CLASS RELATIONS AND POLITICS

The peasant family’s problem, put starkly, was to produce enough rice to feed the household, buy a few necessities such as salt and cloth, and meet the irreducible claims of outsiders. The amount of rice a family could produce was partly in the hands of fate, but the local tradition of seed varieties, planting techniques, and timing was designed over centuries of trial and error to produce the most stable and reliable yield possible under the circumstances. These were the technical arrangements evolved by the peasantry to iron out the “ripples that might drown a man.” Many social arrangements served the same purpose. (Scott 1976: 2-3)

Before diving into Scott’s theories about the peasantry, it is first important to understand what he means by the peasantry, as well as the conditions they were in at the time of his writing (see Figure 1). Generally, peasants refer to rural cultivators who own some of their means of production (e.g., land), produce primarily to meet their families’ consumption needs, and are subject to a larger society (state, capitalists) who makes claims upon them (Scott 1976: 157).

As the quote above suggests, Scott views the vast majority of the peasantry as a group with a tenuous hold on their own survival, who have also developed techniques and social patterns to deal with such precarity. Besides a vital concern with subsistence, peasants in Scott’s writing also face internal inequality. Since the green revolution in the early 1970s in Malaysia, rising land prices and mechanization made it increasingly difficult for tenant farmers or small family farmers to buy land or expand their farm (Scott 1985: 68-82). The income of the poorer peasants was decreasing, and the expansion of large-scale commercial farms enriched the already richer rural elites.

SUBSISTENCE ETHIC

Under these circumstances, Scott argues that most peasant households are risk averse. Their central economic logic is to avoid hunger and guarantee basic needs, rather than to maximize profits for their families. Peasants want to maintain subsistence not only to survive (an economic claim), but also because they consider subsistence as their fundamental social right (a moral claim) to be guaranteed by the elites (Scott 1976: 176). This sense of moral entitlement to subsistence is tied to the principle of reciprocity which, Scott (1976: 167) argues, governs peasants’ social relationships. It means that “a gift or service received creates, for the recipient, a reciprocal obligation to return a gift or service of at least comparable value at some future date.” This principle not only matters for exchanges between peasants of equal economic and social stature, but above all, takes the form of patron-client bonds between elites and poorer peasants: elites protect the masses and provide for their subsistence, while the masses reciprocate with labor and loyalty (Scott 1976: 169). This principle of reciprocity and subsistence ethic constitutes Scott’s moral economy of the peasant in ideal form (see Figure 2).

Importantly, similar patterns of moral reciprocity govern relationships beyond those of the peasant. With conceptions of the good lord, the just king, the decent landlord, and so on, justifications of any hierarchy of status implies some moral responsibility assigned to each role. In reality, the superordinate class (e.g., rural elites) does not always honor their responsibility to provide for subsistence. Nor does the subordinate class (e.g., ordinary peasants) always remain loyal to these elites. Scott (1976: 181) therefore draws the conclusion that “the acceptance of distinction in status and wealth is in this sense always contingent and never absolute.” This opens the door to the question of what happens when the principle of reciprocity is not honored by either party, which is the practical scenario (see Figure 3, where I show that the borders of the classes are amorphous and unfixed).

EVERYDAY RESISTANCE

What do peasants do when the relationship of reciprocity between the elites and the masses is tarnished or breaks down? One extreme outcome is peasant revolt. In line with the subsistence ethic, Scott (1976: 201) argues that peasants tend to revolt not when tax levies and other forms of extraction are objectively the highest, but when it encroaches on their basic subsistence, particularly in times of crop failure or market crisis.

