Land's End from Tania Li

Tania Murray Li explicitly offers her insights on the emergence of capitalist relations among the indigenous highlanders who knowingly privatized their land for the sake of a tremendously successful crop known as cacao, drawing on long and extensive decades of ethnographic research in Sulawesi, Indonesia. Therefore, the impending end of their poverty and seclusion due to the money that came as a result of land privatization inspired many local Highlanders. However, it soon became clear that not all of the landowners were successful in their quest for wealth. Some of the Highlanders struggled to support their family, fell into poverty, and lost their land. Most importantly, the perceived losers and beneficiaries were not entirely strange to one another but related through social bonds.

Through the land venture, several social inequalities emerged and continued to thrive in the poverty of the Highlanders. Li goes a step further to challenge the complacent, modernization narratives espoused by developmental agencies that hold the skewed notion that farmers who lose in the shift to high-value exports crops can seek jobs elsewhere. Consequently, decades of unstable socioeconomic growth in Indonesia meant that the newly landless highlanders had nowhere to turn to but to face the reality of reaching a painful end in itself.

The Wage Relations among the Highlanders of Indonesia

One of the most significant transitional changes that occurred to the Highlanders emanated from fluctuating wage relations. At the beginning of 1990 for instance, wage work among the Highlanders was occasional purposely because they had means to fend for themselves. They owned lands and could sustain themselves. Wage labor, therefore, was not commonplace because of land ownership. As such a farm owner was not in any way obligated to work on another owner’s farm unless for other reasons such as assisting in good will to get work done. However, by 2009, the socioeconomic dynamics had significantly changed the character of wage association prominently becoming evident. The ownership and transfer of land from the Highlanders to the private entities had become so intense such that they were left with no other piece of land to work on other than those owned by their kin, neighbors, and friends. The rule dynamics had relegated the previously wealthy owners to paupers who could not survive without pursuing wage labor in the privatized farms.

Lack of land accessibility significantly reduced dispensable income as was previously the case leading to the unfortunate case of bare survival. Similarly, in the past, the employer had the sole mandate to treat workers who came to assist in the farms because they were not in any way compelled by circumstances to offer their services. On the contrary, the new dependency entailed that the farm worker seeking labor wages had to adhere to the landowners' strict demands however punitive. The most significant wage relation, therefore, emanates from the erosion of labor autonomy because of the inevitable inequalities between peasant workers and wealthy landowners.

Conversely, not all Highlanders sold their lands as evidenced by Kasar, a peasant farmer who before the promises of the modernization narratives had eked a living from his farming endeavors. Kasar represents the majority of Highlanders who had to contend with the debilitating consequences of abject poverty. Emaciated and physically incapacitated, Kasar evokes the memories of a man paying the ultimate price for attempting to join the modernization bandwagon. Left with a barren land, Kasar could not produce anything of significance including the previously lucrative cacao. Instead, he invested in the plantation of Kapok trees that grew well but the market dynamics meant that the prices offered were extremely low. Cutting down the Kapok could not provide any financial reprieve since the land in itself was not adequate to support food production. That left Kasar with no alternative whatsoever to fend for his family since he had grown inflicted by the vagaries of life and the wage work naturally became untenable as the current form of crops required little labor.

Also central to the wage labor relations are the polarizing effects of the capitalist relations that eventually emerged among farmers. Those that accumulated vast pieces of land and capital prospered, while those that lacked resources were either squeezed out of competition or forced to render their labor services to the wealthy owners who controlled the markets. Invariably, it is the same predicament that faced Kasar and several other landless farmers who could no longer sustain their families on the older terms with no viable alternatives. Through the intensification of agriculture and its competitiveness, ex-farmers became vulnerable workers surviving on very cheap labor if at all it existed. The reason why farm labor became so cheap gets attributed to modernization. As such, cacao, kapok and other crops needed little human attention. In furtherance, jobs continued to dwindle in places like the province of Central Sulawesi.

By 2009, only 5% of the labor force found work in unrelated farming ventures such as mining and manufacturing yet the wage relations continued to deteriorate. Of the working labor force, none remitted money to family members. Imperatively, farming remaining the primary source of livelihood, most Highlanders failed to successfully insert themselves into the migrant labor streams headed for other provinces. Land acquisition in any other part of the region was also highly unlikely because the land frontier outside their immediate areas had eventually closed.

Capitalist relations plays a pivotal role in the subsequent wage relations that characterized Indonesia’s countryside. Farmers became unable to live on their own terms as compared to the 1990's. It is through a capitalistic approach that dislodged the Highlanders from their farming activities when they attempted new tree crops which had the cumulative effect of individualizing their land rights leading to the inevitable formulation of capitalist relations whereby highlanders’ capacity to survive became controlled by the rules of competition and profit.

Conclusion

Insightfully, the structure of the wage, lack of land and capitalist relations enhanced new forms of poverty. For people like Kasar, the market was already there by 2006, and capitalist pressure nudged him from all sides to take advantage of the opportunities presented which also meant rendering cheap labor to get capital. Kasar’s limitations stem from an inherent lack to engage in meaningful production due to lack of productive land, seeds, and fertilizers while food had also become costly. As such, inaccessibility to land tend to compel the poor to sell their labor for survival. The capitalist and wage relation cycle projects that if Kasar cannot access credit to purchase seed and fertilizer, then he has very remote chances to farm thus making him entirely dependent on providing cheap labor.