Weapons of the Weak- Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance

by James C Scott

  26. For other explanations of the same phenomenon, see, for example, Frank Parkin, “Class Inequality and Meaning Systems,” in his Class Inequality and Political Order (New York: Praeger, 1971), 79-102, and Louis Dumont, Homo Hierarchicus (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1970).

  27. But note the efforts of lower castes to raise their ritual status and, more recently, the tendency for harijans to leave Hinduism altogether and convert to Islam, which makes no caste distinctions among believers.

  28. See, for example, Gerrit Huizer, Peasant Mobilization and Land Reform in Indonesia (The Hague: Institute of Social Studies, 1972).

  29. Tenancy in Central Luzon, the Philippines, is a striking case in point. Communication from Benedick Kerkvliet, University of Hawaii.

  30. The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1978), 98, 106-07.

  31. It is also true for the regular pattern of human activities that we call institutions. For example—note well, structuralists—the state.

  32. See the persuasive argument along these lines by James Brow, “Some Problems in the Analysis of Agrarian Classes in South Asia,” Peasant Studies 9, no. 1 (Fall 1981): 15-33.

  33. Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward, Poor People’s Movements: Why They Succeed, How They Fail (New York: Vintage, 1977), 20, emphasis added.

  34. “Man does not live by bread alone.” But “bread” may come to mean more than just food; it may mean the wherewithal for living or cash, as in “Can you loan me some bread, man?” In Malay society, the proverb Jangan pecah periok nasi orang (Don’t break someone else’s rice pot) means “don’t threaten someone else’s source of livelihood.”

  35. Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic, 1973), 6-9. An excellent summary of this intellectual position may be found in Richard J. Bernstein, The Restructuring of Social and Political Theory (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1978), 173-236. As Bernstein notes, “These intentional descriptions, meanings, and interpretations are not merely subjective states of mind which can be correlated with external behavior; they are constitutive of the activities and practices of our social and political lives” (229-30).

  36. Clifford Geertz, “Blurred Genres: The Refiguration of Social Thought,” American Scholar 49, no. 2 (Spring 1980): 175.

  37. See, for example, Roy Turner, ed., Ethnomethodology: Selected Readings (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974).

  38. John Dunn, “Practising History and Social Science on ‘Realist’ Assumptions,” in Action and Interpretation: Studies in the Philosophy of the Social Sciences, ed. C. Hookway and P. Pettit (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1979), 160.

  3 • The Landscape of Resistance

  [Page 48]

  The setting within which the peasants of Sedaka today conduct their lives is, only in small part, their own creation. Perhaps a century ago, before British annexation, when land was still being cleared, when the cash economy and production for sale were but a minor facet of a basically subsistence economy, and when the intrusions of the state into village affairs were only sporadic, it might have been plausible to think of the pioneers of Sedaka as largely the creators of their small world. Even then of course they were scarcely autonomous.1 The state was already mobilizing labor to dig drainage canals, thereby opening new paddy land and enlarging its revenue base. The trade in rice through Penang had already monetized the economy sufficiently to expose it to larger market forces. Beyond these social forces that shaped their world, there were, above all, the vagaries of a capricious nature that, year in and year out, determined how well they ate, or if they ate at all.

  The shift has been a shift of degree, but massive enough to constitute a qualitative change. It is not so much that agriculture is no longer a gamble, but rather that the terms of the season-by-season wager are now decisively set by social forces that originate far outside the village sphere. Everything from the timing of water supply, and hence the schedule of transplanting and harvesting, to the cost of fertilizer and tractor services, the price of paddy, the cost of milling, the conditions of credit, and the cost of labor is so much an artifact of state policy and the larger economy that the sphere of local autonomy has shrunk appreciably.

  A detailed account of the social history of Sedaka and of the outside forces that impinge on it is neither necessary nor plausible here. What is necessary, however, is a sketch of the major features of the landscape that forms the context of village class relations. The background of this landscape, the basic countours of the postcolonial state and of the economy, though definitely man-made, is for all practical purposes a given that is rarely, if ever, noticed by the petty actors who are the center of our attention. One cannot, after all, expect the fish to talk about the water; it is simply the medium in which they live and breathe. Most of the elaborate, commonsense knowledge that villagers have in great abundance is of course ultimately predicated on these gross features of their taken-for-granted landscape. In any different context, much of what they know would make little [Page 49] sense. The characteristic features of this basic landscape create palpable limits to what, in the short run at least, is possible; they also create opportunities and exert a determinate pressure on the nature of class relations. Thus, it is the legally enforced system of private property in land that makes landlord-tenant relations both possible and common as a focus of class conflict. Thus, it is the practice of electoral competition, however severely circumscribed, that permits political conflict to be channeled and institutionalized in certain ways. Private property in land and elections, as social creations, are hardly immutable but, so long as they persist, they come to be assumed as “natural” facts like the clayey soils or monsoon rains in Sedaka.2

  In what might be called the middle ground of this landscape stand the economic and social facts of, say, the past ten years. The most prominent of the landmarks here are the consequences of double-cropping for tenure, income, work, mobility, stratification, and social structure in the entire region, of which Sedaka is but a small fragment. Scarcely less prominent is the change in both the scope and nature of government activity. This middle ground is in sharper focus; it manifests itself more palpably in the daily lives of rice farmers; it represents the environment to which they have had to adjust; it is, finally, a subject about which peasants have very decided, if divergent, opinions. To sketch the contours of this middle ground is to establish the basic social and economic facts that are then subject to the interpretations that villagers give them. If, for example, the loss of wage labor income attributable to combine-harvesters is strongly deplored by many villagers, it would be helpful to know both how widespread this pattern is and what the typical losses are. The purpose of sketching this middle ground is not to let the facts speak for themselves (they never do), but rather to establish something of a baseline of experienced givens that form the point of departure for relations between classes.

