Weapons of the Weak- Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance

by James C Scott

  Selections, 181-82. Thus a key function of the dominant ideology is to discipline elites so that their short-run interests do not jeopardize the stability of the social order as a whole.

  72. See, in this context, Gidden’s discussion of the struggle by the working class to universalize what are originally the “sectional” interests of the bourgeoisie. Central Problems, 193ff.

  73. Once again, the concept of hegemony is, to my mind, not sufficiently reflexive here, since both the “compromise” and the “corporate sacrifices” are as much won by resistance and struggle as given or imposed by an elite. The struggle of subordinate classes, in other words, helps determine what kind of compromise will make consent possible.

  74. See, for example, Frank Parkin, Class Inequality and Political Order (New York: Praeger, 1971), 72-102. Willis (in Learning to Labour, 110) would go much further and claim that if in fact the dominant class were successful in inculcating the dominant ideology it would find itself with far more working-class anger and dissent. In particular, he argues that if English working-class children believed what was taught them at school-that is, that doing well in school and following its rules would result in social mobility in a working life where competence and skill are rewarded—they would feel far more cruelly deceived later. Thus, he argues implicitly that social stability and compliance requires that the ideology of the school fail to impress itself on working-class youngsters. Indeed, those working-class youngsters who pose the greatest problem for school authorities enter the work force thoroughly cynical but without aspirations that could possibly be betrayed. Learning to Labour is, in my opinion, the finest study available of hegemony in any setting.

  75. The term “real existing socialism” is taken from Rudolf Bahro, The Alternative in Eastern Europe, trans. David Fernbach (London: Verso, 1981).

  76. See the forthcoming book on Solidarity by Roman Laba. For a socialist critique-within the hegemony-of working life in Hungary, see the remarkable account by Miklos Haraszti, A Worker in a Worker’s State, trans. Michael Wright (New York: Universe Books, 1978).

  77. On this point see, for example, Abercrombie et al., Dominant Ideology Thesis, 17; Richard Hoggart, Uses of Literacy, and Charles Sabel, Work and Politics: The Division of Labor in Industry (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1982).

  78. In his fine study of inmates in a Norwegian prison, Thomas Mathiesen stresses that, while in practice there is little peer solidarity, there is a widespread attitude of “censoriousness.” By this he means a readiness to seize on the norms propagated by the prison officials themselves and accuse them of violating their own standards at every turn. In this case, the progressive (paternalistic?) ideology of prison officials provided effective raw material to serve prisoners’ interests. The inmates constantly pushed for “mechanical” equality, automatic rights, seniority rules, and stated minimum requirements along trade union lines, while prison officials strove to maintain discretionary controls just as management would. The Defenses of the Weak: A Sociological Study of a Norwegian Correctional Institution (London: Tavistock, 1965).

  79. Moore, Injustice, 508 and 84. See also James C. Scott, The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Subsistence and Rebellion in Southeast Asia (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1976), chap. 6. It is of interest in this context that Russian Orthodox priests in tsarist Russia were occasionally beaten when the crops, which were under their ritual protection, failed.

  80. Gramsci, Selections, 419, 421, emphasis added.

  81. Ibid., 327.

  82. Moore, Injustice, 351. Recent events in Poland offer another competing case for such honor.

  83. Ibid., 340.

  84. Ibid., 351-52.

  85. Ibid., 273. See also E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York: Vintage, 1966), 168.

  86. Moore, Injustice, 369.

  87. As for the Russian peasantry, their actions were, of course, quite radical, seizing land and burning the homes of the gentry and officials. Their goals, however, were quite modest and parochial. According to one assessment:

  While the various elites argued constitutional and policy questions in the capital, the peasants were forming their own political order in the countryside… They repudiated the national level, and their alternative was something quite different from simply a new version of the modern centralized state…. Petrograd may well have constituted the center of the national political state, but the peasants were boycotting the play and writing the script for their own production.

  John H. Kress, “The Political Consciousness of the Russian Peasantry,” Soviet Studies 31, no. 4 (October 1979): 576.

  88. Moore, Injustice, 370.

  89. Assembled just before the revolution, the cahiers were essentially lists of complaints and demands from every department. As they were written by local elites, they were not quite mass opinion, though for that reason one might judge the cahiers to represent something closer to the eventual program of the bourgeois revolution. In fact, virtually all of the cahiers focused on local grievances; the vast majority assumed the continuation of feudalism and demanded adjustments (for example, restrictions on lords’ hunting rights, uniform weights and measures, rights to woodland, a limitation on cure salaries). No cahier outside Paris even hinted at popular sovereignty, and most argued their claims by reference to custom. As one historian concludes, “it follows that the revolutionary state of mind expressed in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the decrees of 1789–91 was a product and not a cause of the crisis that began in 1787.” George V. Taylor, “Revolutionary and NonRevolutionary Content in the Cahiers of 1789: An Interim Report,” French Historical Studies 7, no. 4 (Fall 1972): 501.

