Weapons of the Weak- Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance Read online

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  ISBN: 978-1-59740–994-0

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  For Skip, Bernice, and Elinore

  and with gratitude to Z and other friends in “Sedaka”

  It is clear that no Herostratus among them has dared to go into the remote countryside to study the permanent conspiracy of those whom we still call “the weak” against those who believe themselves “strong”—of the peasantry against the rich…. is it not critical to portray at last this peasant who thwarts the [legal] Code by reducing private property into something that simultaneously exists and does not exist? You shall see this tireless sapper, this nibbler, gnawing the land into little bits, carving an acre into a hundred pieces, and invited always to this feast by a petite bourgeoisie which finds in him, at the same time, its ally and its prey…. Out of the reach of the law by virtue of his insignificance, this Robespierre, with a single head and twenty million hands, works ceaselessly, crouching in every commune… bearing arms in the National Guard in every district of France, since by 1830, France does not recall that Napoleon preferred to run the risk of his misfortunes rather than to arm the masses.

  Honoré de Balzac

  Letter to P. S. B. Gavault

  introducing Les Paysans

  Do not imagine that Tonsard, or his old mother or his wife and children ever said in so many words, “we steal for a living and do our stealing cleverly.” These habits had grown slowly. The family began by mixing a few green boughs with the dead wood; then, emboldened by habit and by a calculated impunity (part of the scheme to be developed in this story), after twenty years the family had gotten to the point of taking the wood as if it were their own and making a living almost entirely by theft. The rights of pasturing their cows, the abuse of gleaning grain, of gleaning grapes, had gotten established little by little in this fashion. By the time the Tonsards and the other lazy peasants of the valley had tasted the benefits of these four rights acquired by the poor in the countryside, rights pushed to the point of pillage, one can imagine that they were unlikely to renounce them unless compelled by a force stronger than their audacity.

  Balzac, Les Paysans

  … the binary division between resistance and non-resistance is an unreal one. The existence of those who seem not to rebel is a warren of minute, individual, autonomous tactics and strategies which counter and inflect the visible facts of overall domination, and whose purposes and calculations, desires and choices resist any simple division into the political and the apolitical. The schema of a strategy of resistance as a vanguard of politicisation needs to be subjected to re-examination, and account must be taken of resistances whose strategy is one of evasion or defence—the Schweijks as well as the Solzhenitsyns. There are no good subjects of resistance.

  Colin Gordon on Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge

  Contents

  List of Tables

  Preface

  1. Small Arms Fire in the Class War

  Razak

  Haji “Broom”

  The Symbolic Balance of Power

  2. Normal Exploitation, Normal Resistance

  The Unwritten History of Resistance

  Resistance as Thought and Symbol

  The Experience and Consciousness of Human Agents

  3. The Landscape of Resistance

  Background: Malaysia and the Paddy Sector

  Middle Ground: Kedah and the Muda Irrigation Scheme

  Landownership • Farm Size • Tenure • Mechanization • From Exploitation to Marginalization • Income • Poverty • Institutional Access

  4. Sedaka, 1967–1979

  The Village

  Rich and Poor

  Village Composition

  Land Tenure

  Changes in Tenancy

  Changes in Rice Production and Wages

  Local Institutions and Economic Power

  The Farmers’ Association • The Ruling Party in Sedaka

  5. History according to Winners and Losers

  Class-ifying

  Ships Passing-and Signaling-in the Night

  Two Subjective Class Histories of the Green Revolution

  Double-cropping and Double Vision

  From Living Rents to Dead Rents

  Combine-Harvesters

  Losing Ground: Access to Paddy Land

  Rituals of Compassion and Social Control

  The Remembered Village

  6. Stretching the Truth: Ideology at Work

  Ideological Work in Determinate Conditions

  The Vocabulary of Exploitation

  Bending the Facts: Stratification and Income

  Rationalizing Exploitation

  Ideological Conflict: The Village Gate

  Ideological Conflict: The Village Improvement Scheme

  Argument as Resistance

  7. Beyond the War of Words: Cautious Resistance and Calculated Conformity

  Obstacles to Open, Collective Resistance

  The Effort to Stop the Combine-Harvester

  “Routine” Resistance

  Trade Unionism without Trade Unions • Imposed Mutuality • Selfhelp andlor Enforcement • Prototype Resistance

  “Routine” Repression

  Routine Compliance and Resistance that Covers Its Tracks

  Conformity and the Partial Transcript

  What Is Resistance?

  8. Hegemony and Consciousness: Everyday Forms of Ideological Struggle

  The Material Base and Normative Superstructure in Sedaka

  Rethinking the Concept of Hegemony

  Penetration • Inevitability, Naturalization, and Justice • Conflict within Hegemony • Trade Union Consciousness and Revolution • Who Shatters the Hegemony?

