The Journal of Peasant Studies

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Marx and Chayanov at the margins: understanding

agrarian change in Java

Ben White

To cite this article: Ben White (2018): Marx and Chayanov at the margins: understanding agrarian
change in Java, The Journal of Peasant Studies, DOI: 10.1080/03066150.2017.1419191

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/03066150.2017.1419191

Published online: 31 Jan 2018.

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THE JOURNAL OF PEASANT STUDIES, 2018
https://doi.org/10.1080/03066150.2017.1419191

Marx and Chayanov at the margins: understanding agrarian

change in Java
Ben White
International Institute of Social Studies, The Hague, Netherlands

ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
Starting from the notes which Marx made on Java in 1853 and 1881, Java; Marx; Chayanov;
this contribution explores the history of research and debates on agrarian change; peasants;
the survival, reproduction and differentiation of Java’s peasant differentiation
communities. Rural differentiation and concentration of
landholdings are long-standing, established facts; however this
has produced not a capitalist large-farmer class but growing
numbers of share tenants, as the landowning ‘masters of the
contemporary countryside’ parcel out their land in minuscule
plots to share tenants. Understanding the continuing existence of
this highly productive and pluriactive mass of micro-farmers
requires concepts derived from both the Marxist and the
Chayanovian traditions.

Introduction: Marx and Marxists at the margins

Marx occupied himself with the subject of Asia and pre-capitalist modes of production in
three main periods (1853, 1857–1858, and 1879–1881). His reading on peasantries ‘at the
margins’ in China, India, Indonesia, Ireland, Poland and Russia shows his ‘open approach
towards essential problems such as the evolution of social power interrelations and
class differentiation’ (Tichelman 1983, 11–12). In his late writings on agrarian societies in
transition, he argued firmly that non-capitalist societies were not all inevitably heading
towards capitalism; he was interested in ‘a deep and specific analysis of each society in
its own right, rather than … general formulas applicable to all societies … regardless
of historical specificity’ (Anderson 2016, viii, xi). His working notebooks consist mainly of
extracts or summaries from the books he was reading, but by seeing what he selected
we learn what themes and issues he found relevant, and how he connected them: they
‘let us hear Marx think’ (Dunayevskaya, cited in Anderson 2016, 198). One such theme is
his emerging interest in the potential of the rural ‘commune’ (with communal property,
periodically sub-divided among peasant cultivators as use-right) as a basis for resistance
to capitalism and point of departure into alternative pathways of development.1
Starting from the notes which Marx made on Java in 1853 and 1881, this contribution
explores the history of research and debates on the survival, reproduction and

CONTACT Ben White white@iss.nl

1
As seen in his 1881 letter to Vera Zasulich – apparently suppressed for some three decades after his death – in answer to
her question whether the Russian commune would inevitably disappear as Russian capitalism developed, or whether it
could become the ‘element of regeneration in Russian society’ (Stedman-Jones 2016, 580, 594–95).
© 2018 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
2 B. WHITE

differentiation of Javanese rural communities. Since the colonial period, we can trace two
opposing traditions in academic and policy writing on rural Java. One has seen Javanese
villages as basically homogeneous communities of smallholders, partly insulated from
markets and money economy and practising some vaguely defined form of ‘subsistence
farming’. After Indonesian independence, this approach was given a boost by Geertz’s
much-read, but poorly researched and largely inaccurate, Agricultural involution (1963).
The other approach, more empirically founded and inspired in various degrees by the
Marxist tradition, has seen the dynamics of rural communities in the emerging differences
and class-like relationships between the upper and lower segments of rural society, based
mainly on control over land.
In the rest of the paper we trace the evolution of understandings of the varieties of
peasant differentiation, agrarian labour regimes and mechanisms of surplus transfer,
based on a selection of landmark studies and reports. These include a unique time-
budget study of peasants in 1886; large-scale enquiries and local studies on rural stratifica-
tion and poverty in the early years of the twentieth century, and more detailed studies in
the 1920s and 1930s; various studies from the early independence period, particularly the
three rounds of landmark ‘participatory action research’ carried out by the Indonesian
Communist Party and Indonesian Peasants’ Front; debates on the Green Revolution of
the 1970s–1980s, and recent studies of rice-producing villages in the current era of neo-
liberal ‘reformasi’.2
In summarising these studies, we pay particular attention to the apparent conundrum
that while differentiation and land concentration on the one hand, and widespread land-
lessness on the other, are long-established facts, this has not produced a class of capitalist
large farmers. The persistence of millions of smallholder farms – around 80 percent of
which are less than 0.5 hectare in size (BPS 2013) – presents researchers with the same
puzzle that confronted studies of European peasantries around the turn of the nineteenth
to the twentieth century, to which we will return in the final section.

Studies of peasant differentiation in the nineteenth century

Marx’s notes from his reading of Raffles’ monumental History of Java (1817) in 18533 show
his interest in the different forms of land tenure prevailing in different regions of Java (with
communal tenure and individual use-rights prevailing in most regions, and more or less
private property in some parts of West Java), the burden of tax and labour service, and
the structure of village government – particularly the fact that village heads were often
elected by the heads of those households which had rights to land. His reading in 1881
of Money’s Java: or, how to manage a colony (1861), a less monumental paean to the
system of forced cultivation known as the Cultivation System, shows his interest in the
details of forced sugar, coffee and tea cultivation, the role of the Dutch Trading
Company and the profits flowing into the Dutch Treasury, the great power of the big
2
Parts of this article draw on the author’s previous publications, in particular Hüsken and White (1989); White and Wiradi
(1989); White (2005, 2010, 2014); Ambarwati et al. (2016).
3
For those interested in Marx’s reading of Raffles, the pages which he copied or summarised were (all from Vol. I) pp. 135–
36, 141–44, 146, 148–51, 283–86 (Tichelman 1983, 16–17). These notes are preserved in the International Institute of
Social History, Amsterdam, and their publication is planned to be included in Marx–Engels Gesamtausgabe, 2nd series,
vol. IV/3 (Anderson 2016, 252).
 THE JOURNAL OF PEASANT STUDIES 3

private (mainly European) landlords, and the negative role of Chinese entrepreneurs as
middlemen, landlords and usurers (Tichelman 1983, 17–18).
In one of the passages excerpted in Marx’s notes, Raffles wrote that
The lands on Java are so minutely divided among the inhabitants of the villages, that each
receives just as much as can maintain his family and employ his individual industry … as
property is insecure, there can be no desire of accumulation …