Non-revolt is a far more common outcome, partly due to (fear of) repression and the poor peasants having scattered interests and lacking formal organization (Scott 1985: 244-46). The absence of open and collective resistance does not mean that peasants are content with their situation, or that they accept what the elites claim about them—for example, that they are lazy and dishonest, deserving to be poor. On the contrary, resistance can take the form of everyday actions such as foot dragging and sabotaging machines, of thought and symbol, as long as these actions carry the intentions of mitigating or denying claims made by the superordinate class (Scott 1985: 32). For Scott, such everyday resistance represents ideological conflict: the subordinate class contesting the symbolic order put forth by the superordinate class, fighting for a good name and over the definition of justice, alongside contests over land, work, income, and power. This ideological resistance is based on locally shared expectations of reciprocity, requires little to no coordination, avoids direct confrontation with authority, yet it can be significant and effective in the long run, conditioning the policy options available to the state (Scott 1985: xvi, 36).

SCOTT AND MARX AND ENGELS: CLASS AGENCY

Neither peasants nor proletarians deduce their identities directly or solely from the mode of production, and the sooner we attend to the concrete experience of class as it is lived, the sooner we will appreciate both the obstacles to, and the possibilities for, class formation. [… I]n the village, and not only there, classes travel under strange and deceptive banners. They are not apprehended as ghostly, abstract concepts but in the all-too-human form of specific individuals and groups, specific conflicts and struggles. (Scott 1985:43)

Scott’s primary contribution, I believe, is that he highlights the role of subordinate class agency and values within Marx and Engels’ framework of historical materialism. In other words, Scott puts the local, specific experiences and cultural repertoires of individuals in central place when discussing class relations and class conflicts.

A note on the revolutionary potential of the peasantry and peasantry as a class before delving into specific conversations: for Marx and Engels, the proletariat is the (potentially) revolutionary class under capitalism. They consider peasants, along with the lower middle class, to be conservative and reactionary until eventually becoming part of the proletariat (Scott 1978: 4, 82). For simplicity, in Figure 4 below, I lump the proletariat, peasants, and so on together into the box of the subordinate class with revolutionary potential. Scott does not explicitly assess the revolutionary potential of the peasantry, nor does he have a theory of human society progressing from one stage to the next. As a result, his use of the term class is looser: he talks about the “local class relations” within the peasantry, relations between groups of people who have some shared interests (Scott 1985: xix). Scott also does not invoke class relations in anticipation of the population polarizing into either the bourgeoisie or the proletariat class as Marx and Engels (1978: 474) do.

SCOTT AND MARX AND ENGELS: EXPLOITATION

Scott proposes a different conceptualization of exploitation than Marx and Engels. While Scott also understands exploitation to be a relationship between individuals, groups, or institutions, he does not mean it primarily as a relationship of surplus extraction: capitalists exploit workers by amassing the surplus value produced by workers for purposes of profit maximization and capital accumulation (Marx and Engels 1978: xxxii). Instead, exploitation means an unfairness in the distribution of efforts and rewards intimately felt by the subordinate class based on pre-existing norms of justice (Scott 1976: 158). With peasants, for example, exploitation is perceived to be the most severe not when the largest quantity of crops is taken by the state, but when not enough is left to meet the basic needs of subsistence (Scott 1976: 31-32).

Scott argues that this subjective perception of the subordinate class based on their existing moral economy is crucial to understanding exploitation and its political consequences. Intensifying exploitation, perceived and material, does increase the inequality between poor peasants and their oppressors (Scott 1985: 82), similar to Marx and Engels’ (1978: 216) thesis of class polarization as the division of labor intensifies under capitalism. However, while Marx and Engels predict a revolution of the working class which overthrows existing relations of exploitation for new modes of production, Scott does not believe that heightened exploitation necessarily leads to subordinate class revolt. What it does is heat up the ideological contestations between classes over what is fair and just, over the reciprocal obligations each social role should fulfill. Here again, Scott diverges from Marx and Engels over the agency of the subordinate class to subvert the ideological domination of the superordinate class, which I detail below.

SCOTT AND MARX AND ENGELS: CLASS STRUGGLE AND CLASS CONSCIOUSNESS

Scott argues that one’s position in the social relations of production (e.g., class position) is not the only source of consciousness. In the village, for example, kinship, faction, and ritual links are all foci of human identity and solidarity (Scott 1985: 43). Even when the ruling class attempts to project their ideas as the universal truth, the subordinate class often do not accept their “hegemony of the spirit” (Marx and Engels 1978: 175). Here, Scott provides a definition of resistance that is much more flexible than Marx and Engels’ theory of proletariat revolution towards communism, the lack of which constitutes the false consciousness of the subordinate class.