  Appendixes

  A. A Note on Village Population, 1967–1979

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

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

  D. Glossary of Local Terms

  E. Translation of Surat Layang

  Bibliography

  Index

  Photographs

  Maps

  1. The Muda Irrigation Scheme Area in Peninsular Malaysia

  2. Kedah and the Muda Scheme Area

  3. Kampung Sedaka

  Tables

  3.1 Size Distribution of Paddy-Land Holdings, Muda Irrigation Scheme, 1975–1976

  3.2 Size Distribution of Farms, 1966 and 1975–1976

  3.3 Land Tenure in Muda, 1966 and 1975–1976

  3.4 Family Income Comparisons for Different Tenure Groups and Farm-Size Categories in Muda, 1966, 1974, 1979

  3.5 Income Comparisons between Tenure Categories, 1966, 1974, 1979

  3.6 Net
Income of Various Tenure and Farm—Size Categories as Percentage of Rural Poverty—Line Income

  3.7 Relationship of Distribution of Farm Sizes, Farmers’ Association Membership, and Production Credit Recipients

  4.1 Village Data by Households—Identified by Household Head and Ranked from Poorest to Richest according to Per Capita Annual Net Income

  4.2 Distribution of Ownership of Paddy Land in Sedaka, 1967–1979

  4.3 Distribution of Paddy Farm Size in Sedaka, 1967–1979

  4.4 Frequency Distribution of Farm Holding in Sedaka, 1967–1979

  4.5 Classification of Tenancy Agreements in Sedaka by Timing of Rental Payment, 1967, 1979

  4.6 Classification of Tenancy Agreements in Sedaka by Negotiability of Rents, 1967, 1979

  4.7 Rental Rates for Tenancies Classified by Degree of Kinship between Landlord and Tenant in Sedaka, 1979

  4.8 Proportion of Total Net Income Derived from Paid Paddy-Field Labor by Households in Sedaka: Main Season, 1977–1978

  4.9 Reported Losses of Net Household Income in Sedaka due to the Mechanization of Rice Harvesting: Irrigated Season, 1977, Compared with Irrigated Season, 1979

  4.10 Village Members of Farmers’ Association, with Shares Owned, Land Claimed for Loan Purposes, Land Actually Farmed, Political Affiliation, and Income Rank, June 1979

  4.11 Political Affiliation of Households in Sedaka by Income Level, in Percentages

  Appendix Tables

  C1 Land Tenure in Sedaka, 1967

  C2 Land Tenure in Sedaka, 1979

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

  C4 Officers and Members of the Village Development Committee (JKK) of UMNO in Sedaka, with Income Rank of Family, 1979

  Preface

  The limitations of any field of study are most strikingly revealed in its shared definitions of what counts as relevant. A great deal of the recent work on the peasantry—my own as well as that of others—concerns rebellions and revolutions. Excepting always the standard ethnographic accounts of kinship, ritual, cultivation, and language—it is fair to say that much attention has been devoted to organized, large—scale, protest movements that appear, if only momentarily, to pose a threat to the state. I can think of a host of mutually reinforcing reasons why this shared understanding of relevance should prevail. On the left, it is apparent that the inordinate attention devoted to peasant insurrections was stimulated by the Vietnam war and by a now fading left—wing, academic romance with wars of national liberation. The historical record and the archives—both resolutely centered on the state’s interests—abetted this romance by not mentioning peasants except when their activities were menacing. Otherwise the peasantry appeared only as anonymous contributors to statistics on conscription, crop production, taxes, and so forth. There was something for everyone in this perspective. For some, it emphasized willy—nilly the role of outsiders—prophets, radical intelligentsia, political parties—in mobilizing an otherwise supine, disorganized peasantry. For others, it focused on just the kinds of movements with which social scientists in the West were most familiar—those with names, banners, tables of organization, and formal leadership. For still others, it had the merit of examining precisely those movements that seemed to promise largescale, structural change at the level of the state.

  What is missing from this perspective, I believe, is the simple fact that most subordinate classes throughout most of history have rarely been afforded the luxury of open, organized, political activity. Or, better stated, such activity was dangerous, if not suicidal. Even when the option did exist, it is not clear that the same objectives might not also be pursued by other stratagems. Most subordinate classes are, after all, far less interested in changing the larger structures of the state and the law than in what Hobsbawm has appropriately called “working the system… to their minimum disadvantage.”1 Formal, organized political activity, even if clandestine and revolutionary, is typically the preserve of the middle class and the intelligentsia; to look for peasant politics in this realm is to look largely in vain. It is also—not incidentally—the first step toward concluding that the peasantry is a political nullity unless organized and led by outsiders.

  And for all their importance when they do occur, peasant rebellions—let alone [Page xvi] revolutions—are few and far between. The vast majority are crushed unceremoniously. When, more rarely, they do succeed, it is a melancholy fact that the consequences are seldom what the peasantry had in mind. Whatever else revolutions may achieve—and I have no desire to gainsay these achievements—they also typically bring into being a vaster and more dominant state apparatus that is capable of battening itself on its peasant subjects even more effectively than its predecessors.

