The Malay Labourer: By the Window of Capitalism

This book explores the ethnography of emerging proletarian social consciousness and resistance. By the 1970s Malay peasants on the east coast of peninsular Malaysia found themselves reconstituted as a class, not only as an economic category but also as a community in a capitalist plantation frontier society. The plantation, as a window to capitalism, serves as a micro-level base to explore how Malays responded to wage labour and the plantation’s class hierarchy. More specifically, the analysis examines Malay working-class understandings of exploitation and justice. Zawawi Ibrahim makes use of the concept of a ‘proletarian moral economy’, which attempted to embed not only workers’ rights to subsistence and reciprocity but also their rights to maruah (human dignity).

ZAWAWI IBRAHIM is a visiting professor at Taylor’s University, Malaysia. He was most recently Professor of Sociology and Anthropology at Universiti Brunei Darussalam, Brunei.