The Moral Economy

of the Peasant
REBELLI ON AND SUBSISTENCE
I N SOUTHEAST ASI A
JamesC. Scott
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los libros y r e s i s t s 3 Gracias
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23 22
Introduction
There are districtsinwhich the position of the rural population is
that of a man standing permanently up to theneck in water, so that
even a rippleissufficient to drown him.
1
Tawney was writing about China in 1931but it would not stretch his
graphic description much to apply it to thepeasantry of Upper Burma,
Tonkin and Annamin Indochina, or East and Central Javain theearly
twentieth century. Here too, lilliputian plots, traditional techniques, the
vagaries of weather and the tributein cash, labor, and kind exacted by
the statebrought the specter of hunger and dearth, and occasionally
famine, to the gatesof every village.
The particular ecological niche occupied by some sectors of the
peasantry in Southeast Asia exposed them, more than most, to subsis-
tencerisks. Upper Burma'sDry Zone, alwaysat themercy of acapricious
rainfall, suffered a catastrophic famine in 1856-57, shortly after Brit-
ain'sconquest of Lower Burma. "The rainsfailed and thericewithered
in thefields. . . and the people died. They died in thefieldsgnawing
the bark of trees; they died on the highwayswhilewandering in search
of food; they died in their homes."
2
I n Annam, in northeast Thailand,
and elsewherewhere nature isunkind, most adults must haveexperi-
enced, within living memory, one or more timesof great scarcity when
the weak and very young died and when otherswerereduced to eating
their livestock and seed paddy, to subsisting on millet, root crops,
branon what they might normally feed their animals.
The great famitieof 1944-45 experienced by the peasantry of North
Vietnam, however, wasof such magnitude asto dwarf other twentieth-
century subsistencecrisesin the region. I n the best of times, the culti-
vated land inTonkin barely sufficed to feed itsown population. The
Japanese and their Vichy allies, nevertheless, converted much paddy
land to jute and other war-machine crops. After the October 1943
harvest, theoccupation forcesliterally scoured thecountrysidein armed
bands, confiscating much of the crop. A near-famine became a total
famine when a seriesof typhoons from May to September broke dikes
and flooded much of Tonkin'spaddy land, destroying the tenth-month
1. R. H. Tawney, Land and Labor in China (Boston: Beacon Press, 1966), p. 77.
2. Fromthe Government of Burma Report on the Famine in Burma 1896-97, quoted by-
Michael Adas in Agrarian Development and the Plural Society in Lower Burma (Madison:
University of Wisconsin Press, 1974), p. 45.
1
T H E MORAL ECONOMY OF T H E PEASANT
harvest in 1944. Even millet, potatoes, and ricebran were exhausted;
potato leaves, banana roots, grasses, and the bark of trees remained.
Those who tried to plant a few potatoes might find that they had been
pulled out and eaten during thenight. Starvation began in October 1944
and beforethespring harvest in 1945asmany astwo million Vietnamese
had perished.
3
Subsistence crises and periods of dearth for most Southeast Asians
have typically been on a smaller scale: local droughts or floods,
epidemics that destroyed plow animals, windsor rains at harvest that
beat down or spoiled much of the grain, or birds, rats, or crabs that
ravaged the crop. Often the shortage might be confined to a single
family whoseland waseither too high and dry or too low and wet, whose
working head fell ill at transplanting or harvest time, whosechildren
weretoo many for itssmall patch of land. Even i f thecrop was sufficient,
the claimson it by outsidersrent, taxesmight make it insufficient.
I f theGreat Depression left an indeliblemark on thefears, values, and
habitsof a wholegeneration of Americans, can weimaginetheimpact of
periodic food crises on the fears, values, and habits of ricefarmersin
monsoon Asia?
The fear of food shortageshas, in most precapitalist peasant societies,
given rise to what might appropriately be termed a "subsistenceethic."