The cultivator bargained with the Búkul or Petíng’gi [village head] for a season or for two crops,
had his land measured off by the latter, and paid a stipulated portion of the produce either in
money or in kind. (Raffles 1978 [1817], 147)

Raffles seemed unaware of – or uninterested in – the existence of a large class of rural land-
less in this period. With some notable exceptions the view of rural Java as an egalitarian
society populated by small-scale peasant farmers dominated the ideas of colonial admin-
istrators and researchers, throughout the nineteenth century.
In the debates on colonial extractive policy which followed the British interregnum,
similar views were held both by the liberal Du Bus de Gisignies (Commissioner-General,
1826–30) who was critical of communal land tenure and favoured the free cultivation of
export crops on peasant farms and European plantations, and by his opponent van den
Bosch (Governor-General, 1830–1833) who generalised the ‘cultivation system’ (1830–
1870) – already practised in large parts of West Java and some other regions – whereby
peasants were obliged to cultivate export crops for delivery to the colonial government
at fixed prices and/or against remission of land rent (Hüsken and White 1989, 237–38).
Writing in 1827, Du Bus’ main argument against forced deliveries was precisely that it
blocked the process of differentiation that would ensue when peasants could freely
engage in export crop production:
And when … all grounds on Java will have been opened up, it will have over its whole surface
a population … which, huddled together everywhere, will consist of countless millions of
tenants on whole, half and quarter acres of land, each farming to obtain his food, each
growing rice and nothing else, each farming for an income like that of the meanest day
labourer. (Boeke 1961 [1927], 275)4

Against these visions, numerous published reports and archival sources from different
regions of Java provide a picture of highly stratified rural societies based mainly on differ-
ent rights to land and labour. While these divisions were variable and often complex, we
can speak of three broad agrarian classes: first, a substantial mass without land rights, both
itinerant free labourers and those attached in servile relationships to landed peasant
households; second, a large mass of peasants – often internally differentiated – with
rights to land but with heavy tax and labour obligations attached to those rights; and,
finally, village officials who in addition to their own holdings controlled part of the
village land in lieu of salaries, plus rights to the unpaid labour of the landholding peasants
to cultivate it (Breman 1980, 1983, 2015; Knight 1982; Carey 1986). Between landless and
landholding peasants, both wage labour and sharecropping relations were ‘commonplace’
(Knight 1982, 126), and the peasant population was highly mobile:

4
Du Bus’ report was written for him by Willem van Hogendorp, who was seconded to him during his tenure as Governor-
General.
4 B. WHITE

People moved for many reasons: to escape the burden of compulsory labour, to take up wage
labour, to escape harvest failures … , to open up new agricultural lands, to flee oppression by
local officials, or to seek opportunities in the growing towns and cities. (Ricklefs 2007, 18)

Time-budgets of peasants in 1886

In 1870 the government announced the gradual abolition of the Cultivation System, and
the new Agrarian Law opened the door to foreign investment in plantations. What was it
like to be a landholding peasant at this time? In 1886 Herman G. Heyting (Controleur of
Kutoardjo, in the heartland of Central Java) undertook a unique year-long study of Java-
nese peasant time-budgets, incomes and expenditures. He noted that one-shot interviews
with native officials, or with villagers, provided information of doubtful reliability. With the
help of local assistants, he compiled a year-long daily journal of the work done by three
peasant men and their household incomes and expenditures in rice, money or other
goods. These data are reproduced in their entirety, day-by-day, for each peasant, in a
three-part, 102-page published under a pseudonym (Arminius 1889),5 the first detailed
time-budget study available for Indonesia and maybe for any Asian country,
The three peasants owned between one-quarter and one-half of a hectare of land. Two
of them were subject to heerendienst (unpaid labour for the upkeep of government irriga-
tion works and roads), while the other was liable to koffiecultuurdienst, unpaid labour in the
coffee orchards. They were all liable to desadiensten (literally ‘village services’) which
included corvée labour on the village head’s land, upkeep of village roads and irrigation
works, and other tasks.
They worked for an average of 7–8 hours per day throughout the year, belying persist-
ent colonial claims about native peasant indolence.6 Besides work on their own farm and
non-farm activities, they all worked for wages on the land of others, and spent between a
quarter and a half of all their labour time in the various forms of labour-tax already
described. If we add to this their cash payments of land-rent and the (much-hated)
head tax, and follow Heyting in converting these into labour equivalents using the pre-
vailing rate at which peasants could buy themselves out of a day of labour-tax service,
these peasants were devoting 37, 52 and in the most extreme case 68 percent of all
their working days in labour which generated for them nothing except the right to be
a peasant.
Heyting failed to record the labour inputs of the other (women and children) members
of the three households. From indirect evidence it is clear that these were considerable, for
example when we look at the various components of their household incomes including
handicrafts, petty trade, livestock, harvest wages, etc., all of which later studies have found
to involve large amounts of female and child labour, and to provide a significant pro-
portion of small-peasant livelihoods.
Based on this information, Heyting makes an interesting calculation of the costs and
benefits of land rights. If we assign imputed values to their labour inputs at prevailing
5
I am grateful to the late Frans Hüsken for drawing my attention to this study, more than 40 years ago. More details from
Heyting’s study are given in White (2010).
6
This corresponds closely to the average daily work inputs of male peasants in another year-long time-allocation study in
rural Java, almost 90 years later, which found adult men to be spending 7.9 hours per day in directly productive work
(White 1976, 275).
 THE JOURNAL OF PEASANT STUDIES 5

wage rates (as neo-classical farm economics does), the gross receipts (value of farm
produce sold or self-consumed) minus the total cost of being a peasant (the land tax,
head tax and labour tax, plus their inputs of labour and seed on their own farms) leaves
them with a substantial apparent net loss, and net profit only when no value is assigned
to their labour. As Heyting observes,
When we examine the costs and benefits of land ownership, theoretically it appears as a loss;
but the native in these parts does not really consider his own labour and obligatory labour
service directly in terms of money values. (Arminius 1889, 1718f.)

