Labour takes Root; Mobilization and Immobilization of Javanese Rural Society under the Cultivation System

Abstract

In the production of tropical export crops, the factor labour has always overshadowed the two other factors, land and capital. In the days prior to the mechanisation of agriculture, that is to say, far into the second half of the 19th century, the factor capital almost coincided with labour. “Des bras, des bras, toujours des bras” as the saying went among the planters of the Mascareignes. However, it would be wrong to suggest that before the industrial revolution the relative importance of labour only manifested itself in the production of tropical export crops. There is a revered tradition in economic theory which considers labour to be the only source of wealth. Thus, Karl Marx proposed that the value produced by a labourer above the maintenance level should be designated as surplus value. For him, the control of this surplus lay at the basis of each “mode of production” (his term for a stage of development). Each mode of production was characterised by a specific set of social relations between the labourer, the ruling class that appropriates the surplus value, and the means of production. Labour and the labour process therefore were in his eyes a social phenomenon. One might add they are inherent to the tissue of authorities that constituate any social order.