This ethic, which Southeast Asian peasantsshared with their counter-
partsin nineteenth-century France, Russia, andItaly, wasa consequence
of living so close to the margin. A bad cropwould not only mean short
rations; the price of eating might be the humiliation of an onerous
dependenceor the saleof someland or livestock which reduced the odds
of achieving an adequate subsistence the following year. The peasant
family's problem, put starkly, was to produce enough rice to feed the
jusehold, buy a few necessitiessuch as salt and cloth, and meet the
irreducible claims of outsiders. The amount of rice a family could
produce waspartly in the handsof fate, but the local tradition of seed
varieties, planting techniques, and timing wasdesigned over centuriesof
trial and error to produce the most stable and reliable yield possible
under the circumstances. Thesewere the technical arrangements evolved
3. For adescriptionof thisincrediblewinter, see Ngo Vinh Long'stranslationof Tran
Van Mai, Who Committed This Crime?, in Ngo Vinh Long, Before the Revolution: The
Vietnamese Peasants Under the French (Cambridge, Mass.: M.I .T. Press, 1973). Many peasants
experienced the Viet Minh inthisperiodasan organizationthat helped organize attacks
on official granaries or on Japanesericeshipments and brought available grain f rom the
periphery of the Delta. For a brief discussion of Vietnamese politics in this period, see
Huynh KimKhanh, "The Vietnamese August RevolutionReinterpreted,"Journal of Asian
Studies 30:4 (August 1971), 761-81.
I NTRODUCTI ON
3
by thepeasantry to iron out the"ripplesthat might drown a man." Many
social arrangements served the same purpose. Patterns of reciprocity,
forced generosity, communal land, and work-sharing helped to even out
theinevitabletroughsin afamily'sresourceswhich might otherwisehave
thrown thembelow subsistence. The proven valueof these techniques
and social patterns is perhaps what has given peasants a Brechtian
tenacity in the face of agronomists and social workerswho come from
the capital to improvethem.
The purpose of theargument which followsisto placethesubsistence
ethic at thecenter of theanalysisof peasant politics. Theargument itself
growsout of a prolongedeffort on my part to understand someof the
major peasant rebellionswhich swept much of Southeast Asia during the
Great Depression of the 1930s. Two of thoseinsurrections, theSaya San
Rebellion in Burma and what has been called the Nghe-Tinh Sovietsin
central Vietnam, are analyzed in somedetail.
I n a broad view of colonial history in Southeast Asia, theserebellions
and others like themmight beconsidered epiphenomena, though they
were hardly trivial for the men and women who fought and died in
them. Both uprisingswereultimately crushed; bothfailed to achieve any
of the peasants' goals; both are considered minor subplots in a political
drama that was to be increasingly dominated by the struggle between
nationalistsand colonizers. I nstill another and moreprofound historical
sense, these movements were marginal. They looked to a closed and
autonomous peasant Ut opia in aworld inwhich centralization and com-
mercialization were irresistible. They were more or lessspontaneous
uprisingsdisplaying all thetrademarks of peasant localismin aworld in
which the big battalions of secular nationalismwere the only effective
opposition to the colonial state. Along with other backward-looking
movements of peasantsor artisans, they were, in Hobsbawm's phrase,
"inevitable victims" inasmuch as they ran "dead against the current of
history."
4
Viewingfromanother perspective, however, wecan learn a great deal
from rebelswho were defeated nearly a half-century ago. I f we under-
stand theindignation and ragewhich prompted themto risk everything,
we can grasp what I have chosen to call their moral economy: their
notion of economic justice and their working definition of exploi-
tationtheir view of which claimson their product were tolerable and
which intolerable. Insofar as their moral economy is representative
of peasantselsewhere, and I believeI can show that it is, wemay move
4. E. J . Hobsbawm, "Class Consciousness in History," in Istvan Mezaros, ed., Aspects of
History and Class Consciousness (London, 1971), pp. 11-12.
4
T H E MORAL ECONOMY OF T H E PEASANT
toward afuller appreciation of thenormativerootsof peasant politics. I f
we understand, further, how the central economic and political trans-
formationsof thecolonial era served to systematically violatethe peasan-
try'svision of social equity, wemay realizehow a class"of low classness"
5
cameto provide, far moreoften than theproletariat, theshock troopsof
rebellion and revolution.
Onecautionary noteisin order. Thisstudy isnot primarily an analysis
of thecauses of peasant revolution. That task has been attempted, and
with notable success, by Barrington MooreJ r. and Eric R. Wolf .
