in vain for a proletariat or peasantry that will somehow detach itself from its insistence on the mundane objectives that will make for a tolerable material life and a modicum of dignity. There is, on the contrary, every point in seeing precisely these ends and their dogged pursuit through thick and thin as the central hope for a more humane social order-as the core of the critique, in symbol and in action, of any and all social orders erected above peasants and workers by those who claim to serve their interests.

  The reader will detect, correctly, a certain pessimism about the prospects for revolutionary change that will systematically and reliably respect the insistence on small decencies that are at the core of peasant or working-class consciousness. If the revolution cannot even deliver the petty amenities and minor humanities that animate the struggle of its subjects, then there is not much to be said for whatever else it may accomplish. This pessimism is, alas, not so much a prejudice as, I think, a realistic assessment of the fate of workers and peasants in most revolutionary states-a fate that makes melancholy reading when set against the revolutionary promise.102 If revolution were a rare event before the creation of such states, it now seems all but foreclosed. All the more reason, then, to respect, if not celebrate, the weapons of the weak. All the more reason to see in the tenacity of self-preservation-in ridicule, in truculence, in irony, in petty acts of noncompliance, in foot dragging, in dissimulation, in resistant mutuality, in the disbelief in elite homilies, in the steady, grinding efforts to hold one’s own against overwhelming odds-a spirit and practice that prevents the worst and promises something better.

  1. See, for example, Nicholas Abercrombie, Class Structure and Knowledge (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980), 68.

  2. As we have seen, this class was also capable of recognizing and bitterly resenting the way in which rich landowners could take advantage of such loans through jual janji, taking over title to more land and thereby reinforcing the basis for economic dependency.

  3. The term is Pierre Bourdieu’s (Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. Richard Nice [Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1977], 191). The analysis in this and the next paragraph relies very heavily on Bourdieu’s subtle analysis of precapitalist forms of domination.

  4. Ibid., 179, emphasis in original. Bourdieu also elaborates that “Gentle, hidden exploitation is the form taken by man’s exploitation by man whenever overt, brutal exploitation is impossible. It is as false to identify this essentially dual economy with its official reality (generosity, mutual aid, etc.), i.e. the form which exploitation has to adopt in order to take place, as it is to reduce it to its objective reality, seeing mutual aid as corvee, the khammes [client, bondsman) as a sort of slave, and so on. The gift, generosity, conspicuous distribution-the extreme case of which is potlatch-are operations of social alchemy which may be observed whenever the direct application of overt physical or economic violence is negatively sanctioned, and which tend to bring about the transmutation of economic capital into symbolic capital.” Ibid., 192.

  5. In this respect, the Marxist position that feudal domination is direct, undisguised appropriation, whereas capitalist domination works through the mystified form of commodity fetishism in which the worker “appears” to sell his labor as a commodity is in error. The “gift” as a disguised appropriation can be seen as the functional equivalent of commodity fetishism under capitalism. This is not, however-as will be apparent later-an argument on behalf of false-consciousness.

  6. One may plausibly argue, I think, that the total of these services-in terms of their cost-was no more than what a free market wage and tenancy market would have required to achieve the same purpose. The point, however, is not that these traditional forms of appropriation are less onerous but rather that they were necessary under the circumstances.

  7. E. P. Thompson, “Eighteenth-Century English Society: Class Struggle without Class,” Social History 3, no. 2 (May 1978): 150.

  8. In practice, he is likely to feel his way toward a request by hinting of the work that might be done or noting his own financial straits in order to ascertain in advance whether a request has a good chance of success. If a refusal seems likely, he will go no further, since an outright “no” would jeopardize the possibility of asking again in the future.

  9. Bourdieu, Outline, 37-38.

  10. Ibid., 40-41.

  11. Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1973), 182. Their situation is not unlike that of English landowners in the early nineteenth century as described by Raymond Williams:

  Yet the
re was always a contradiction in English agrarian capitalism: its economics were those of a market order; its politics were those of a self-styled aristocracy and squirearchy, exacting quite different and “traditional” disciplines and controls.

  Although there is hardly an aristocracy in Sedaka, it is nevertheless clear that mechanization, leasehold tenancy, and their consequences for the ties of subordination and dependency are incompatible with “traditional disciplines and controls.”

  12. Poor villagers undoubtedly viewed such rationalizations with skepticism. The point is, however, that in any structure of organized inequality, the only possible justification for privilege must reside in its social function. When, as in Sedaka, the practical and self-interested actions of the rich that reinforce this rationale are largely abandoned, and only the rhetoric remains, the social authority of the propertied class is bound to suffer.