Readers familiar with debates on the agrarian question in Europe around the turn of the
nineteenth to the twentieth century will recognise a theme in these reflections. The per-
sistence and survival of peasant smallholder farming and its coexistence with more fully
commoditised agriculture is only understandable if the peasant does not account for
his own (and his family members’) labour time; peasants aim to maximise not profits
based on property and surplus value extracted from labour, but labour income, the
total and indivisible ‘family labour product’ (Chayanov 1967b, 5; Kautsky 1899, 170; cf.
van der Ploeg 2013).

Peasant differentiation in the late colonial period

The last half-century of Dutch colonial rule produced a large body of research and debate
on agrarian conditions in Java. Both before and after the introduction of the so-called
‘ethical policy’ in 1901, various reports concluded that rural welfare had not increased
with the abolition of the Cultivation System, but rather was on the decline. Among
these were the overview report on the economic situation of the Javanese by van Deven-
ter (1904), later updated by Huender (1921); the massive and chaotic Inquiry of 1904–1905
into the ‘Declining Welfare of the Native Population of Java and Madura’ (which produced
dozens of thick reports between 1907 and 1911, and Hasselman’s attempt at a summary in
1914), and Meyer Ranneft and Huender’s (1921) report on the tax burden on the native
population. All of these reports have something to say about differentiation in rural com-
munities. Compiling results of the Declining Welfare Inquiry, Hasselman estimated that
landholding peasants7 made up only 55 percent of rural households. Landless wage
workers in the peasant sector made up another 22 percent, landless share tenants five
percent, wage workers on plantations three percent, and those in non-agricultural occu-
pations 15 percent. Among landholding peasants, almost half controlled farms of less
than 0.5 hectares while at the other end of the spectrum, the nine percent with holdings
of more than 1.4 hectares controlled more than one-third of all the land. The numerous
qualitative reports from different districts in the Inquiry make frequent mention of land
concentration. On the eve of the Great Depression, in yet another report on the Economic
Situation of the Native Population, Fievez de Malines van Ginkel concluded that the econ-
omic boom of recent years had increased rural inequality: the situation of landless workers
and near-landless peasants had deteriorated while that of the larger landholders had
improved (Fievez de Malines van Ginkel 1926, 152). Meyer Ranneft and Huender in
1921 again found that more than one-third of rural households were landless, with
7
This includes individual owners, those with a permanent share in communal land, and those with a share in periodically
redistributed communal land.
6 B. WHITE

almost as many ‘poor peasants’ whose incomes were only slightly higher than those of the
landless. ‘Middle peasants’ (with incomes about three times those of landless workers)
were only about one-fifth, while ‘wealthy peasants, native wholesalers and industrialists,
officials and village heads, and religious teachers’ (with incomes about 10 times those
of the landless) were just under seven percent (Meyer Ranneft and Huender 1921, 10;
see also Wertheim 1964, 112).
Despite all this, J.H. Boeke still found it possible, in his various writings of the 1920s and
1930s, to speak of Java’s ‘grey, undifferentiated masses’ living in ‘shared poverty’ (a term
later borrowed by Geertz) and to propose a ‘welfare policy’ that would work by betting on
the strong:
It must not be a policy centred on the masses, but a policy centred on individuals, seeking
quality. It must not be democratic, but aristocratic. It will have the task of encouraging differ-
entiation in Native society by concerning itself with the vigorous, energetic, advanced
elements. (Boeke 1961 [1927], 298)

Landlessness on the one hand, and land accumulation on the other, may lead to the emer-
gence of capitalist wage-labour farms, the expansion of sharecropping, or a combination
of these. All these reports (and the academic studies mentioned below) confirm that emer-
ging capitalist farmers were a rare phenomenon, and that share-tenancy was ‘a very
common transaction’ (Huender 1921, 27). In a dissertation influenced by Chayanov,
Ploegsma reviewed more than 30 local studies and reports on land distribution from differ-
ent parts of Java. He was adamant that where land concentration was found ‘it certainly
does not lead to large-scale [farm] enterprise. The accumulated holdings will be share-
cropped or rented out, and agro-economically speaking nothing changes, the small-
farm enterprise persists’ (Ploegsma 1936, 61).
It is, then, something of a puzzle that share tenants, in the quantitative estimates just
mentioned, appear to be only about five percent of all peasant farmers. This figure
refers only to share tenants having no land of their own, and would be greater if we
could include the ‘part-owner’ peasants who may enter sharecropping arrangements to
supplement their own meagre holdings, as they do today. But the problem goes
deeper than this; Scheltema is probably correct in arguing that the reliability of statistics
on share tenancy ‘leaves much to be desired’ (Scheltema 1931, 272). Then as now, there is
a consistent contrast between the low frequency of share tenancy recorded in large-scale
surveys, and its much greater frequency as found in detailed local studies.
Agrarian commercialisation, differentiation and strengthening of the position of agrar-
ian elites came to an abrupt halt during the depression years of the 1930s. The collapse of
the export economy and the purchasing power of those within it led in turn to the collapse
of demand for peasant products; prices of coconuts, cassava and maize, for example,
declined even more than those of rice (Sumitro 1952, 22). Meanwhile, peasants were
still required to pay taxes in cash, resulting in serious ‘money famine’ among peasants.
Peasants in Yogyakarta whom I interviewed in the early 1970s recalled that in the 1930s
it was ‘money that became scarce’ (larang) or ‘expensive’ (mahal), while ‘things’
(barang) became cheap as the prices of food and other commodities dropped. In such con-
ditions it was those with regular wage- or salary-incomes who prospered, while those who
sold produce in order to pay land or poll taxes, or for other cash needs, came into severe
difficulties (White 2011, 69). Even J.H. Boeke, whom one might expect to hold a different
 THE JOURNAL OF PEASANT STUDIES 7