  90. Here the debate between Luxemburg and Lenin is relevant, but neither appreciated, I believe, the possibly radical consequences of modest working-class-or peasant-demands. See Kathy E. Ferguson, “Class-Consciousness and the Marxist Dialectic: The Elusive Synthesis,” Review of Politics 42, no. 4 (October 1980): 504-32.

  91. Eric Hobsbawm, “Peasants and Politics,” Journal of Peasant Studies 1, no. 1 (October 1973): 12.

  92. Moore, Injustice, 476.

  93. See also Bourdieu, Outline, 164-71.

  94. Gramsci, Selections, 178, 334.

  95. Problems in Materialism and Culture: Selected Essays (London: New Left Books, 1980), 259.

  96. The creation of the modern state has many of the same rupturing effects on local arrangements and might be examined in the same fashion.

  97. See, for example, Thompson’s analysis of Cobbett in The Making of the English Working Class, 761.

  98. Alier, Labourers and Landowners in Southern Spain, 93-94.

  99. Moore, Injustice, 459.

  100. George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier (London: Left Book Club, 1937), 173, 176-77.

  101. Georg Lukacs, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1971), 59, emphasis in original.

  102. To quote Orwell one last time: “For a left-wing party in power, its most serious antagonist is always its own past propaganda.” Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus, eds., The Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters of George Orwell, vol. 1 (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1968), 515.

  Appendix A • A Note on Village Population, 1967–1979

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  Despite the growth of Sedaka’s population, the first point to note is that it has grown much less than the rate of natural increase would suggest. Had the rate of household formation kept pace with natural increase, there would have been something on the order of eighty-three households by 1979, nearly twice the actual increase. This finding is neither new nor surprising.1 Population has been leaking away from the rice plain of Kedah for some time,2 owing both to the extended boom in the national and urban economy and to the fact that, even with double-cropping, the prospects for the children of tenants and smallholders are hardly encouraging. Their departure has slowed the process of involution in the local economy but has hardly reve
rsed it.

  Aside from the departure of young people, which simply reduces the size of an existing household, there were fourteen households present in 1967 that are absent today. Six families simply died out.3 Eight households left the village. Four of these bought paddy land elsewhere, renting or selling locally owned land in the process. All but one of these four families purchased land in Seberang Perak, one of the last “paddy frontier” areas where suitable land can be bought at reasonable prices and cleared for cultivation. This form of mobility required capital; one such family owned 10 relong in Sedaka, another owned 6 relong, and still another had rented in at least 15 relong. Only one household, which owned 2 relong, was anything less than a family of substance. The four remaining families had the good fortune to be accepted as settlers on government plantation schemes (ranchangan). Attracted by the assurance of high incomes, they left and in three cases were able to arrange for one or more of their brothers to be taken in as well. Again, these families were not by any means poor in the village context. One owned a shop and small rice mill, two others owned nearly 5 relong apiece, and the last owned only 1 relong but was said by villagers to have been fairly well-off. In fact, of the eleven individuals who applied successfuly for [Page 352] settlement schemes, nearly two-thirds were from the top half of the village income distribution.4

  Paradoxically, such settlement schemes are intended to benefit the rural poor, but, like so many government programs, accomplish quite the reverse. The reasons for this are not obscure. Incomes on the schemes are high enough to attract the sons of even the wealthiest villagers. Application requires at least two trips, usually all the way to Pahang, and a number of documents that typically require bribes. The cost involved is substantial. Even when they make the effort, however, poor applicants have a lower success rate for at least two reasons.5 First, they are less likely to meet the literacy standards required, as their parents are likely to have withdrawn them from primary school at an early age. Second, they are less likely to have the political connections that can often mean the difference between success and failure.

  Both rich and poor quit the village, but their manner of leaving is decidedly different. The poor tend to leave as individuals-the sons and, more rarely, daughters, of families whose local prospects are bleak. With the rare exception of those with secondary education, they leave for such urban jobs as manual labor and construction work or, in the case of young women, domestic service or factory work. The well-to-do, when they leave at all, often go as families to land they have bought or to a settlement scheme plot. In other words, the poor leave to join the ranks of the proletariat and the rich leave as a propertied, if petite, bourgeoisie.

