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amidst overt compliance. Finally, I take a step backward to explore, in more general terms, the definition of resistance and the reasons why many of the actions considered here might justifiably be termed resistance.

OBSTACLES TO OPEN, COLLECTIVE RESISTANCE

An observer need not look long and hard to find examples of further resistance in Sedaka. In fact, they abound. They are, however, fOrms of resistance that reflect the conditions and constraints under which they are generated. If they are open, they are rarely collective, and, if they are collective, they are rarely open. The encounters seldom amount to more than "incidents," the results are usually inconclusive, and the perpetrators move under cover of darkness or anonymity, melting back into the "civilian" population for protective cover.

To appreciate why resistance should assume such guises, it is helpful to pause briefly to consider a few of the major "givens" that determine the range of available options. This will anticipate somewhat the material that fOllows, and a few of the issues raised only schematically here will be developed at greater length later in this chapter and the next.

Perhaps the most important "given" that structures the options open to Sedaka's poor is simply the nature of the changes they have experienced. Some varieties of change, other things equal, are more explosive than others-more likely to provoke open, collective defiance. In this category I might place those massive and sudden changes that decisively destroy nearly all the routines of daily life and, at the same time, threaten the livelihood of much of the population. Here in Sedaka, however, the changes that constitute the green revolution have been experienced as a series of piecemeal shifts in tenure and technique. As painful as the changes were, they tended to come gradually and to affect only a small minority of villagers at any one time. The shift from rents collected after the harvest (sewa padi) to fixed rents paid befOre planting (sewa tunai), fur example, affected only tenants and was pushed through over several seasons, so that only a few tenants round themselves simultaneously in jeopardy. Furthermore, most of them were able to hang on to their tenancy even if it meant an additional burden of debt. If we could imagine a single, large landlord insisting on sewa tunai from all the village tenants in the same season, the response might have been very different. The loss of tenancies that resulted when landlords decided to resume cultivation themselves or to lease (pajak) their land to wealthy commercial operators followed a similar pattern. Much the same can be said fur the raising of rents and fur the substitution of broadcasting for transplanting. The screws were turned piecemeal and at varying speeds, so that the victims were never more than a handful at a time. In this case as in others, each landlord or farmer insisting on the change represented a particular situation confronting one or, at most, a few individuals.

The only exception to this pattern was the introduction of combine-harvesting

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and, as we shall see, it provoked the nearest thing to open, collective defiance. Even in this case, however, the impact was not instantaneous, nor was it without a certain ambiguity fur many in the village. For the first two or three seasons the economic impact on the poor was noticeable but not devastating. Middle peasants were genuinely torn between the advantage of getting their crop in quickly and the loss of wage earning fur themselves or their children. A few of the smallest farmers, as I have noted, succumbed to the temptation to use the combine in order to hasten their exit for contract labor in the city. At no single moment did combine-harvesting represent a collective threat to the livelihood of a solid majority of villagers.

Another striking characteristic of the agricultural transformation in Kedahone that serves very powerfully to defuse class conflict-is the fact that it removes the poor from the productive process rather than directly exploits them. One after another, the large farmers and landlords in the Muda Scheme have eliminated terrains of potential struggle over the distribution of the harvest and profits from paddy growing. In place of the struggle over piece-rates for cutting and threshing, there is now only a single payment to the machine broker. In place of negotiations over transplanting costs, there is the option of broadcasting the seed and avoiding the conflict altogether. In place of tense and contentious disputes over the timing and level of rents, there is the alternative of hiring the machines and farming oneself or leasing to an outsider for a lump sum. Even the shift to sewa tunai eliminates the tales of woe and ruin that previously dominated the post-harvest claims for rent adjustment. The changes themselves, of coursedismissing a tenant, switching to the machines, moving to fixed rents before planting-are not so simple to put across. But once they have been put across, the ex-tenant or ex-wage laborer simply ceases to be relevant; there is no further season-by-season struggle. Once the connection and the struggle in the realm of production have been severed, it is a simple matter also to sever the connec- tion--and the struggle-in the realm of ritual, charity, and even sociability. This aspect of the green revolution, by itself, goes a long way toward accounting for the relative absence, here and elsewhere, of mass violence. If the profits of the green revolution had depended on squeezing more from the tenants, rather than dismissing them, or extracting more work for less pay from laborers, the consequences for class conflict would surely have been far more dramatic. As it is, the profits from double-cropping depend much less on exploiting the poor directly than on ignoring and replacing them. 1 Class conflict, like any conflict, is played out on a site-the threshing floor, the assembly line, the place where piece-rates or rents are settled-where vital interests are at stake. What doublecropping in Muda has achieved is a gradual bulldozing of the sites where class conflict has historically occurred.