viewpoint, criticised the comfortable view that Java’s peasants could ‘manage without
money’ and fall back on subsistence economy: ‘This argument contains a serious flaw. It
underrates … the disappearance of the self-sufficiency that formerly characterised
village life’ (Boeke 1953, 50). As savings, credit lines or other reserves were exhausted,
the next step for peasants was the pawning of land: ‘indebtedness in Java reached unpre-
cedented proportions and land-usury became a near-universal phenomenon’ (Sumitro
1952, 24).
The ensuing decade of Japanese occupation (1942–1945) and the independence war
(1945–1949) were times of general shortage, not of money but of ‘things’ (food, cloth
and other basic needs); in contrast to the deflationary 1930s, material shortages were
accompanied by inflation, connected in many respondents’ memories with the introduc-
tion of the new paper currency (uang Jepang) in 1944: ‘paper money flooded the country
and prices soared to unknown heights, while goods and services were constantly decreas-
ing’ (Selosoemardjan 1962, 249). It is quite likely, although to date no researchers have
been able to unearth land transfer records to prove it, that the 1930s and 1940s were a
period of accelerated land transactions, in which the few households with access to
fixed cash incomes in the 1930s, or agrarian surpluses in the 1940s, laid the basis for
their descendants’ prosperity through the accumulation of lands in mortgage or distress
sales.
Indonesian progressive intellectuals at this time were not much interested in agrarian
conditions or issues of rural poverty. One exception is Iwa Kusuma Sumantri’s study The
peasants’ movement in Indonesia, written in Moscow under a pseudonym in 1927 on com-
mission from the Farmers’ and Peasants’ International Krestintern. The chapter on ‘social
and economic conditions of the peasantry’ discusses among other problems the heavy
burdens on the peasantry imposed by tax and service obligations to government, large
landowners and native princes, and made worse by the ‘monstrous activities of the numer-
ous usurers [who] usually consist of Chinese merchants and native hadjis’ (Dingley 1927,
25). Sumantri concludes with a strong argument for the need for Indonesia’s young pro-
gressives to pay attention to peasant problems and promote the emergence of peasant
organisations. He does not enter into discussions on internal class differentiation within
the peasantry or the class nature of the peasantry, although these were matters of
heated debate in Russia at precisely this time (Shanin 1972, chap. 3).
Another exception, which continues to influence perceptions of Indonesian rural social
structure to the present day, is Sukarno’s various writings and speeches on the subject of
‘Marhaen’ and ‘Marhaenisme’. Walking in the countryside south of Bandung in 1924,
Sukarno met Marhaen, the ‘chicken-flea peasant’ (petani sieur) whose situation as
owner-operator of a small farm and with his own implements and work-animals – desti-
tute, but not a member of the proletariat – seems to have been a genuine source of pol-
itical relevation. Marhaen then became the standard referent in Sukarno’s (and Sukarnoist)
discourse for a specific, non-Marxist-textbook kind of poverty and agrarian structure which
Sukarno frequently alluded to in some of his most important works of the 1930s, including
his defence plea Indonesia accuses! in the political trial of 1930, and the 1933 pamphlet
Towards Indonesian independence. Sukarno had read Kautsky, but paid little attention to
his analysis of the agrarian question, being more interested in his ideas on the respective
roles of the (peasant and worker) masses, political parties and individual leaders in political
struggle. It is probably due to the combined influence of Kautsky (the textbook) and
8 B. WHITE

Marhaen (the ‘field’ reality) that we owe Sukarno’s insistence that political dialogue must
be first and foremost with the masses (rather than among elites), and that the Indonesian
Nationalist Party (PNI) must by necessity become a ‘mass party’:
The structure of Indonesian society is at present … a society for the most part consisting of
little farmers, little labourers, little traders, and little seamen … . The Indonesian movement can
only be a movement which draws its strength almost exclusively from the circles of brothers
Kromo8 and Marhaen … . (Soekarno 1975 [orig. 1930], 96–97, emphasis in the original)

As Onghokham perceptively notes,

Sukarno ignored such groups as village heads and officials, larger land-owning ‘Marhaens’,
wholesale traders and wealthy batik traders; he also did not raise the issue of the millions
who did not own any land but worked as share tenants or wage labourers, because to raise
these issues would have been divisive … For Sukarno, the main reason for launching the
concept of Marhaen was to convince the educated Indonesian elite to abandon their precon-
ceptions about the common people. (Onghokham 1978, 32)

Sukarno’s populist focus on the impoverished petty commodity producer, and his appar-
ent ignorance (or, perhaps, neglect for political purposes) of internal differentiation in rural
society has been mirrored in much subsequent elite and academic discourse on Indone-
sian society. ‘Marhaenism’ remains a rallying cry for the PNI’s contemporary descendant,
the PDIP (‘Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle’).

Peasant studies in the early independence years

In the early independence years the need for a concrete understanding of agrarian con-
ditions and problems became acute, as a series of committees established in 1948,
1951, 1956, 1958 and 1959 wrestled with the task of formulating the new Agrarian Law.
Studies in West Java by the agronomist Anwas Adiwilaga (Adiwilaga 1954a, 1954b), and
Dam (1966 [1956]) documented the problems of land concentration, absentee ownership,
the poor and often declining terms of landlord–tenant relations, competition and the
absence of mutual assistance as the basis of rural social structure, and the chronic indebt-
edness of small peasants, tenants and landless workers.
The most important and interesting research from this period is the ‘participatory action
research’ (avant la lettre) carried out by the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) and its peasant
affiliate the Indonesian Peasants’ Front (BTI) in 1959, 1964 and 1965. The PKI/BTI cadres who
went to the field practised the ‘three togethers’, the ‘four don’ts’ and the ‘four musts’. The
‘three togethers’ (3 sama) were: work together, eat together and sleep together with the
poor peasants and landless workers. The ‘four don’ts’ (4 jangan) were: don’t sleep in
houses of village elites, don’t lecture the peasants, don’t be the cause of material losses to
your host families or the peasants, and don’t take notes in front of the peasants; while the
‘four musts’ (4 harus) were: practise the ‘three togethers’; be modest, polite and ready to
learn from the peasants; know and respect the local language and customs; and help to
solve the problems of the host family, the peasants and the local Party (Aidit 1964, 18).
The first results of these studies covered 15 villages in Java and documented consider-
able inequalities in land control. Widely publicised at the 1959 National Farmers’
8
‘Kromo’ was Sukarno’s name for the Javanese equivalent of the Sundanese ‘Marhaen’.
 THE JOURNAL OF PEASANT STUDIES 9