  The foreground of the landscape—the changes of the past decade as they have become manifest within the village of Sedaka—will be depicted in chapter 4. These two chapters constitute the setting for local experience and activity.

  The array of facts presented have been chosen with two principles of selection in mind. First, I have judged that the massive transformation in techniques of production and production relations attendant on double-cropping were the central facts for class relations in Sedaka. Second, in selecting among those facts, I have also been guided by the concerns that seemed to preoccupy villagers themselves. If the levels of land rents or the loss of harvest work aroused great worry, I let that worry influence my selection of facts. No doubt I have left out some [Page 50] pertinent, even vital facts. But it appeared preferable to be guided by their experience rather than my own, for it is from their experience that their reactions are shaped.

  BACKGROUND: MALAYSIA AND THE PADDY SECTOR

  If one had to be a peasant somewhere in Southeast Asia, there is little doubt that Malaysia would be the first choice by nearly an
y standard. Its advantages include an open, buoyant, capitalist economy with an abundance of natural resources, a relatively favorable population-to-land ratio, a political system that, if not democratic, does at least allow some political opposition, and a state that is less predatory than most of its neighbors. In terms of health services, education, water and electricity supply, transportation, flood control, and irrigation, it has almost surely done more for its population than any other Southeast Asian state.3 Its rate of growth over the past twenty years has made it the envy of its neighbors and the darling of international lending agencies such as the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank. Gross national product per capita has grown at an average annual rate of 3.9 percent from 1960 to 1976, a rate far higher than the median for low-income countries or middle-income countries and higher also than the median for industrial nations.4 Thus, despite rapid population growth (3 percent annually), Malaysia achieved a per capita gross national product of over US$1,100 by 1978, a figure that dwarfed, by a factor of 2, that of any major Southeast Asian country.5

  If ever there was a case of export-led growth, it is Malaysia. In 1980 the country was the world’s largest exporter of tropical hardwoods, tin, rubber, and palm oil, and it has been a net exporter of petroleum since 1975. One result of a consistently favorable balance of trade has been to swell government revenue nearly fourfold between 1966 and 1976, thereby enormously expanding the policy options and development expenditures of the state. By Southeast Asian standards at least the Malaysian treasury is literally awash with revenue. Another result has been to reinforce the dependence of the economy on the markets for its mostly primary export commodities. That dependence is now far more diversified than in the past when it rested on tin and rubber, but it is a marked dependence nontheless. As is so often the case, even the impressive growth of [Page 51] import-substitution industries has not lessened Malaysia’s reliance on trade; such industrialization has depended heavily on imports of capital goods and intermediate goods (nearly three-fourths of total imports by value in 1974). Foreign domination of the economy has also persisted, albeit in modified form. Once entrenched, primarily in the plantation sector, foreign enterprises became prominent both in import substitution (for example, textiles, steel, motor vehicle assembly) and in export-goods industries (for example, electrical machinery, transistors) in free-trade zones. As of 1974 more than 60 percent of the share capital of Malaysian corporations was held by foreigners.

  In this context, the needs of smallholder agriculture in general and the paddy sector in particular have never been a top priority of either the colonial or the postcolonial state. As the main source of foreign exchange and government revenue, the plantation sector has always had its requirements for infrastructure, labor, land, and capital take precedence. Now, with a growing urban work force, the effort to minimize labor costs by keeping the domestic price of rice (the major staple) low has become even more compelling.

  As elsewhere, the pattern of capitalist development, export-led growth, and encouragement of foreign investment has also resulted in a growing maldistribution of income. This has occurred despite a remarkable overall rate of growth and government programs directly aimed at redressing poverty. It is reflected in the growing disparity between average incomes in the traditional agricultural sector and the remainder of the economy from 1960 to 1970. While the gap was on the order of 1 to 2.5 in 1960, it grew to more than 1 to 3 in 1970.6 It is reflected as well in the widening gulf between the incomes of those below the official poverty line and those above it. From 1960 to 1970, for example, the real incomes of the rural poor actually declined by as much as 0.4 percent per annum, while the incomes of the rest of the population grew at about 2.4 percent annually.7 Over the next eight years (1970–78) the real incomes of the rural poor grew (2.4 percent annually), but at a rate less than half that of the rest of the population (5.2 percent). Not only have the disparities in income grown markedly over nearly two decades, but by 1978 the real incomes of the two major groups of rural poor—paddy smallholders and rubber tappers—were not appreciably better than they had been in 1960. What we have, in effect, then is a pattern of overall capitalist growth that has generated greater inequities [Page 52] and from which the rural poor have benefited least.8 The linkage between the extent of poverty and the pattern of growth in Malaysia is reflected in the anomaly that a substantially larger proportion of its rural population (44 percent) is below the nation’s offical poverty line income than is the case in other countries with far lower per capita incomes.