1. As a recently sacked factory worker once remarked ruefully to me, "The only thing worse than being exploited is not being exploited."

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A second obstacle to open protest is already implicit in the piecemeal impact of double-cropping. The impact of each of the changes we have discussed is mediated by the very complex and overlapping class structure of Sedaka. There are well-off tenants and very poor tenants; there are landlords who are (or whose children are) also tenants and laborers; there are smallholders who need wage work to survive but also hire the combines. Thus each of the important shifts in tenure and production creates not only victims and beneficiaries but also a substantial strata whose interests are not so easily discerned. Sedaka is not Morelos, where a poor and largely undifferentiated peasantry confronted a common enemy in the sugar plantation. It is in fact only in comparatively rare circumstances that the class structure of the countryside was such as to produce either a decisive single cleavage or a nearly unifOrm response to external pressure. The very complexiry of the class structure in Sedaka militates against collective opinion and, hence, collective action on most issues.

The obstacles to collective action presented by the local class structure are compounded by other cleavages and alliances that cut across class. These are the familiar links of kinship, friendship, faction, patronage, and ritual ties that muddy the "class waters" in virtually any small community. Nearly without exception, they operate to the advantage of the richer farmers by creating a relationship of dependence that restrains the prudent poor man or woman from acting in class terms. Thus Mansur, a poor landless laborer, is related to Shamsul, one of the richest men in the village, and can expect occasional free meals at his house as well as casual work now and then. While this does not prevent Mansur from privately complaining about the loss of work and the tightfisted rich in general, it does help explain his UMNO membership and his deferential profile in village politics. Mat "halus" is extremely poor, rather outspoken privately on class issues, and a member of PAS. But he rents a single relong from his father-in-law, Abdul Rahman, a fairly wealthy UMNO landowner, and takes care not to embarrass him by making trouble in the village. Other examples might be cited, but the point is clear. A small minority of the village poor are hedged in by links of kinship and/or petty economic dependencies they are reluctant to jeopardize. If they disagree with their relative, landlord, or employer, they are likely to do so with circumspection. It would be a mistake to overemphasize such ties, for they are certainly rarer and more fragile than they once were, and many of the poor are not constrained in this way at all. They do, nevertheless, neutralize a fraction of the poor. 2

2. It goes virtually without saying that the meager possibilities for joint action among the village poor all but evaporate once we leave the community. Even the values that the poor use to justify their claim to work, land, and charity are meant to apply largely within the village itself. While kinship links join most of the poor to relatives elsewhere, these are links of family and not of class. If there were a national or even regional political vehicle that gave effective voice to the class interests of the poor on such issues as land reform, mechanization, and employment, it would undoubtedly find a large following. But Partai Islam (PAS) is not that vehicle,

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A third obstacle to open resistance is, perhaps, not so much an obstacle as a viable alternative. As Moore reminds us in quite another context, "throughout the centuries one of the common man's most frequent and effective responses to oppression {has been} flight. "3 Nowhere has this option been more historically significant than in Southeast Asia in general and Malaya in particular. So long as there was a land frontier and so long as control over manpower rather than land was the basis of surplus extraction, the possibility of what one writer has awkwardly called "avoidance protest" has always proved more attractive than the risk of open confrontation. 4 Much to the consternation of their indigenous leaders as well as their colonial rulers, the rural Malay population has always been exceptionally mobile--moving to another petty chiefdom, leaving one plot of land to make a new clearing and homestead in the fOrest, switching crops and often occupations in the process-and has classically "voted with its feet." Because of its particular demography and social organization, it would not be an exaggeration to say that "exit" rather than "voice" had come to characterize the traditional and preferred response to oppression in Malay society. 5 Fortunately fur the contemporary losers in the green revolution, this traditional option is still available to many.