Conference and in the press, they were the basis for the PKI’s identification of the tujuh
setan desa, the ‘seven village devils who suck the blood of the peasants’: landlords,
usurers, advance purchasers of crops, middlemen, bureaucratic capitalists (those who
use state funds to pressure peasants to sell their products to state enterprises at low
prices), village bandits (local strongmen who commit crimes to defend the interests of
exploiting classes) and evil village officials (Aidit 1964, chap. 2).
The third and last study was carried out in early 1965 by BTI and PKI cadres under the
guidance of the Aliarcham Academy of Social Sciences, and sponsored by the Ministry of
Science and Research. It covered 24 villages in West, Central and East Java,9 and had the
official aim of studying the conditions of food production. The results were written up in a
preliminary series of stenciled monographs, but were never published, being overtaken by
Suharto’s seizure of power in October 1965 and the subsequent obliteration of the PKI, the
BTI and the Aliarcham Academy. In a retrospective summary, Ina Slamet recalls that stress
was placed on objective reporting, albeit for the specific purpose of providing the BTI and
PKI with more comprehensive knowledge of rural conditions (Slamet 1988, 1). This is
indirectly confirmed by the enormous variety of conditions reported from the various vil-
lages, suggesting that the cadres were hardly pressured into following a standard line.
While the PKI and BTI had based their initial thinking on a basic, ‘classical’ agrarian class
categorisation (landlords, rich peasants, middle peasants, poor peasants, agricultural
labourers) they made important modifications to this framework based on the realities
observed in the field, combining land- and income-based indicators to arrive at a classifi-
cation of social-economic groups in rural society which ‘though it did not resolve all ambi-
guities, was nevertheless fairly realistic’ (Slamet 1988, 30).
While in some of the villages there were landlords with holdings far exceeding the
maximum permitted in the 1960 Agrarian Law, in many others there were not. In some
villages it was found that land formerly parcelled out to share tenants was now rented
out for cash to relatively well-to-do peasants, in order to avoid the provisions of the
1960 Law on Share Tenancy.10
Claims that the PKI failed to understand the agrarian structure, basing itself on a too-
rigid application of the Marxist or Maoist model of rural class divisions (Lyon 1970; Morti-
mer 1972; Tornquist 1984, chap. 17), need to be reconsidered in the light of these studies.
Both the published and unpublished studies of 1964 and 1965 show clearly that the PKI
were willing to adapt received theories and concepts to Indonesian realities as revealed
in field research; as Slamet notes, based on their field studies the PKI ‘were making
quite some efforts to Indonesianise Marxism and adapt it to local conditions and forms
of conceptualisation’. The ‘seven village devils’ discourse, for example, was precisely an
attempt to underline that Indonesia’s rural poor were exploited in complex ways and
that ‘concentration of surplus’ was based not only on landlordism or capitalist farmers’
extraction of surplus value from wage labour, but also on a much richer combination of
economic, political and ideological mechanisms (Slamet 1988, 31, 176).

9
Villages in Bali and Lampung were also included in the study, but are not discussed here.
10
Law no. 2 (1960) on Share Tenancy – still in force and universally ignored today – does not specify the proportion of the
crop due to tenant and landlord, but does require that the division of the crop takes place after deducting all costs (of
seed, fertilizer, draught animals, planting and harvesting wages). These costs are thus, effectively, shared 50:50 between
owner and tenant.
10 B. WHITE

These nuanced accounts of rural class differentiation, landlessness, poverty, exploita-

tion and indebtedness offer a stark contrast to the picture of homogeneous, poverty-
sharing peasants given in Agricultural involution by Geertz, with Boeke’s ‘grey, undifferen-
tiated mass’ now described as ‘a largely homogeneous, post-traditional rural slum’ (Geertz
1963, 116). Geertz avoided discussion of major social divides by focusing on the middle,
and on non-class distinctions (White 2007, 2014). There has been extended critique of
this aspect of his work on rural Java, with just about all the main arguments in Agricultural
involution having been proved wrong by subsequent empirical research: ‘a brilliant
hypothesis, brought down by available evidence’ (Brown 1997, 110).
Geertz’s chronic blindness to class relations and divisions in Javanese society is a good
example of the ‘sociology of ignorance’ (Wertheim 1984); his vision of rural Javanese
society mirrored the blindness of colonial and post-colonial elites, whose idea of the har-
monious and homogeneous village community was derived from, and promoted by, the
village elite themselves (Wertheim 1975, 177–214). His general claims in Agricultural invo-
lution – a book based not on fieldwork but on secondary data11 – that Javanese society
consisted not of ‘haves’ and ‘have nots’ but only of cukupans and kekurangans (‘just
enoughs’ and ‘not quite enoughs’, Geertz 1963, 97) jar not only with leftist accounts but
also with his own field study of Mojokuto, which noted landlord households owning up
to 20 hectares of irrigated rice fields, about 40 times the average holding (Geertz 1965, 21).
There is certainly a striking lack of fit between Geertz’s accounts of Javanese homo-
geneous rural culture and the many violent, class-based political conflicts in the region
both before and after his fieldwork. In 1973–1974, the Norwegian anthropologist Svein
Aass returned to rural Mojokuto and described a community which one would not recog-
nise in the pages of Agricultural involution. Long-standing social conflict between the
ascendant group of landowners and rich peasants and the group of marginal peasants,
semi-proletarians and the landless expressed itself more and more in terms of class. Har-
vesters’ in-kind wages had fallen from one-fifth to one-tenth, while the largest landowner
– besides 20 hectares of rice-fields – owned three rice-hulling machines and a fleet of Mit-
subishi vans (Aass n.d., 70). Aass describes a harvest scene:
The villagers of Sarangmanuk … were lined up at one end of the field. Behind them was a
crowd of women from the neighbouring hamlet of Blaru clamouring to be allowed to join
the harvest. Almost all the men in Blaru had been killed during the conflicts following the pol-
itical events of 1965–66 and their land expropriated by their victorious opponents. Every
harvest these women came en masse to the fields … and in the past, they had been given
work. But this year [the landowner] was thinking of buying a new Honda motorbike …
and had given clear instructions to keep outsiders out of the field … . All that was left to
the pathetic outsiders was to glean any small paddy stalks left by the harvesters. (Aass n.d.,
244f.; see also Aass and Aass 1983)

So much for ‘shared poverty’.

