The Moral Economy of the Peasant

The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast Asia

Author	James C. Scott
Country	United States
Language	English
Genre	Political Science / Anthropology
Published	1976
Publisher	Yale University Press
ISBN	978-0300021905

The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast Asia is a non-fiction book by American political scientist James C. Scott, Sterling Professor of Political Science at Yale University. This book is a survey of the economic and political tensions in peasant communities of Burma and Vietnam during the 1930s. At the intersection between political science and anthropology, this books aims to explain the conditions and motives for rebellion of peasants in a Cold War political and economic context.

This book is a product of historical research in the colonial archives in Paris and London. It develops an influential analysis of the modes of production and the forms of resistance within peasant communities. It builds on and has had a considerable impact on the theory of moral economy. In this book, Scott argues that the intrusion of the capitalistic, market-driven economy in traditional agrarian societies has severely destabilized the complex networks of peasant subsistence.

The book is part of a larger effort by Scott to study dynamics of resistance in the world's most marginalized communities. His highly regarded work on rural communities makes broader critical observations about the nature and establishment of the state, which in turn has led it to become used by developmental economists, anarchists, and libertarians alike.

Overview

The book takes its title from The Moral Economy of the English Crown in the Eighteenth Century, an essay published in 1971 by British historian E. P. Thompson.^[1] Thompson argues that an affront to the shared values and norms of the population led to rebellious movements. The riots were triggered by the state breaching the populations' perceived consensus on the legitimate ways to make, sell, and regulate bread.^[2] Thompson argues that moral economy, the "consistent traditional view of social norms and obligations, of the proper economic functions of several parties within the community" is a historical variable that has an important impact on social movements.

James C. Scott takes this grid of interpretation and applies to it to rural communities in the developing world. His main argument is that radical change in peasant communities by world capitalism and the colonial state threatens the "subsistence ethic," the principle that peasants are mostly and firstly focused on survival. The strategies of agrarian communities privilege stability as opposed to a maximization of profit. Scott argues that most relations in peasant society are articulated around this central axiom. The Landlord-tenant relationship, for example, may not permit the peasant to reap the most benefit from his work, but would be based on a "reciprocity ethic." The precarity of agrarian life is a central tenet of Scott's argument. Any drastic change in the complex and carefully agreed upon equilibrium would have a drastic impact on the lives of peasants.

Colonialism and world capitalism would, according to Scott, be that drastic change. Scott argues that the peasant's "crisis subsistence insurance" would not be respected by the rational colonial state, unaware and unwilling to compromise with local complexity. The tax system is identified by Scott as the "major institutional threat to peasant welfare". Indeed, the colonial states were more powerful than the previous indigenous governments. The peasants felt morally let down by the state that would rather pursue its own interests while continuing the extract mercilessly, with a "blind rigor". The infuriated peasants felt morally wronged and turned to revolt as a desperate measure. Thus, the moral economy of peasants refers to the system of values that underpin the expression of emotions, that in turn may have a political dimension.

Major themes

The subsistence ethic

Peasants are contrived by their low material resources as well as their constant vulnerability to natural and manmade catastrophes. Scott starts his book by a quote by R.H. Tawney, who states "the position of the rural population is that of a man standing permanently up to the neck in water so that even a ripple is sufficient to drown him".^[3] The peasant's doctrine is "safety first", meaning that his fundamental objective is to feed himself, his family, and his community. Profit is less important than survival.

In the table below, Scott recapitulates the different regimes of extraction or exploitation he observed in Southeast Asia. These categories must be seen as a continuum: towards the "A" end, the landlord protects the peasants and ensures that the cultivator will receive enough to survive regardless of what the land yields. Implicitly, this tenancy agreement also gives minimum social rights to the peasants. At the "C" end, it is the opposite: it is the landowner's revenue that is assured regardless of the yield of the land, thus shifting the risk and pressure on the peasant. A useful way to understand this is that the closer the system to the "A" side, the more the peasant's need are seen as the central legitimate claim on the harvest. Landowners that put their interests first ("C" end) breach the subsistence ethic.

In practical terms, the dichotomy between the "A" and "C" end, meaning a system that takes into account the subsistence ethic and that which does not, can be summarized by comparing the difference in the peasant's share between a sharecropping and fixed-rent system:

The fixed rent system may prove to maximize the profits of the tenants, but it fundamentally undermines his security and subsistence capacity in underperforming yields. The landowner's claim to peasant resource must be in accordance with its capacity to pay and secure the peasant's livelihood. This is the central reasoning in peasant communities, according to Scott.