  For these reasons it seemed to me more important to understand what we might call everyday forms of peasant resistance—the prosaic but constant struggle between the peasantry and those who seek to extract labor, food, taxes, rents, and interest from them. Most forms of this struggle stop well short of outright collective defiance. Here I have in mind the ordinary weapons of relatively powerless groups: foot dragging, dissimulation, desertion, false compliance, pilfering, feigned ignorance, slander, arson, sabotage, and so on. These Brechtian—or Schweikian—forms of class struggle have certain features in common. They require little or no coordination or planning; they make use of implicit understandings and informal networks; they often represent a form of individual selfhelp; they typically avoid any direct, symbolic confrontation with authority. To understand these commonplace forms of resistance is to understand much of what the peasantry has historically done to defend its interests against both conservative and progressive orders. It is my guess that just such kinds of resistance are often the most significant and the most effective over the long run. Thus, Marc Bloch, the historian of feudalism, has noted that the great millenial movements were “flashes in the pan” compared to the “patient, silent struggles stubbornly carried on by rural communities” to avoid claims on their surplus and to assert their rights to the means of production—for example, arable, woodland, pastures.2 Much the same view is surely appropriate to the study of slavery in the New World. The rare, heroic, and foredoomed gestures of a Nat Turner or a John Brown are simply not the places to look for the struggle between slaves and their owners. One must look rather at the constant, grinding conflict over work, food, autonomy, ritual—at everyday forms of resistance. In the Third World it is rare for peasants to risk an outright confrontation with the authorities over taxes, cropping patterns, development policies, or onerous new laws; instead they are likely to nibble away at such policies by noncompliance, foot dragging, deception. In place of a land invasion, they prefer piecemeal squatting; in place of open mutiny, they prefer desertion; in place of attacks on public or private grain stores, they prefer pilfering. When such stratagems are abandoned in favor of more quixotic action, it is usually a sign of great desperation.

  Such low-profile techniques are admirably suited to the social structure of the [Page xvii] peasantry—a class scattered across the countryside, lacking formal organization, and best equipped for extended, guerrilla-style, defensive campaigns of attrition. Their individual acts of foot dragging and evasion, reinforced by a venerable popular culture of resistance and multiplied many thousand-fold, may, in the end, make an utter shambles of the policies dreamed up by their would-be superiors in the capital. Everyday forms of resistance make no headlines. But just as millions of anthozoan polyps create, willy-nilly, a coral reef, so do the multiple acts of peasant insubordination and evasion create political and economic barrier reefs of their own. It is largely in this fashion that the peasantry makes its political presence felt. And whenever, to pursue the simile, the ship of state runs aground on such reefs, attention is usually directed to the shipwreck itself and not to the vast aggregation of petty acts that made it possible. For these reasons alone, it seems important to understand this quiet and anonymous welter of p
easant action.

  To this end, I spent two years (1978—80) in a Malaysian village. The village, which I call Sedaka, not its real name, was a small (seventy-household), ricefarming community in the main paddy-growing area of Kedah, which had begun double-cropping in 1972. As in so many other “green revolutions” the rich have gotten richer and the poor have remained poor or grown poorer. The introduction of huge combine-harvesters in 1976 was perhaps the coup de grace, as it eliminated two-thirds of the wage-earning opportunities for smallholders and landless laborers. In the course of two years I managed to collect an enormous amount of relevant material. My attention was directed as much to the ideological struggle in the village—which underwrites resistance—as to the practice of resistance itself. Throughout the book I try to raise the larger issues of resistance, class struggle, and ideological domination that give these issues their practical and theoretical significance.

  The struggle between rich and poor in Sedaka is not merely a struggle over work, property rights, grain, and cash. It is also a struggle over the appropriation of symbols, a struggle over how the past and present shall be understood and labeled, a struggle to identify causes and assess blame, a contentious effort to give partisan meaning to local history. The details of this struggle are not pretty, as they entail backbiting, gossip, character assassination, rude nicknames, gestures, and silences of contempt which, for the most part, are confined to the backstage of village life. In public life—that is to say, in power-laden settings—a carefully calculated conformity prevails for the most part. What is remarkable about this aspect of class conflict is the extent to which it requires a shared worldview. Neither gossip nor character assassination, for example, makes much sense unless there are shared standards of what is deviant, unworthy, impolite. In one sense, the ferociousness of the argument depends on the fact that it appeals to shared values that have been, it is claimed, betrayed. What is in dispute is not values but the facts to which those values might apply: who is rich, who is poor, how rich, how poor, is so-and-so stingy, does so-and-so shirk work? Apart [Page xviii] from the sanctioning power of mobilized social opinion, much of this struggle can also be read as an effort by the poor to resist the economic and ritual marginalization they now suffer and to insist on the minimal cultural decencies of citizenship in this small community. The perspective adopted amounts to an implicit plea for the value of a “meaning-centered” account of class relations. In the final chapter I try to spell out the implications of the account for broader issues of ideological domination and hegemony.