For half a century at the very least, a substantial portion of the population increase in Kedah's rice bowl has been moving away. They have contributed, as pioneers, to the opening up of new paddy areas in Perak, Pedis, Pahang, Johor, and the inland districts of Kedah itself. Virtually every poor family in the village has, at one time or another, applied fur acceptance to government-sponsored settlement schemes (ranchangan), where incomes from rubber and especially oil palm are routinely more than can be wrested from even a substantial paddy farm. Only a few have been selected, and they are typically not from among the poorest villagers. Still, the slim chance of becoming a sponsored settler (peneroka) is a factor in preventing more open expressions of local conflict; For the children of modest and poor villagers, the option of factory work and domestic service (fur women) and full-time urban contract labor (fur men) are available. For the

dominated as it is by large landowners, and the socialist party (Partai Rakyat), for reasons of repression and communalism, has never established a real foothold in Kedah.

3.Barrington Moore, Jr., Injustice: The Social Bases of Obedience and Revolt (White Plains: M. E. Sharpe, 1978), 125.

4.For an illuminating discussion of this pattern in the region generally, see Michael Adas, "From Avoidance to Confrontation: Peasant Protest in Precolonial and Colonial Southeast Asia," Comparative Studies in Society and History 23, no. 2 (April 1981): 217-47.

5.The terms "exit" and "voice" are taken from the analysis in Albert 0. Hirschman, Exit, \.-Vice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations and States

(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1970).

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poor families who largely choose to remain, short-term contract labor in the cities offers a means to a viable, if unsatisfactory, livelihood. This last, and most common, resort not only reduces the economic pressure on poor families but also removes the head of household from active participation in village affairs for much of the year. Such semiproletarians still reside largely in the village and may even farm a small plot of paddy land, but they play an increasingly marginal role in the local issues that might provoke class conflict. A major slump in offfarm employment would, of course, change this picture dramatically by making local work and access to land that much more salient. 6 For the time being, however, the ability to raid the cash economy to make good the local subsistence deficit continues to provide a less risky alternative to local conflict.

Lest one gain the impression from the fOregoing that the obstacles to class conflict in Sedaka are entirely a matter of the complex local stratification, the piecemeal character ofchanges in production relations, and the alternative sources of income, I hasten to add that repression and the fear of repression are very much involved as well. The chilling role of repression as it is experienced by poor villagers will become all too apparent in the accounts that fOllow. Here it is sufficient simply to note that the efforts to halt or impede the growth of combine-harvesting occurred in a climate of fear generated by local elites, by the police, by the "Special-Branch" internal security fOrces, by a pattern of ·political arrests and intimidation. There is good reason to believe that the local campaign against the combine would have assumed a more open and defiant course had it not been fur the justifiable fears generated by coercion.

The fifth and final obstacle to open resistance makes sense only against a background of expected repression. This obstacle is simply the day-to-day imperative of earning a living-of household survival-which Marx appropriately termed "the dull compulsion of economic relations. "7 Lacking any realistic possibility, fur the time being, of directly and collectively redressing their situation, the village poor have little choice but to adjust, as best they can, to the circumstances they confront daily. Tenants may bitterly resent the rent they must pay fur their small plot, but they must pay it or lose the land; the near landless may deplore the loss of wage work, but they must scramble fur the few opportunities available; they may harbor deep animosities toward the clique that dominates village politics, but they must act with circumspection if they wish to benefit from any of the small advantages that clique can confer.

At least two aspects of this grudging, pragmatic adaptation to the realities

6.Malaysia's strong fOreign-exchange position and its diversified exports make it less vulnerable than many other Third World economies, but it is nevertheless vulnerable to any deep and prolonged slump. Shortfalls in private investment and in export earnings and the resulting need to trim public spending over the past two years (1981-82) have made this vulnerability increasingly apparent.

7.Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970): 7 37.