  In the course of the past dozen years, a total of twenty-eight new families have established themselves in Sedaka. Thirteen reflect the natural process of new family formation: six are the sons of villagers who have married and set up separate households; seven are daughters of villagers whose husbands have moved in and established new households. Another ten families moved in because the husband’s or, more rarely, the wife’s father owned land in the village (though he did not reside there), which the couple could rent. Thus, in twenty-three cases, the combination of kinship and available land (whether rented or inherited) explains the appearance of new households in Sedaka. The kinship tie, in this context, is decisive only because it provides access to farming land. There are no hard-and-fast rules in Malay society governing whether a new family should live near the husband’s or wife’s parents, and it is a safe bet that in nearly all twenty-three [Page 353] instances the choice was made according to which side could provide the most paddy land. Of the remaining five families, two are pure wage laborers with only a house lot in the village, and three are special cases.6

  The economic status of these new households offers something of a window on the past decade. Despite the fact that nearly all established households in Sedaka because it was economically advantageous to do so, their incomes place a majority of them among the poorest half of the village. Far more significant, however, is the average farm size among this group.7 The land they now rent from their parents is likely, with a few notable exceptions, to represent the maximum acreage they will eventually inherit; in many cases they will inherit less.8 Thus, the present size of farms for this group of active rice growers is a fair indication of their future farm size as well. The average farm size for this group in 1979 was 3.5 relong, nearly 1 relong below the village average. If, however, we eliminate the five privileged farmers among the twenty-eight who now farm more than 6 relong, the average farm size for the remaining twentythree is a meager 2.6 relong, well below the minimum 4 relong required for a subsistence income.

  The situation of these twenty-three families illustrates the long-term demographic dilemma of village agriculture. Put in more anthropological terms, one writer has called this the problem of the “establishment fund,” which is the “cost of setting up a household with access to a means of living comparable to that of the previous generation.”9 For an agrarian society, such access means above all access to land. Given the disappearance of the rice frontier and high [Page 354] birth rates, each new generation finds itself pressing against a resource base that is largely fixed. To be sure, double-cropping and a buoyant urban economy provide a welcome breathing space. What space they provide, however, is largely undercut by the fact that well over half the population now farms plots that are already less than adequate as well as by the impact of structural changes that have reduced both wage work and the land available for rental. The stark reality is that there is simply no viable niche in the village economy for the greater part of the next generation.

  1. This assumes, of course, that the average size of a household did not increase. Since all evidence indicates that household size, even in rural areas, has been declining, this is a safe assumption.

  2. S. Jegatheesan, Land Tenure in the Muda Irrigation Scheme, MADA Monograph No. 29 (Alor Setar: MADA, 1976), 26, notes that the rural population in Muda grew at an annual rate of only 1.54 percent from 1957 to 1970, while the national rate of population increase was 3.1 percent for the same period.

  3. In two of these cases the surviving widow or widower has moved to a nearby pondok in Yan. The pondok in this and many other cases is both a center for religious teaching and a kind of Islamic retirement home at which old people prepare themselves spiritually for death. 351

  4. In cases where a son or co-resident younger brother in the same household was accepted to a ranchangan and left, the household remained in both the 1967 and 1979 censuses. For this reason, the number of individuals going to ranchangan was greater than the number of families that dropped out of the 1979 census. In two cases, also, individuals who were accepted chose not to take up the opportunity.

  5. Such is the attraction of the ranchangan that at least twelve villagers applied during my eighteen-month stay. Half the applicants were from among the poorer families and had risked considerable capital (typically M$200) in order to apply.

  6. Of the special cases, one is a pensioner from the national railways who was born in Sedaka and has chosen to retire there; another is a storekeeper who has set up shop next to the main road; and the third is a widow who has moved from her old house to a smaller house where she lives with her niece, who is still schooling.

  7. Landownership for this group is significantly below the village average but that is to be expected, since few are of an age when they could expect to inherit land. The usual practice is that land is not actually transferred until the father is deceased; when a farmer retires from active cultivation he is thus likely to rent land to his children.

  8. A farmer with a good deal of land may occasionally rent more land to a son than that son will inherit. This is likely to happen when other sons are not yet of farming age or have taken work that does not permit them to cultivate. When the land is eventually inherited, these underage and noncultivating sons will typically receive a full share of property. Of the new
households, there were only four farmers who could expect to inherit more land than they were now farming, and the amount of additional land involved was less than 6 relong.

  9. Brian Fegan, “The Establishment Fund of Peasants and Population Increase in Central Luzon: Changing Class Structures” (Paper presented at Second Conference of the Asian Studies Association of Australia, University of New South Wales, Sydney, May 15-19, 1978).

  Appendix B • Farm Income Comparisons for Different Tenure and Farm Size Categories: Muda, 1966, 1974, 1979

  [Page 355]

  Appendix C • Data on Land Tenure Changes, Net Returns, and Political Office

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  TABLE C1 • Land Tenure in Sedaka, 1967

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  TABLE C2 • Land Tenure in Sedaka, 1979

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  TABLE C3 • Net Returns per Relong for Various Classes of Cultivators in Sedaka, Depending on Size of Yield, 1979

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  FIGURE C3a • Net Returns per Relong for Various Classes of Cultivators in Sedaka, Depending on Size of Yield, 1979