Studies of the green revolution of the 1970s and 1980s

The abandonment of land reform at the beginning of the Suharto regime (1966–1998)
coincided with the beginnings of Indonesia’s ‘green revolution’. In less than 20 years
11
Geertz lived in the house of a railroad worker in the District Capital of Kediri, and never did village fieldwork.
 THE JOURNAL OF PEASANT STUDIES 11

Indonesia, which in the late 1960s was importing one-third of all the rice in the world
market, achieved a brief period of self-sufficiency in rice through a combination of exten-
sification (mainly outside Java) and intensification (in Java and other rice-bowl regions). At
this time critical research and debate on issues of agrarian transformation, agrarian reform
or even agrarian poverty were severely constrained by the hostile political context.
The Agro-Economic Survey (AES)’s long-term research programmes involved repeated
visits to samples of villages in Java from 1969 onwards. These studies were an important
element in both policy discussions and academic debate; their influence was felt not only
through the various survey results published by AES researchers themselves, but also
through the fact that many of the better-known green-revolution dissertations and
other studies by foreigners were based on research carried out in AES sample villages
(among them Franke 1972; Collier et al. 1974; Hayami and Kikuchi 1981; Hart 1986;
White and Wiradi 1989; Breman 1995; Pincus 1996). The AES villages, in this way, provided
raw material for many prominent foreign critics as well as apologists of the green
revolution.
‘Green revolution’ studies from the early 1970s onwards have shown their own pro-
gression. The early 1970s were a rare moment when young scholars from research insti-
tutes in Bogor, Yogyakarta, Jakarta and Salatiga all turned their attention to the
negative impacts of green-revolution technologies and practices on employment and
incomes for the marginal-peasant and landless groups who formed the majority of
most rural communities. Their empirical work (summarised in White 2000, 87–89) suc-
ceeded in drawing the attention of policymakers and foreign donors to issues of the dis-
tributional consequences of agricultural modernisation in the ‘unreformed’ agrarian
structures of Java and other islands. Most of these studies, however, were based on a
static, populist, homogeneous and inaccurate model of ‘traditional’, institutionally fixed
agrarian arrangements which the green revolution was thought to be replacing, heralding
the demise of Geertzian involution and shared poverty. Their authors entered rarely, if at
all, into dialogue with general theory or comparative literature, and were generally out of
touch with earlier work on agrarian labour relations in Javanese rice agriculture (mainly by
Dutch authors). In the first 10 years the AES studies did not even collect data on land own-
ership and tenancy;12 only from the late 1970s onwards were agrarian structures more
thoroughly investigated through a series of research training workshops and field
studies on land tenure and agrarian relations.
In contrast and partly in reaction to these studies, the later 1970s and 1980s saw many
researchers (but again, particularly foreigners) engaging in a more reflective kind of ‘green
revolution’ study, relating field observations on changing agrarian relations to classic ideas
of agrarian differentiation and diversification, often with an explicitly comparative purpose
and sometimes with a broader historical perspective (Hayami and Kikuchi 1981; Hart 1986;
Maurer 1986; Hüsken 1989; White and Wiradi 1989; Pincus 1996). These authors on the
whole had read the classic European works on agrarian differentiation processes and
were, among other things, more or less explicitly concerned to explore the relevance of
one or another mainstream (neoclassical, or Marxist-inspired) model for the understanding
of the dynamics of agrarian change.

12
All that is available are estimates of the distribution of operated farm holdings in the sample villages (Agro-Economic
Survey 1972).
12 B. WHITE

The AES’s village re-studies allowed White and Wiradi (1989) to compare changing
agrarian relations and diversification in nine Javanese villages between 1971 (when the
green revolution was barely beginning) and 1981, when virtually all rice cultivators were
using modern varieties, and increased inputs of chemical fertilisers and pesticides, and
had achieved impressive yield increases. By 1981, increasing landlessness had left about
half of all households without ownership rights to rice fields (sawah), and (when tenant
farming is included) about 40 percent without cultivation rights. While large numbers of
small peasant farms persisted, small groups of households owning more than 1.0 hectares
(less than nine percent of all households) between them owned more than half of all
the sawah. In some villages, share tenancy (in which land flows from larger owners to
the land-poor or landless) appeared to be declining in favour of fixed-rent leasing
(which generally involves transactions between landed households, or from smaller to
larger owners). There were signs of the emergence of ‘a group of prosperous larger
farmers or more accurately farm managers, sometimes supplementing their own holdings
with land lease and mortgage, who control a large part of land and farm incomes and also
provide the bulk of wage employment’; while ‘horizontal’ wage labour transactions
between smaller farm households were common, 68 percent of all agricultural wages
were earned by members of landless households, i.e. in ‘vertical’ wage relations (White
and Wiradi 1989, 293).
The importance of household pluriactivity (combination of farm and non-farm incomes)
for all landholding groups was one key to understanding why land concentration and pro-
letarianisation were not proceeding faster:
On the one hand, wealthy households have many other avenues for profitable investment,
and many demands for nonproductive expenditures, which compete with the alternative of
land acquisition. On the other hand, the many small owners whose agricultural incomes do
not provide reproduction at minimal levels are able, by participating in a variety of low-
return nonfarm activities … to achieve subsistence incomes without the distress sale of
their ‘sub livelihood’ plots. These patterns … call for interpretations of agrarian differentiation
processes under conditions of commoditization and productivity growth which place the
phenomenon of ‘part-time’ farming and farm labour at all levels of the agrarian structure in
more central focus. (White and Wiradi 1989, 299)

Such pluriactivity is nothing new: the historical record provides substantial evidence of ‘a
widespread and lively involvement of rural people in non-agricultural pursuits throughout
the colonial period and before’ (Alexander, Boomgaard, and White 1989, 1).
Frans Hüsken’s study in Gondosari village (Central Java) found that share tenancy, far
from declining with the green revolution, had markedly increased; share tenants had
grown in number by almost 80 percent between 1956 and 1976, and one-third of all
households were share tenants. Even though hired labour was easily available (another
one-third of households were agricultural labourer households) the share of the harvest
paid out to tenants cost landowners 20–30 percent less than it would cost them to hire
day-labourers. With a few instructions to the share tenants and occasional visits to the
fields to inspect the crops, landlords had time to devote to other pursuits – ‘the landlords
are becoming “entrepreneurs” not only in agriculture, but also outside it’ (Hüsken
1979, 149) – while the share tenants provided a reservoir of free labour that could be
called upon at any time, and a group of followers who could be relied on for political
support.
 THE JOURNAL OF PEASANT STUDIES 13