6
A study
of themoral economy of peasantscantell uswhat makes themangry and
what islikely, other thingsbeing equal, to generatean explosivesitua-
tion. But if anger born of exploitation were sufficient to spark a rebel-
lion, most of theThird World (and not only theThird World) would be
in flames. Whether peasants who perceive themselves to beexploited
actually rebel dependson a host of intervening factorssuch asalliances
with other classes, the repressive capacity of dominant elites, and the
social organization of the peasantry itselfwhich are not treated except
in passing here. Instead, I deal with thenatureof exploitation in peasant
society as its victims are likely to see it, and what one might call the
creation of social dynamiterather than itsdetonation. (I limit myself to
thisterrain not only out of respect for the fine work done on revolution
by Mooreand Wolf and a senseof the division of academic labor, but
becauseexploitationwithout rebellion seemsto mea far moreordinary
state of affairs than revolutionary war.) I n the final chapter, I try to
indicate what the tragic options are for an exploited peasantry in the
absence of rebellion.
The basic idea upon which my argument restsisboth simpleand, I
believe, powerful. I t arisesfrom the central economic dilemma of most
peasant households. Living close to the subsistencemargin and subject
to the vagaries of weather and the claims of outsiders, the peasant
household has little scope for the profit maximization calculus of tra-
ditional neoclassical economics. Typically, the peasant cultivator seeksto
avoid the failure that will ruin himrather than attempting a big, but
risky, killing. I n decision-making parlance hisbehavior isrisk-averse; he
minimizesthesubjectiveprobability of themaximumloss. I f treating the
peasant asa would-beSchumpeterian entrepreneur misseshiskey exis-
tential dilemma, so do thenormal power-maximizing assumptions fail to
5. Theodor Shanin, "The Peasantry as a Political Factor," Sociological Review
14:1 (1966), 5.
6. See Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1966), and
Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century (New York: Harper and Row, 1969), respectively.
I NTRODUC TI ON
5
do justiceto hispolitical behavior. To begin instead with theneed for a
reliable subsistenceasthe primordial goal of the peasant cultivator and
then to examine hisrelationshipsto hisneighbors, to elites, and to the
statein termsof whether they aid or hinder himin meeting that need, is
to recast many issues.
I t isthis"safety-first" principle which liesbehind a great many of the
technical, social, and moral arrangements of a precapitalist agrarian
order. Theuse of morethan one seed variety, theEuropean traditional
f arming on scattered strips, to mentiononly two, areclassical techniques
for avoiding undue risks often at the cost of a reduction in average
return. Within the village context, a widearray of social arrangements
typically operated to assure a minimum income to inhabitants. The
existence of communal land that was periodically redistributed, in part
on thebasisof need, or thecommonsin European villagesfunctioned in
thisway. I naddition, social pressureswithin theprecapitalist villagehad
a certain redistributiveeffect: rich peasantswereexpected to becharita-
ble, to sponsor morelavish celebrations, to help out temporarily indigent
kin and neighbors, to givegenerously to local shrines and temples. As
Michael Lipton has noted, "many superficially odd village practices
make senseas disguised forms of insurance."
7
I t isall too easy, and a serious mistake, to romanticize thesesocial
arrangements that distinguish much of peasant society. They are not
radically egalitarian. Rather, they imply only that all are entitled to a
living out of the resourceswithin the village, and that living isattained
often at thecost of a lossof statusand autonomv. They work, moreover,
in largemeasurethrough the abrasive forceof gossip and envy and the
knowledge that the abandoned poor are likely to bea real and present
danger to better-off villagers. These modest but critical redistributive
mechanisms nonethelessdo provideaminimal subsistenceinsurance for
villagers. Polanyi claimson the basisof historical and anthropological
evidence that such practices were nearly universal intraditional society
and served to mark it of f f rom the modern market economy. Hecon-
cludes, "I t is the absence of the threat of individual starvation which
makes primitive society, in a sense, more human than market economy,
and at the sametime lesseconomic."
8
7. Michael Lipton, "The Theory of the Optimizing Peasant,"Journal of Development
Studies 4 (1969), 341, cited in Wolf , Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century, p. 279.
8. Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1957), pp. 163-64.
Even the termseminal, applied as it is without discretion, is too weak a tributefor this
book. Hisanalysis of premarket and market economies has been formative for my own
work. The emphasis in thisquote has been added.
