Ranajit Guha on the failure to grasp the political agency of peasants

“…[I]nsurgency is regarded as external to the peasant’s consciousness and Cause is made to stand in as a phantom surrogate for Reason, the logic of that consciousness”.

- Ranajit Guha, The Prose of Counter-Insurgency

Weapons of the Weak

James C. Scott provides a perspective on hegemony and ‘invisible power’ that has been both influential and controversial. In his influential book Weapons of the weak: everyday forms of resistance (1985) Scott introduces the idea that oppression and resistance are in constant flux, and that by focusing (as political scientists often do) on visible historic ‘events’ such as organised rebellions or collective action we can easily miss subtle but powerful forms of ‘every day resistance’. Scott looks at peasant and slave societies and their ways of responding to domination, with a focus not on observable acts of rebellion but on forms of cultural resistance and non-cooperation that are employed over time through the course of persistent servitude.

Scott’s research finds that overt peasant rebellions are actually rather uncommon, do not occur when and where expected, and often don’t have much impact.  Rather than seeing ‘resistance as organisation’, Scott looks at less visible, every-day forms of resistance such as ‘foot-dragging, evasion, false compliance, pilfering, feigned ignorance, slander and sabotage’.  He finds these in rural and factory settings, and also among the middle class and elites (e.g. through tax evasion or conscription), but particularly among rural people who are physically dispersed and less politically organised than urban populations (Scott 1985).

Some aspects of the southern question

by Antonio Gramsci, Unfinished, October 1926

These notes were initially stimulated by the publication of an article on the Southern question by "Ulenspiegel" in the 18 September issue of the journal Quarto Stato, and by the somewhat comical editorial presentation which preceded it. "Ulenspiegel" informed his readers of Guido Dorso's recent book La Rivoluzione meridionale (pub. Piero Gobetti, Turin, 1925), and alluded to the author's assessment of our party's position on the southern question. 246 In their presentation, the editors of Quarto Stato - who proclaim themselves to be "young people who know the Southern problem thoroughly in its general lines" [sic] - protest Collectively at the idea that the Communist Party can be accorded any "merits". Nothing wrong so far: young people of the Quarto Stato type have always and everywhere expressed extreme opinions and violent protests on paper, without the paper rebelling. But then these "young people" add the following words: "We have not forgotten that the magical formula of the Turin Communists used to be: divide the big estates among the rural proletariat. This formula is at the antipodes from any sound, realistic vision of the Southern problem." And here it becomes necessary to set the record straight, since the only thing that is "magical" is the impudence and superficial dilettantism of the "young" writers of Quarto Stato.

Everyday forms of peasant resistance

by James C. Scott, LibCom

"Everyday resistance" is the most common form of opposition to oppression. It consists of footdragging, non-compliance, pilfering, desertion, feigned ignorance, slander, arson, sabotage, flight etc... James C. Scott's article is the classic statement on "everyday resistance". 

I. THE UNWRITTEN HISTORY OF RESISTANCE

The argument which follows originated in a growing dissatisfaction with much of the recent work - my own as well as that of others - on the subject of peasant rebellion and revolution. It is only too apparent that the inordinate attention to large-scale peasant insurrection was, in North America at least, stimulated by the Vietnam war and something of a left-wing academic romance with wars of national liberation. In this case interest and source material were mutually reinforcing. For the historical and archival records were richest at precisely those moments when the peasantry came to pose a threat to the state and to the existing international order.[1] At other times, which is to say most of the time, the peasantry appeared in the historical record not so much as historical actors but as more or less anonymous contributors to statistics on conscription, taxes, labour migration, land holdings, and crops production.

Peasants, states and civilisations

Dilip Menon, The Hindu

James C. Scott, who is due to deliver a major lecture in Delhi this month, discusses his shaping influences, his interdisciplinary orientation and his political outlook.

James C. Scott is one of the most distinguished social scientists writing today, with political scientists, historians and anthropologists claiming him for their own. Born in 1936 and educated at Williams College and Yale, he is currently Sterling Professor of Political Science at Yale. He is known for his seminal contributions to the study of peasants, power and resistance marked by extensive fieldwork and a sophisticated engagement with social theory in prose characterised by clarity and passion. The trilogy The Moral Economy of the Peasant (1976), Weapons of the Weak (1985) and Domination and the Arts of Resistance (1990) explored issues of patron-client relations, hegemony and the everyday expressions of resistance in peasant societies with literary flair, an ethical commitment and depth of local knowledge. His most recent work, Seeing Like a State (1998), explores forms of state knowledge and what he terms “state simplifications” arising out of the need to govern that run aground on the rocks of the recalcitrance of local facts. Currently, Professor Scott is engaged in fieldwork in Burma (Myanmar) looking at how peoples of the hills evade the reach of states and civilisations. He will deliver the second Indian Economic and Social History Association public lecture on December 19 at the Stein Auditorium, Habitat Centre, New Delhi. Professor Scott responds to questions from Dilip Menon, who teaches history at Delhi University.