Moral underpinnings of rebellion

Rather than the causes of peasant rebellion, The Moral Economy specifies the conditions of its possibility. Scott writes: "the nature of exploitation in peasant society as the victims are likely to see it, and what one might call the creation of social dynamite rather than its detonation".^[6] He argues that societies are organized around a certain set of social and moral values that impact directly political activity. In the case of peasant societies, this moral economy is organized around the subsistence ethic. In order to understand peasant rebellion, Scott writes: "If we understand the indignation and rage which prompted them to risk everything, we can grasp what I have chosen to call their moral economy: their notion of economic justice and their working definition of exploitation--their view of which claims on their product were tolerable and which intolerable[.]".^[7] Scott often uses the term "social equity" to name this complex web of traditions, norms, implicit agreements, and values that construct the social fabric of peasant societies. The argument relies on several points:

1. Peasants have an acute knowledge or representation of exploitation. In turn, they derive an idea of justice, and injustice. This means that the allocation of the rare resources of the community was in conformity with a certain moral order based on the "subsistence ethic".
2. Any breach to this equilibrium is enough to push anger peasants, who will then move to resist, and potentially rebel. In other words, offense to this system is seen first and foremost as a moral breach for the peasant.
3. Rebellion is possible if peasants are indignant and angered on an individual basis. The harm is not perceived to be done to the group but to the individual. It is the amalgamation of each individual decision to resist that creates the rebellious movement.

Based on these three points, Scott is able to formally study the impact of the subsistence ethics on rebellion.

The peasant's conception of justice can be narrowed down to two moral principles "firmly embedded in both the social patterns and injunctions of peasant life":^[8]

1. The norm of reciprocity: the "central formula for interpersonal conduct" holds that peasants have a moral duty to help one another. Scott uses the work of sociologist Alvin W. Gouldner, who held that "equal exchanges defines a fair relationship". Any gift must be repaid equally out of gratitude, motivated equally by a feeling of obligation as well as shame if the norm is not respected. Scott's point, however, is that this norm applies equally to equal relationships as well as unequal ones. Relations between elites and their clients, Scott finds, are also regulated by the moral imperative of reciprocity and mutual rights. Despite being hardly quantifiable, this norm has a rational basis: the boss is supposed to protect his client and assure his material subsistence. In return, the client offers his superior his work and loyalty. Scott notes that the norm of reciprocity is what separates "collaborative and legitimate" or "primarily exploitative".^[9]
2. The norm of subsistence is derived from the previous element. It is deemed as a "fundamental social right",^[10] it implies that the wealthy have a moral duty to help the less fortunate, especially when times are hard. This expectation was in turned projected on the bureaucracies that extracted resources from the peasants. Scott writes: Claims on peasant incomes [...] were never legitimate when they infringed on what was judged to be the minimal culturally defined subsistence level; and second, the product of the land should be distributed in such a way that all were defined a subsistence niche."^[11]

Taken together, these two norms emphasize that rebellion is not a matter of peasants being poor, or otherwise deprived of material goods. Rather, the agrarian social structure was held together by moral commitments that bound all individuals, including the most powerful and affluent. All members of the community shared this common morality. This is important because "Communitarian structures not only receive shocks more uniformly but they also have, due to their traditional solidarity, a greater capacity for collective action. . . . Thus, the argument runs, the more communal the village structure, the easier it is for a village to collectively defend its interests".^[12]

Thus, the probability of a rebellion depends both on the individual peasant's capacity to recognize a moral breach and value it sufficiently so as to act on it. Then, due to the peculiar nature of the collective moral dimension of such societies, individual injustice becomes aggregated to the collective. The roots of rebellion are thus both moral and individual (the peasant recognizes that his own set of values have been breached by a coercive entity).

The nature of exploitation

An important insight in the book is the continued persistence of extractive systems in agrarian societies. Indeed, Scott contends that as long as the norm of reciprocity and subsistence are respected, the oppressive structure remains in place despite being the antithesis of the local conceptions of justice present within peasant villages. Justice, Scott finds, is thus central and marginal: central, because the relationships between the dominated and the dominating are bound together by a fundamental judicial pact, on which the survival of peasants and their families rely. Yet it is also marginal because the relations of productions are seldom challenged. The peasant, Scott write, asks not "how much is taken?" but "how much is left?".^[13] There is a clear differentiation, between the existing injustice and the perceived injustice. An extractive system is perceived differently by peasants considering its respect of the imperative of subsistence: "the timing, size, and scope of [the extractor]'s contributions and claims to peasant resources are the key to their legitimacy".^[14]

Scott notes the importance of the nature of extraction: "As peasants experience it, the manner of exploitation may well make all the difference in the world. Forms of exploitation that tend to offer built-in subsistence security and which, in this sense, adapt themselves to the central dilemma of peasant economics are, and as seen to be, far less malign than claims which are heedless of minimum peasant standards".^[15]

Notes

References