6 T H E MORAL ECONOMY OF T H E PEASANT
The provision of subsistenceinsurance wasnot confined to thevillage
sphere; it also structured the moral economy of relations to outside
elites. AsEric Wolf observed,
I t issignificant, however, that before the advent of capitalism. . .
social equilibriumdepended in both the long and short run on a
balance of transfers of peasant surpluses to the rulers and the
provision of minimal security for the cultivator. Sharing resources
within communal organizationsand reliance on tieswith powerful
patrons were recurrent ways in which peasantsstrove to reduce
risks and to improvetheir stability, and both were condoned and
frequently supported by the state.
9
Again, we must guard against the impulse to idealize these arrange-
ments. Wherethey worked, and they did not alwayswork, they werenot
so much a product of altruismasof necessity. Whereland was abundant
and labor scarce, subsistence insurance was virtually the only way to
attach a labor force; wherethe meansof coercion at thedisposal of elites
and the statewassharply limited, it wasprudent to show some respect
for the needsof the subordinate population.
Although the desire for subsistencesecurity grew out of the needsof
cultivatorsout of peasant economicsit wassocially experienced asa
pattern of moral rightsor expectations. Barrington Moorehas captured
the normativetone of these expectations:
This experience [of sharing riskswithin the community] provides
the soil out of which grow peasant mores and the moral standards
by which they judge their own behavior and that of others. The
essenceof thesestandardsisa crude notion of equality, stressing
thejusticeand necessity of a minimumof land [resources] for the
performance of essential social tasks. Thesestandardsusually have
somesort of religioussanction, and it islikely to bein their stresson
thesepointsthat the religion of peasantsdiffers fromthat of other
social classes.
10
The violation of thesestandardscould be expected to provokeresent-
ment and resistancenot only becauseneedswere unmet, but because
rights wereviolated.
The subsistenceethic, then, isrooted in the economic practices and
social exchangesof peasant society. Asa moral principle, as a right to
9. Wolf , Peasant Wars, p. 279.
10. Moore, Social Origins, pp. 497-98. I believetheemphasis inmost peasant societiesis
not so muchon landper season the right to ashareof the product of land; henceI have
added "resources" in brackets.
I NTRODUC TI ON 7
subsistence, I believeI can show that it formsthestandard against which
claims to the surplus by landlords and the state are evaluated. The
essential question iswho stabilizeshisincome at whose expense. Since
thetenant prefersto minimizetheprobability of a disaster rather than to
maximizehisaveragereturn, thestability and security of hissubsistence
income are more critical to his evaluation of the tenure system than
either his average return or the amount of the crop taken by the
landlord. A tenure systemwhich provides the tenant with a minimal
guaranteed return islikely to be experienced aslessexploitativethan a
systemwhich, while it may take lessfrom himon the average, doesnot
rate his needsas a consumer as primary. The samereasoning may be
applied to theclaimof the state. To theextent that that claimisa fixed
charge which does not vary with the peasant'scapacity to pay in any
given year, it is likely to be viewed as more exploitativethan a fiscal
burden which varieswith hisincome. The test for the peasant ismore
likely to be"What isleft?" than "How much istaken?" The subsistence
test offers a very different perspective on exploitation than theories
which rely only on thecriterion of surplusvalueexpropriated. Whilethe
latter may be useful in classifying modes of expropriation, it is my
contention that they are less likely to be an adequate guide to the
phenomenology of peasant experience than thesubsistencetest. For it is
the question of subsistence that ismost directly related to theultimate
needsand fears of peasant life.
Two major transformations during the colonial period in Southeast
Asia served to undermine radically the preexisting social insurance
patterns and to violate the moral economy of the subsistence ethic.
Thesewere, first, theimposition of what Eric Wolf hascalled "a particu-
lar cultural system, that of North Atlantic capitalism"
11
and, second, the
related development of the modern state under a colonial aegis. The
transformation of land and labor (that is, nature and human work) into
commodities for salehad the most profound impact. Control of land
increasingly passed out of the handsof villagers; cultivators progres-
sively lost free usufruct rights and became tenants or agrarian wage
laborers; thevalueof what wasproduced wasincreasingly gauged by the
fluctuations of an impersonal market. I n a sense, what washappening in
Southeast Asia wasnothing morethan a parochial recapitulation of what
Marx had observed in Europe. "But on the other hand, these new
freedmen becamesellersof themselves only after they had been robbed
of all their own meansof production and of all the guaranteesof ex-
istence afforded by the old feudal arrangements. And the history of
11. Wolf, Peasant Wars, p. 276.
8 T H E MORAL ECONOMY OF T H E PEASANT
this, their expropriation, iswritten in theannalsof mankind in lettersof
blood and fire."