For Scott (1985: 290), class resistance includes “any act(s) by member(s) of a subordinate class that is or are intended either to mitigate or deny claims (for example, rents, taxes, prestige) made on that class by superordinate classes (for example, landlords, large farmers, the state) or to advance its own claims (for example, work, land, charity, respect) vis-à-vis those superordinate classes.” This means that even though Scott is still operating in the traditions of historical materialism with a focus on the material basis of class relations and class struggle, he allows for resistance to include both individual and collective acts, with a focus on actors’ intentions rather than consequences. For him, self-interested resistance of the lower classes does not have to coalesce into collective and formal political struggle to be meaningful “class struggles”. Formal political activities may be the norm for elites, the intelligentsia, and the middle classes, but not the lower classes. In the example of the peasantry, their struggles are embedded in local cultures and routines to provide for subsistence, and it is impossible to divorce the struggle over material needs from the struggle over values and ideologies (Scott 1985: 299-301). In other words, the formation of a unified proletariat (subordinate) class consciousness is not only difficult but also not a core issue when it comes to animating class struggle. As a result, Scott (1985: 350) calls for the respect, celebration, and better understanding of lower classes’ everyday resistance for self-preservation, with an educated pessimism for the prospect of revolution.

CONCLUSION

James Scott provides a value-laden account of class relations with the case of peasants in Southeast Asia in the 1960s and 70s. He argues that beyond extracting from and laying claims on the subordinate class, superordinate classes are also bound up with the subordinate classes in a web of moral obligations and expectations. We cannot understand class relations and class conflicts without understanding the moral terrain in which they are embedded. In the example of the peasantry, Scott explains their resistance and the lack thereof in the context of a subsistence-oriented moral economy, as well as the traditional structures of subsistence security that were challenged by the continued expansion of global capitalism.

Friendly critics of Scott have pointed out that he deals better with the subtleties of resistance than the subtleties of domination, or the relationship between resistance and domination. Specifically, Sivaramakrishnan (2005) points out that both sides in Scott’s everyday class conflicts are well aware of each other’s repertoire of practical and discursive strategies. There exists a larger social contract that, to some extent, orders and constrains these conflicts. Scott (2005) agrees to this criticism and adds that to participants in the conflict, their limits and constraints are never clearly defined. There are also larger, ever-changing boundary conditions such as property relations and the political regime which can threaten the “rules” of class conflict in a given context (Scott 2005). Attempts to make sense of the complicit and reciprocal relationship between domination and resistance go on.

Why should we care about a theory of class relations from forty years ago based on the Malaysian, Vietnamese, and Burmese peasantry? I wish to emphasize here that Scott’s work is by no means restricted to a theory of the peasantry. The agency of the lower classes against the hegemony of the ruling class, as well as the importance of values and meanings in the operation of power, are important for us to consider beyond traditional, rural societies. Besides, characteristics of the peasants in Scott’s writing apply to many of us now: we own some means of (re)production in the form of knowledge and material assets, yet our ability to make a living is increasingly uncertain. How can we resist the numerous claims laid upon us, and to find our place in this neoliberal, global capitalism? Scott’s theories provide some inklings.

REFERENCES

Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels. 1978. The Marx-Engels Reader (2nd Edition), Edited by R. C. Tucker. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.

Scott, James C. 1976. The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast Asia: Yale University Press.

Scott, James C. 1985. Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance: Yale University Press.

Scott, James C. 2005. "Afterword to “Moral Economies, State Spaces, and Categorical Violence”." American Anthropologist 107(3):395-402.

Sivaramakrishnan, Kalyanakrishnan. 2005. "Some Intellectual Genealogies for the Concept of Everyday Resistance." American Anthropologist 107(3):346-55.