Differentiation, diversification and mobility in the current era of neo-

liberal ‘reformasi’
The fall of Suharto and the ensuing turbulent period of reformasi unleashed a flood of
pent-up peasant activism and a rich profusion of new publications on agrarian issues.
On the whole, however, issues of agrarian political economy in lowland rice-producing vil-
lages have been relatively neglected in research since the 1980s. In 2013 and 2015, the
independent research centre Akatiga carried out two rounds of research in 12 villages
in main rice-producing area of West, Central and East Java.13 The main aim of this
project was to examine patterns of access to farmland and their implications for pro-
ductivity, employment and income distribution, as well as the relationship between land-
holdings and farm and non-farm incomes.
Inequality in landholdings is significant in all the 12 villages, and in some it has reached
levels approaching polarisation, with high levels of absolute landlessness, and absentee
landownership on a large scale. In eight of the 12 villages, more than 40 percent of
households own no land; tenancy rates are high (much higher than those found in the
agricultural censuses, as already noted) with pure or part-tenant farmers outnumbering
owner-operator farmers in nine of the 12 villages, and rather small minorities of pure
owner-operators. The largest landowners tend to have only three, four or five hectares,
below the maxima permitted under the 1960 Basic Agrarian Law, but still substantial in
villages where average land availability is 0.2 or even 0.1 hectares per household.
While the AES studies suggested a decline in share-tenancy and the emergence of
small-capitalist farmers during the 1970s, these recent studies suggest a trend more
akin to that observed by Hüsken in Gondosari. The largest owners are generally not
farmers, spending their time in various high-return non-farm activities, and not interested
in farming themselves; their landholdings are a source of income through rent, and of
speculation through its rising value. Many are village officials, and/or own businesses on
the up- and downstream sides of agriculture; both local and absentee owners tend to allo-
cate their land in small parcels to tenants in share-tenancy (or, less commonly, rental)
arrangements. In all except two villages, the majority of small-scale farmers do not own
part or all the land they cultivate, and share tenancy has become the most dominant
labour regime. Thus, as Ploegsma found 90 years ago, concentration of land control in a
relatively few households to this day does not result in concentration of farm operations
into large capitalist farms (Ambarwati et al. 2016, 271–77).
Although it is not a primary focus of this contribution, it should be noted that the small
(and often tiny) farm size pattern typical of rice production in these villages is not a barrier
to high productivity. Both secondary data and Akatiga’s own surveys in the same 12 vil-
lages support the conclusion that larger farms do not have higher per-hectare yields,
and even that the farm-size–productivity relationship is an inverse one (Wati and
Chazali 2015).
Pluriactivity is the norm in all landholding strata, but with much variation in the
relations between agricultural and non-agricultural employment and incomes. The type
of non-farm involvement and levels of income depend on various factors, among them
access to capital, education, and gender. Members of landless farm-worker households

13
As well as additional villages in Lampung and South Sulawesi provinces.
14 B. WHITE

earn additional income in various local (or nearby) activities, as factory workers, construc-
tion workers, washerwomen, workers in small-scale food and craft enterprises, or in some
cases in local mines. Their income from these activities may be higher than that of the
operators of small farms. At the other end of the agrarian structure, large landowners
and farmers often invest heavily in agri-linked and non-farm activities which require sub-
stantial capital and provide high returns, in trade, agri-processing (e.g. rice mills), and
equipment (renting out tractors, combine harvesters, etc.); these households, though
small in number, control a large slice of the rural economy through their diversified
land- and non land-based investments; some of them also have lucrative jobs in village
government or the civil service. Out-migration, both permanent and temporary, now
extends to all social classes, and both genders. It is another indispensable element in
our understanding of the disappearance or survival of some smallholder and landless
households, and the upward mobility of some others.

In conclusion
The studies summarised in this contribution all demonstrate the differentiation of the
Javanese peasantry as a long-standing and established fact. They also demonstrate the
need to approach it with a non-reductionist, flexible perspective, as Marx wanted to do
in his later years, and as Lenin also advocated14 even though later agrarian scholars and
activists may have forgotten this. Despite rapid urbanisation, Green Revolution, increas-
ingly commoditised and fossil-based production, and rapid development of the urban
and rural non-farm economies along capitalist lines, the small-farmer pattern has
remained in Java: numbers of farms are not declining and their average size is not increas-
ing.15 Differentiation processes and concentration of landholdings (both internally and by
urban absentees) proceed; however, this has produced not a large capitalist farmer class,
but growing numbers of share tenants, as the majority of the landowning ‘masters of the
contemporary countryside’ (Lenin 1960, 177) do not establish large wage-labour farms but
parcel out their land in minuscule plots to share tenants. Larger and smaller farm house-
holds (including the share tenants) rely equally on strategies of pluriactivity, but for differ-
ent reasons.
Understanding the continuing existence and dynamic of small-peasant farms and
households within Java’s differentiated rural communities requires us to explore both
their ‘centripetal’ and ‘centrifugal’ tendencies and the ‘simultaneous occurrence of oppos-
ing trends’ (Shanin 1972, 76), which in turn means that concepts derived from the Marxist
and the Chayanovian tradition are both essential and relevant. In fact, to see these tra-
ditions as conflicting and irreconcilable may itself be a fallacy, as Chayanov saw his
work as belonging to the Marxist tradition (van der Ploeg 2017, 4). Indeed, re-reading
Lenin, Kautsky, Chayanov and (about) Kritsman’s agrarian marxist group, while under-
standing the reasons for their differences in emphasis and in their views on peasant

‘[T]he main trends of peasant differentiation are one thing; the forms it assumes, depending on the different local con-
14

ditions, are another’ (Lenin 1976, 145).