12
On theland in Lower Burma and in theMekong Delta
these "new freedmen" faced an increasingly implacable classof land-
owners whose claimson the harvest varied lesswith the needsof their
tenantsthan with what themarket would bear. What had been a worsen-
ing situation throughout the early twentieth century became, with the
onset of the world depression, a zero-sum struggle based as much on
coercion as on the market. Peasants resisted as best they could and,
where circumstances permitted, they rebelled.
The statewasasmuch an actor in thisdrama asweretheownersof the
scarce factors of production. Not only did it provide the legal and
coercivemachinery necessary to ensurethat contractswerehonored and
the market economy retained, but the state was itself a claimant on
peasant resources. Much of itsadministrativeeffort had been bent to
enumerating and recording itssubjects and their land for tax purposes.
Its fiscal advisors reasoned much as landlords: a stable income was
preferable to a fluctuating income and therefore fixed head taxes and
fixed land rateswere preferable to a tax on actual income. When the
economic crisiscame, the state'sreceipts fromcustoms dutiesand other
variable sources of income fell dramatically and it accordingly bore
down more heavily on itsmost steady revenue producer, the head tax.
This claim, further burdening an already hard-pressed peasantry, also
provoked resistance and rebellion.
I t ispossible to discern in all of thisa strong parallel with the earlier
creation of nation-states and the development of a market economy in
Europe which produced similar resistance.
13
There too the problemof
subsistence income was exacerbated by market forces and by a more
intrusive state. R. C. Cobb, in hismasterful study of popular protest in
eighteenth-century France, maintains that it can be understood only in
termsof the problemof food supply, thedanger of shortages, and their
political meaning.
Attitudes to dearth conditioned popular attitudes to everything
else: government, thecountryside, life and death, inequality, depri-
vation, morality, pride, humiliation, self-esteem. I t is the central
theme in all forms of popular expression. Nor were the common
12. Capital, vol. 1(New York: New Worl d Paperbacks, 1966), p. 715.
13. See, for example, Polanyi, and Roland Mousnier, Peasant Uprisings in Seventeenth-
Century France, Russia., and China, trans. Brian Pearce(NewYork: Harper and Row, t970),
and E. P. Thompson, "The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth
Century,'' Past and Present 50 (February 1971).
I NTRODUCTI ON 9
people living in a world of myth and panic fear: for dearth and
famine were in fact the biggest single threat to their existence.
14
Despitethestriking parallels, a good casecan bemadethat theprocess
of transformation was, i f anything, more traumatic for colonial peoples.
For one thing, it telescoped a processwhich had taken asmuch as three
centuries in England or France into a forced march of mere decades. I n
Europe, moreover, as Polanyi eloquently shows, the indigenous forces
which had much to losefromaf ull market economy (including, at times,
the crown, portionsof the aristocracy, artisans, peasants, and workers)
were occasionally able to impede or at least restrict the play of market
forcesby invoking theolder moral economy. I n Germany and Japan the
creation of strong conservative statesallowed what Moorehas called "a
revolution from above" which kept asmuch of the original social struc-
ture intact aspossible whilestill modernizing theeconomy. The results,
while laying the ground for fascismand militarismat a later date, were
somewhat lesstraumatic in the short run for the peasantry. But in the
colonial world the political forces which would have opposed or
moderated the full impact of the market economy had little or no
capacity to make themselves felt except at the level of insurrection.
The problemfor thepeasantry during thecapitalist transformation of
theThird World, viewedf rom thisperspective, isthat of providing for a
minimum income.
15
While a minimum income has solid physiological
dimensions, wemust not overlook itssocial and cultural implications. I n
order to be a fully functioning member of villagesociety, a household
needsa certain level of resourcesto discharge itsnecessary ceremonial
and social obligationsaswell asto feed itself adequately and continueto
cultivate. To fall below this level is not only to risk starvation, it is to
suffer a profound lossof standing within the community and perhaps
to fall into a permanent situation of dependence.
