Page 402 - Ranah Studi Agraria: Penguasaan Tanah dan Hubungan Agraris

Agrarian and Nonagrarian Bases ...

industries in Geneng) does wage employment in the nonfarm
sector involve relations with local employers who are also
major employers of agricultural labor. Furthermore, as more
detailed analyses have shown (Soentoro et al. i98i:ch. 5; Soen-

toro 1984), large and probably increasing proportions of non-
farm incomes are earned outside the village through seasonal
or continuous (‘circulating’ and in some cases daily ‘commut-
ing’) out-migration of household members to urban centers-
in petty trade, casual labor in the (then) booming construc-
tion sector, as becak drivers, domestic servants, etc.
Given the involvement of male and female members of
‘landless agricultural labor’ households in such a wide variety
of activities and labor ‘statuses’ besides farm labor, in petty
commodity production, small trade, service sector and wage
work, both inside and outside the village, the landless cannot
easily be categorized as a landless worker class; we could more
usefully underline their semiproletarian status, with all the
complex and ambiguous implications for class relations, class
consciousness, and class action which that status involves.
The same can also be said of the smaller farm households who
supplement inadequate own-farm incomes both with agricul-
tural wages and with a similar variety of nonfarm activities

both inside and outside the village. We suppose this mobility
and diversification of labor will further develop among such
households as landlessness and land concentration increase,
as the seasonality of agricultural wage-labor demand sharp-
ens, and as agricultural mechanization proceeds, even if real
agricultural wages remain at their new higher level for those
with access to them. It is interesting to note that only among

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