15
The apparent decline in the number of farms (and increase in their average size) in the most recent (2013) Agricultural
Census is, we have argued, mainly due to changes in the definitions and criteria for ‘farms’ used by the Central Bureau of
Statistics (Ambarwati et al. 2016, 270).
 THE JOURNAL OF PEASANT STUDIES 15

futures, one can be as easily struck by similarities and complementarities as by fundamen-

tal analytical divides.
Lenin’s model is essential for the understanding of the centripetal processes of ‘cumu-
lation of advantages and disadvantages’ underlying the emergence and persistence of
large landowner/farmer classes on the one hand, and landless and near-landless semi-pro-
letarians on the other. Lenin recognised the existence of a ‘middle’ group of peasant family
farms (which he estimated at about 40 percent of all farms), but focused his analysis on the
capitalist-farmer minority (‘probably less than one-fifth’ of all households) and the landless
and near-landless (the ‘lower 50 percent’) who provided them with wage labour. He saw
the essential dynamic in the relationship between these two extremes as the penetration
of commodity economy ‘develops the extreme groups at the expense of the middle
peasantry’:
Numerically, the peasant bourgeoisie constitute a small minority of the peasantry, probably
not more than one-fifth of the total number of house- holds … . But as to their weight in
the sum-total of peasant farming, in the total quantity of means of production belonging
to the peasantry, in the total amount of produce raised by the peasantry, the peasant bour-
geoisie are undoubtedly predominant. They are the masters of the contemporary countryside.
(Lenin 1960 [1899], 177–78)

His characterisation of the mass of near-landless peasants, on the other hand – ‘insignificant
farming on a patch of land, with the farm in a state of utter ruin … inability to exist without
the sale of labour power … and extremely low standard of living’ (Lenin 1960 [1899],178) –
fits the Java case less well, given the high yields obtained by Javanese micro-farmers.
Chayanov, meanwhile, acknowledged the existence of emerging capitalist farming on
the ‘wage labour farms’ (which he estimated at around 10 percent of all farms, compared
to Lenin’s ‘less than one-fifth’) and also of the emerging landless proletariat, but ignored
them for his purpose, which was to develop a model of the ‘labour farm’, the peasant
family farm: he focused on the 80 percent of all households (in his estimation) that were
‘family farms’, because he was concerned to show that family farming could be an efficient
and viable part of a modern agrarian commodity economy:
Simple, everyday observation of life in the countryside shows us elements of ‘capitalist exploi-
tation’. We suppose that, on the one hand, proletarianization of the countryside and, on the
other, a certain development of capitalist production forms undoubtedly take place there …
[however], as we are concerned with the labour farm the themes we have touched on, despite
their exceptionally intense and topical general economic interest, are quite to one side.
(Chayanov 1966 [1925], 256–57)

Both Chayanov and Kautsky put their fingers on one key basis of smallholder, petty com-
modity producer survival in broader capitalist contexts. Like Heyting’s three Javanese
peasants in the 1880s, the Kautskian and Chayanovian petty commodity producer
‘does not live from the yield on his property but from the yield of his labour’ (Kautsky
1899, 170), and this ‘family labour product’ cannot be decomposed analytically. ‘Since
there is no social phenomenon of wages, the social phenomenon of net profit is also
absent’ (Chayanov 1966 [1929], 5); ‘labour, within the peasant farm, is not wage
labour. And capital is not capital in the Marxist sense (i.e. it is not capital that needs
to produce surplus value to be invested in order to produce more surplus value)’ (van
der Ploeg 2013, 15).
16 B. WHITE

Chayanov’s notion of peasant ‘self-exploitation’ has been widely misunderstood; as

van der Ploeg reminds us, it is a neutral term referring simply to the net product of
peasant labour, quite different from Kautsky’s ‘overwork and underconsumption’. But
overwork and underconsumption were only one of many sources of peasant survival
for Kautsky; he noted three main forms of ‘supplementary employment’ which made
possible the persistence of the ‘independent small agricultural establishment’, a list
which fits our Java case well: wage-labour on larger farms, domestic industries
and crafts, and migration of some family members to more distant industrial or agricul-
tural work (Kautsky 1988 [1899], 110–18). Only in cases ‘where neither of these is avail-
able and the small peasant remains a mere farmer’ do they survive mainly through
overwork and underconsumption, or ‘as Marx puts it, through barbarism’ (Kautsky
1988 [1899], 307).
Finally, the empirical work of Kritsman and the so-called ‘agrarian marxist’ school,
brought prematurely to a halt in 1929 by Stalin’s decision to collectivise, helps us to
avoid romantic ideas of peasant households as practising ‘subsistence’ farming and insu-
lated from capitalist markets. Kritsman’s Russian peasants of the 1920s were
a petty bourgeois mass, all inextricably bound up in commodity relations, not only in so far as
they sold their produce or bought consumer goods, but also in that they were engaged in
market transactions for various factors of production required for farming. As a result of
these various transactions, almost all households experienced relations in which they were
either exploited or exploiting and many experienced both together. (Cox 1986, 199)

These conclusions, in turn are not far from Chayanov’s observations that the peasant farm
becomes an inseparable part of the capitalist system, so far as the family farm exists within an
economy dominated by capitalist relations; so far as it is drawn into commodity production
and is a petty commodioty producer, selling and buying at prices laid down by commodity
capitalism. (Chayanov 1966 [1925], 222)

If Marx were able to read these works and see the contribution that each of them has to
offer in the analysis of agrarian structures and changes in places like Java, one could
imagine that he would be pleased to recognise his legacy in all these varieties of agrarian
marxism.

Acknowledgements
Thanks to Jan Breman, Hanny Wijaya and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful and encoura-
ging comments. Translations from Dutch and Indonesian sources are by the author.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor
Ben White is Emeritus Professor of rural sociology at the International Institute of Social Studies, The
Hague. His research and teaching has focused on processes of agrarian change and the anthropol-
ogy and history of childhood and youth, especially in Indonesia. He is a founding member of the
 THE JOURNAL OF PEASANT STUDIES 17

Land Deal Politics Initiative (www.iss.nl/ldpi), and the Emancipatory Rural Politics Initiative (www.iss.
nl/erpi). Email: white@iss.nl.

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