The precapitalist community was, in a sense, organized around this
problem of the minimum incomeorganized to minimizethe risk to
which itsmembers wereexposed by virtueof itslimited techniques and
the caprice of nature. Traditional forms of patron-client relationships,
reciprocity, and redistributive mechanisms may be seen from this
perspective. While precapitalist society was singularly ill-equipped to
providefor itsmembersin theevent of collective disaster, it did provide
household social insurance against the "normal" risks of agriculture
through an elaborate systemof social exchange.
14. R. C. Cobb, The Police and the People: French Popular Protest Movements 1789-1820
(London: Oxf ord University Press, 1970), p. xviii.
15. 1amgrateful to Van Ooms for suggesting this.
I O T H E MORAL ECONOMY OF T H E PEASANT
I n morerecent times, of course, the stateitself hasassumed theroleof
providing for a minimumincome with such devices ascountercyclical
fiscal policy, unemployment compensation, welfare programs, social
medicine, and the negative incometax. One effect of theseguarantees,
incidentally, has been to makeit morerational for individualsto engage
in profit-maximizing behavior.
Thecolonial period in Southeast Asia, and elsewhere for that matter,
wasmarked by an almost total absenceof any provision for the mainte-
nanceof a minimal incomewhile, at the sametime, thecommercializa-
tion of the agrarian economy was steadily stripping away most of the
traditional formsof social insurance.
16
Far fromshielding the peasantry
against the fluctuations of the market, colonial regimes were likely to
presseven harder in a slump so as to maintain their own revenue. The
result was something of a paradox. I n the midst of a booming export
economy, new fortunes for indigenous landowners, officeholders, and
moneylenders and, occasionally, rising averageper capita income, there
was also growing concern with rural indebtednessand poverty and an
increasing tempo of peasant unrest. I t was not unlikethe discovery of
pauperismin the midst of England's industrial revolution.
17
The expla-
nation for thisparadox isto be sought in the new insecuritiesof subsis-
tenceincometo which the poorer sector of the population was exposed.
Although the average wage rate might be adequate, employment was
highly uncertain; although the average prices for peasant produce
might bebuoyant, they fluctuated dramatically; although taxesmight be
modest, they were a steady charge against a highly variable peasant
income; although theexport economy created new opportunities, it also
concentrated the ownership of productive resources and eroded the
leveling mechanisms of the older villageeconomy.
The moral economy of the subsistenceethic can beclearly seenin the
themes of peasant protest throughout this period. Two themes pre-
vailed: first, claimson peasant incomes by landlords, moneylenders, or
the statewere never legitimatewhen they infringed on what wasjudged
to be the minimal culturally defined subsistencelevel; and second, the
product of the land should be distributed in such a way that all were
guaranteed a subsistenceniche. The appeal wasin almost every caseto
the pastto traditional practicesand the revoltsI discussare best seen
as defensive reactions. Such backward-looking intentionsare by now a
16. A possible exception to thisrulewasthe Dutch East Indieswhere, at least onJava,
colonial policy was bent to extracting a marketable surplus while at the same time
preservingnot to say fossilizingas much of rural society as possible.
17. See Wolfram Fischer, "Social Tensions at the Early Stagesof I ndustrialization,"
Comparative Studies in Society and History 9 (1966-67), 64-83.
I NTRODUC TI ON
commonplace in the analysis of peasant movements. As Moore, citing
Tawney, putsit, "the peasant radical would beastonished to hear that he
is undermining the foundations of society; he is merely trying to get
back what haslong beenrightfully his."
18
The revoltswere, by the same
token, essentially the revoltsof consumers rather than producers. Ex-
cept wherecommunal land had been appropriated by local notables, the
demand for the redistribution of land itself wasstrikingly absent. Pro-
testsagainst taxesand rents were couched in terms of their effect on
consumption; what was an admissible tax or rent in a good year was
inadmissiblein a bad year. I t wasthe smallness of what wasleft rather
than the amount taken (the two are obviously related, but by no means
are they identical) that moved peasantsto rebel.
The initial chapter, which borrowsshamelessly f rom economists and
anthropologists, describes what the "subsistence ethic" means ana-
lytically for peasant economics. Theapplicability of what hasbeen called
the"safety first" principleof decision-making to the peasantry in South-
east Asia isexplained and illustrated.
