Introduction: Moral Economy, Capitalism, and State Power in Rural Protest

Scott Evan Guggenheim and Robert P. Weller

This book originated in the Symposium on Peasant Rebellions held at the Johns Hopkins University on January 24-25,1980. Yet partly as a result of the Symposium, the revised papers collected here are not limited either to peasants or to rebellions. A full understanding of peasants means knowing how they articulate with other classes, and a full understanding of rebellions means knowing how they relate to other forms of protest (or to the lack of any protest). This book thus addresses some important questions that an approach toward "peasant rebellions" alone would bypass: when do peasants act as a class, and when do they act separately? When do people rebel, when do they choose a less violent form of protest, and when do they remain quiescent?

The essays collected here examine the forms rural violence has taken through the past three centuries of social and economic change. Each essay is independent, yet each also corrects and refines earlier conceptions about three shared theoretical concerns, which we discuss in detail below. The first shared concern is moral economy: several of the authors examine how people use accepted forms of standardized protest in particular historical contexts. The second is the growth of capitalism: each essay clarifies how changes in the class structure may lead to the loss of old forms of protest or to the creation of new forms. Third is the influence of the state: many of the essays stress the independent role the state plays in determining particular forms of rural action or inaction. The authors, who include anthropologists, historians, political scientists, and sociologists, root their treatment of these theoretical, social scientific ideas in concrete historical cases; this book is an interdisciplinary attempt to challenge some of the traditional theories of peasant rebellion.

Moral Economy

Moral economy concentrates on the system of rights and obligations that surround interpersonal and interclass relations in rural societies. Although moral economy may be taken to include as diverse a variety of theorists as Eric Wolf and Jim Scott (see Popkin, 1979: 5-8), moral economists agree that we should examine shared normative standards of what constitutes proper behavior.

Scott (1976) and his students have popularized what we shall call the strong version of moral economy theory. In this version, social obligations permeate the transfer of surplus from the peasantry to the nonproducing classes, and economy is thus inseparable from morality.

Woven into the tissue of peasant behavior, then, whether in normal local routines or in the violence of an uprising, is the structure of a shared moral universe, a common notion of what is just. It is this moral heritage that, in peasant revolts, selects certain targets rather than others, and that makes possible a collective (though rarely coordinated) action born of moral outrage....

We can begin, I believe, with two moral principles that seem firmly embedded in both the social patterns and injunctions of peasant life: the norm of reciprocity and the right to subsistence.... Reciprocity serves as a central moral formula for interpersonal conduct. The right to subsistence, in effect, defines the minimal needs that must be met for members of the community within the context of reciprocity. Both principles correspond to vital human needs within the peasant economy (Scott, 1976: 167).

The peasant is obligated to pay his rent, and the landlord is obligated to guarantee the peasant a minimum level of subsistence; peasants have rights as well as duties, though this is not to say that these rights have never been violated. Indeed, peasants throughout the world have evolved many forms of protest to violations of their customary rights, ranging from emigration, to joining the priesthood, to food riots, to outright rebellion (see, for example, Adas, 1981).

Scott (1977b) has suggested that peasants create and sustain ideologies intrinsically opposed to the dominant world view. Peasants, in this view, develop their own concept of justice to interpret their basic conflict with their landlords. This folk ideology is often a specific reversal of elite ideology: "Any moral order is bound to engender its own antithesis, at least ritually, within folk culture" (Scott, 1977b: 33). Peasants may subordinate themselves to the elite ideology, or they may dissent from it; which alternative they choose depends on the material relation between the peasants and the elite. In either case, peasants understand that their interests differ from the interests of their masters.

The strong version of moral economy argues that peasant ideologies and institutions provide useful building blocks for constructing revolutions. In times of structural change, landlords will no longer meet peasant expectations, and peasants will attempt to reassert the traditional morality. According to Scott, because the peasants' alternative universe "represents the closest thing to class consciousness in pre-industrial agrarian societies" (1977b: 224), reassertion of the traditional moral economy may be an effective ideology for rebellious organizations. Indeed, such an ideology may be truly revolutionary, by seeking to alter the new structural conditions.

Thaxton's essay, "Mao Zedong, Red Misérables, and the Moral Economy of Peasant Rebellion in Modern China" illustrates several aspects of the strong version of moral economy. Thaxton attributes much of the success of the Chinese Communist Party in organizing peasants to the Communist offer of a renewed traditional system of rights and duties. In contrast to the usual stereotype of outside organizers who easily turn peasants to their purposes, Thaxton offers a picture of outsiders who must adapt to the "alternate symbolic universe" of the peasantry.

Wasserstrom's "Indian Uprisings under Spanish Colonialism" also fits parts of the strong version of moral economy. He shows how Mexican Indians...