Presentation of Class in Everyday Life

CONTRACTED to work an eight hour day for a fixed wage, a labourer in rural Bihar is reminded that he is to work uninterruptedly except for an half hour lunch break. Yet agricultural work, especially on someone else's land and under a hot sun, can be onerous; and the worker takes advantage of the employer's temporary absence. Repairing to the shade of a nearby mango tree, he prepares some tobacco and is contentedly chewing when the employer returns. The master delivers himself of a sermon on hard work and the terms of the contract, but is surprised to find the incident repeated the next day. This goes on for several days; until the employer gives in. The worker's tobacco break coincidental with the master's tea break (for that was why he was absent) is now accepted as part of the contract. This incident is probably typical of a wide variety of situations in the fields and factories of India, yet rival interpretations of its significance would sharply differ. In a version of that much abused but still influential genre of social thought, 'modernisation' theory, the labourer is not committed to his work. The absence of 'labour commitment' both among field labourers and an industrial working class not fully divorced from its rural roots, it has been suggested, can markedly slow down economic growth. The alternate interpretation, preferred by leftist intellectuals, recognises the element of class conflict in the refusal to work without a break. Yet, as the frequent use of the qualifying adjectives 'primitive' and 'embryonic' make clear, many Marxists are inclined to downplay the significance of such forms of struggle. For one, they are individual; for another, they are not violent or confrontationist; and finally, they do not challenge the existing distribution of power and economic resources. For some Marxists (or more accurately, Leninists) this elemental class conflict and the 'trade union' consciousness that is believed to inform it is the clearest justification for the intervention of a military and intellectual vanguard. The work under review addresses itself in part to this tradition of Marxism, and in part to the academic stereotype of the peasantry as alternating between quiescence and conformity on the one hand and sudden outbursts of violent, largely 'spontaneous' revolt on the other. Chiding most students of the peasantry (including himself) for their preoccupation with peasant rebellions, Scott believes that this emphasis was misplaced. For virtually all large scale revolts have ended in failure, brutally crushed by the state. And even where they have been successful in installing a new social order, the ideological orientation of the new regime has often been at odds with the needs of the peasantry. There are in addition sound intellectual (as distinct from political) reasons for undertaking the "unwritten history of resistance" (28) Not only is open rebellion infrequent, it is by no means the characteristic form of peasant resistance. The everyday form of peasant resistance is the prosaic but constant struggle between the peasantry and those who seek to extract labour, food, taxes, rents, and interest from them. Most of the forms this struggle takes stop well short of collective outright defiance. Here I have in mind the ordinary weapons of relatively powerless groups: foot dragging, dissimulation, false compliance, pilfering, feigned ignorance, slander, arson, sabotage, and so forth. These Brechtian forms of class struggle have certain features in common. They require little or no co,ordination or planning; they often represent a form of individual self help; and they typically avoid any direct symbolic confrontation with authority or with elite norms. To understand these commonplace forms of resistance is to understand what much of the peasantry does 'between revolts' to defend its interests as best it can (29) An elucidation of these forms of protest, and their larger significance, is the task the author sets himself. While the core of the book is a "thick description" of class relations in a single Malay village, its point of departure (and eventual resting place) are the theoretical and methodological issues involved in the study of peasant society.