I n the second chapter I attempt to show that the subsistenceethic is
not only a given of peasant economics, but that it has a normative or
moral dimension as well. This can be seen in the structure of village
reciprocity, in social choices, in preferred systemsof tenancy, and in
attitudestoward taxes. On thisbasis, I try to distinguishwhich systemsof
tenancy or taxesare most exploitativefrom the perspective of subsis-
tencesecurity and to demonstrate that thisperspective isin accord with
peasant values.
Chapters 3, 4and 5represent an effort to apply thisargument to the
development of the colonial economy and peasant politicsin Southeast
Asia, particularly in Burma and Vietnam. Chapter 3isdevoted to an
analysis of how structural change in the colonial economy not only
narrowed thesubsistencemargin of many peasantsbut exposed themto
new and greater risksof subsistencecrises. The effect of thefiscal claim
of the colonial stateon the peasantry isanalyzed in much the sameway
in Chapter 4. I n Chapter 5, two major rebellionsin Vietnamand Burma
are examined in the light of the subsistenceethic and the "safety-first"
principle.
Chapter 6isa more general effort to apply the political economy of
thesubsistenceethic to peasant politics(I arguethat the peasant'snotion
of social justicecan bederivedfromthenorm of reciprocity and theright to
subsistence) and to formulateanoperational concept of exploitation which
askstwo questions: What isthe balance of exchange between peasants
18. Moore, Social Origins, p. 498.
1 2 T H E MORAL EC ONOMY OF T H E PEASANT
and elites? What are the effects of thisbalance on peasant subsistence
security?
Chapter 7 addressesthequestion of peasant rebellion. First, thecondi-
tionsthat, when joinedwith exploitation, seemto make for rebellion are
discussed. Thisleadsinevitably to a consideration of why rebellion isnot
the characteristic expression of peasant politics. What are the alterna-
tives to rebellion? Finally we turn to the age-old question of false con-
sciousness: How can we know i f peasantsfeel unjustly exploited when
the power of the state makes rebellion a mortal risk? This question, I
believe, may be answered by looking at levelsof coercion and especially
at the development of peasant culture, which can tell uswhether peas-
antsaccept or reject the key values of the agrarian order inwhich they
live.
1 The Economics and Sociology of the
Subsistence Ethic
The distinctiveeconomic behavior of the subsistence-oriented peasant
family results from the fact that, unlikea capitalist enterprise, it isa unit
of consumption aswell asaunit of production. The family beginswith a
moreor lessirreduciblesubsistenceconsumer demand, basedon itssize,
which it must meet in order to continueasaunit. Meeting thoseminimal
human needsin a reliableand stable way isthe central criterion which
knitstogether choicesof seed, technique, timing, rotation, and so f orth.
The cost of failure for those near the subsistence margin issuch that
safety and reliability take precedence over long-run profit.
Many of the seeming anomalies of peasant economics arise from the
fact that the struggle for a subsistence minimum iscarried out in the
context of a shortageof land, capital, and outside employment oppor-
tunities. This restricted context has at times driven peasants, as A. V.
Chayanov has shown in his classic study of Russian smallholders, to
choicesthat defy standard bookkeeping measuresof profitability.
1
Peas-
ant familieswhich must feed themselves from small plotsin overpopu-
lated regionswill (if there are no alternatives) work unimaginably hard
and long for the smallest increments in productionlong after a pru-
dent capitalist would move on. Chayanov calls this"self-exploitation."
When thispattern becomescharacteristic of an enureagrarian system, as
it did inTonkin and Java, it representswhat Clif f ord Geertz hascalled
"agricultural involution."
2
That the marginal return on hisadditional
labor isminiscule matters little to the capital-poor, land-short peasant
who must wring the family'sfood out of what he has.
Because labor is often the only factor of production the peasant
possesses in relative abundance, he may have to move into labor-
absorbing activities with extremely low returns until subsistence de-
mandsare met. Thismay mean switching cropsor techniques of cultiva-
tion (for example, switchingfrombroadcasting to transplanting rice) or
filling theslack agricultural seasonwith petty crafts, trades, or marketing
which return very little but are virtually the only outlets for surplus
1. A. V. Chayanov, The Theory of Peasant Economy, ed. Daniel Thorner, BasileKerblay,
and R. E. F. Smith (Homewood, 111.: Richard D. I rwin, for the American Economic
Association, 1966; originally published in 1926).
2. Clif f ord Geertz, Agricultural Involution (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1963).
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