  Whatever policy attention the paddy sector has received has come about for three reasons. The first is the concern of the state to assure the steady domestic supply of rice.9 When imported rice was cheap and abundant and when rubber and tin prices were buoyant, the colonial policy of using export earnings to buy rice from abroad seemed to make sense. From time to time, however, the assumptions on which the policy was based failed to hold. In 1931, for example, the slump in export prices called into question the colony’s ability to pay for the rice it needed. For the first time, the government began to address the question of self-sufficiency in rice; Malay Reservation laws were passed to prevent land from passing out of Malay hands and out of paddy cultivation and in 1939 a guaranteed minimum paddy price was established. Despite these initiatives, Malaya continued to import, on average, half of the rice it consumed, for even at the depth of the Depression rubber tapping was more profitable than growing rice. A rice-provisioning crisis following World War II and then, in 1954, a paddy price slump that threatened producer incomes and prompted large demonstrations of farmers in Alor Setar gave renewed urgency to the issue of selfsufficiency. The result was a modest program of loans to help indebted farmers redeem their mortgaged land and a Padi Cultivators’ Ordinance designed to control paddy rents and ensure security of tenure. This last has remained virtually a dead letter to this day. Such ineffective patchwork solutions were inevitable, inasmuch as the state was unwilling to raise greatly the farm-gate price for fear of what this would imply for the wages of the plantation and urban work force. Progress toward self-sufficiency would have to await the new inputs and doublecropping technology of the last two decades.

  The second, and by far most important, stimulus for addressing the needs of the paddy sector has been the nature of political competition since independence. To put it crudely, the dominant political party since independence (the United Malay Nationalists’ Organization, UMNO) is an exclusively Malay party that depends largely on Malay votes to keep it in power. Many of those votes must come from paddy farmers, who are overwhelmingly Malays. The electoral system [Page 53] is, to be sure, hedged about by severe restrictions. There is virtually no municipal self-government, thereby ensuring that the largely Chinese towns will not fall into the hands of Chinese opposition parties. An internal security act allows the government to hobble the activities of both religious and left-wing opposition with preventive detention. Finally, a pattern of parliamentary constituencies of unequal population size makes the Malay vote far more influential than it would otherwise be. The electoral system has nevertheless played a vital role since 1957 in legitimizing the rule of the Malay political elite and of the National Front (Barisan Nasional), which it dominates.

  The juxtaposition of a modified electoral regime with an open, export-oriented economy that has exacerbated inequities in income distribution provides a setting in which the Malay paddy farmer has become a vital political factor. Consider the following facts. First, the average per capita income of Malays in 1970 was roughly one-half that of Chinese, the other major ethnic community.10 Taking only poor households, nearly three-quarters were Malay and over four-fifths were rural.11 The incidence of poverty, moreover, is far higher among paddy farmers than any other major occupational group, and those paddy farmers are predominantly (84 percent) Malays. The regional distribution of this poverty is also noteworthy: It is concentrated in the northern states of the peninsula (Kedah, Perlis, Kelantan, and Trengganu),
which produce most of the nation’s paddy and which are most heavily Malay. Little wonder that the combination of a large, poor, rural Malay population, together with growing income disparities, has provided the most fertile ground for inroads by the major Malay opposition party, PAS (Partai Islam). Following the general elections of 1969, UMNO had every reason to be concerned about its political hegemony among Malays; PAS had won virtually as many Malay votes overall as UMNO, and in the 43 seats where there was a straight fight between the two PAS is estimated to have received more Malay votes than UMNO.12 PAS has, at one time, controlled the state governments of Kelantan and Trengganu and in 1969 came within striking distance of winning in Kedah as well.

  The third reason why the ruling party was forced to confront the problems of poverty and growing income disparities is that they became a threat not only to its electoral hegemony but also to the fragile peace of the civil society itself. The communal riots in Kuala Lumpur and in other cities following the 1969 [Page 54] general elections were the most serious since independence and served notice that the pattern of growth to that point had not by any means purchased social peace.13 Large demonstrations by rubber smallholders and tappers in Kedah and elsewhere in 1974 further reinforced the sense that policy changes were necessary.

  One major result of this concern, not to say panic, was what is now called the New Economic Policy. It was designed to eradicate poverty by the end of the century and restructure the economy so that race would be no longer identified with economic function.

  The main threat to the political hegemony of the ruling party has thus been concentrated largely in the poor, Malay, paddy-growing states of the north, where race is very much identified with economic function. UMNO’s effort to secure its political base in these areas is reflected in policies aimed at benefitting Malay rice producers. Virtually all of these policies can be regarded as “soft” options.