Page 400 - Ranah Studi Agraria: Penguasaan Tanah dan Hubungan Agraris

Agrarian and Nonagrarian Bases ...

circulation between smaller farm house-holds, the bulk of wage
transactions are ‘vertical’ with 68 of all agricultural wages
earned by members of landless households (cf. Table 7.11).
The changes we have described, which represent the accelera-

tion and crystallization of trends already long in motion rather
than any abrupt break with past patterns of agrarian relations,
might then allow us to speak with greater confidence of the
emergence of opposing ‘commercial farmer/employer’ and
‘landless agricultural laborer’ classes (with the exception of
‘backward,’ rain-fed Sentul where the transition from exchange
to wage labor is only just beginning), at either end of a still
large but relatively declining mass of petty commodity pro-
ducing small-farm households still retaining some access to
land and (particularly at the lower end of the scale) supplement-
ing inadequate own-farm incomes with wage labor (cf. Table
7.11).
Such a view may be helpful in characterizing recent
changes in production relations in agriculture, but it is ina-
dequate and perhaps highly misleading as a characterization
of rural classes or class relations or the ‘agrarian structure’ as
a whole. As we can see from the right-hand side of Table 7.11,
nonfarm incomes provided almost two-thirds of all incomes

in our nine sample neighborhoods taken together - in what
was a relatively successful agricultural year for all villages
except Wanarata-and more than half the incomes of each lan-
downership group with the exception of those owning more
than 1.0 ha of sawah (although the latter still command the
highest absolute levels of nonfarm income). As we have seen
already in Table 7.1, only Mariuk can still be considered a

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