[Peace-discuss] Fwd: [Marxism] Walden Bello: Class War: Thailand's Military Coup

Sat May 31 06:10:13 EDT 2014

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> From: Michael Karadjis via Marxism <marxism at lists.csbs.utah.edu>
> Date: May 30, 2014, 12:27:03 PM EDT
> To: "C. G. Estabrook" <galliher at illinois.edu>
> Subject: [Marxism] Walden Bello: Class War: Thailand's Military Coup
> Reply-To: Michael Karadjis <mkaradjis at gmail.com>, Activists and scholars in Marxist tradition <marxism at lists.csbs.utah.edu>
> 
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> http://fpif.org/class-war-thailands-military-coup/
> 
> Class War: Thailand’s Military Coup
> Outnumbered by the country's rural voters, Thailand's once vibrantly
> democratic urban middle class has embraced an elitist, antidemocratic
> agenda.
> 
> By Walden Bello, May 27, 2014
> 
> Thailand’s military coup is a victory for the country’s elites and
> middle classes. But the country’s rural majority is unlikely to stand
> aside while the elites dictate a new constitution. (Photo: Pittaya
> Sroilong / Flickr)
> 
> 
> This article is a joint publication of Foreign Policy In Focus and
> TheNation.com.
> 
> After declaring martial law on Tuesday, May 20, the Thai military
> announced a full-fledged coup two days later. The putsch followed nearly
> eight months of massive street protests against the ruling Pheu Thai
> government identified with former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra. The
> power grab by army chief Gen. Prayuth Chan-ochacame two weeks after
> Thaksin’s sister, Yingluck, was ousted as caretaker prime minister by
> the country’s Constitutional Court for “abuse of power” on May 7.
> 
> The Thai military portrayed its seizure of power as an effort to impose
> order after two rounds of talks between the country’s rival factions
> failed to produce a compromise that would provide Thailand with a
> functioning government.
> 
> Deftly Managed Script
> 
> The military’s narrative produced few takers. Indeed, many analysts saw
> the military’s move as a coup de grace to Thailand’s elected government,
> following what they saw as the judicial coup of May 7.
> 
> It is indeed difficult not to see the putsch as the final step in a
> script deftly managed by the conservative “royalist” establishment to
> thwart the right to govern of a populist political bloc that has won
> every election since 2001. Utilizing anti-corruption discourse to
> inflame the middle class into civil protest, the key forces in the
> anti-government coalition have, from the start, aimed to create the kind
> of instability that would provoke the military to step in and provide
> the muscle for a new political order.
> 
> Using what analyst Marc Saxer calls “middle class rage” as the battering
> ram, these elite elements forced the resignation of the Yingluck
> government in December; disrupted elections in February, thus providing
> the justification for the conservative Constitutional Court to nullify
> them; and instigated that same court’s decision to oust Yingluck as
> caretaker prime minister May 7 on flimsy charges of “abuse of power.”
> Civil protest was orchestrated with judicial initiatives to pave the way
> for a military takeover.
> 
> The military says that it will set up a “reform council” and a “national
> assembly” that will lay the institutional basis of a new government.
> This plan sounds very much like the plan announced in late November by
> the protest leader Suthep Thaugsuban, which would place the country for
> a year under an unelected, unaccountable reform panel.
> 
> The military’s move has largely elicited the approval of Suthep’s base
> of middle-class supporters. Indeed, it has been middle-class support
> that has provided cover for the calculated moves of the political
> elites. Many of those that provided the backbone of the street protests
> now anticipate the drafting of an elitist new order that will
> institutionalize political inequality in favor of Bangkok and the
> country’s urban middle class.
> 
> The Thai Middle Class: From Paragons to Enemies of Democracy
> 
> The sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset once celebrated the middle class
> as paragons of democracy. But in recent years, middle-class Thais have
> transmogrified into supporters of an elitist, frankly antidemocratic
> agenda. Today’s middle class is no longer the pro-democracy middle class
> that overthrew the dictatorship of General Suchinda Krapayoon in 1992.
> What happened?
> 
> Worth quoting in full is an insightful analysis of this transformation
> provided by Marc Saxer:
> 
> The Bangkok middle class called for democratization and specifically the
> liberalization of the state with the political rights to protect
> themselves from the abuse of power by the elites. However, once
> democracy was institutionalized, they found themselves to be the
> structural minority. Mobilized by clever political entrepreneurs, it was
> now the periphery who handily won every election. Ignorant of the rise
> of a rural middle class demanding full participation in social and
> political life, the middle class in the center interpreted demands for
> equal rights and public goods as ‘the poor getting greedy’… [M]ajority
> rule was equated with unsustainable welfare expenses, which would
> eventually lead to bankruptcy.
> 
> From the perspective of the middle class, Saxer continues, majority rule
> 
> overlooks the political basis of the social contract: a social
> compromise between all stakeholders. Never has any social contract been
> signed which obligates the middle class to foot the tax bill, in
> exchange for quality public services, political stability and social
> peace. This is why middle classes feel like they are “being robbed” by
> corrupt politicians, who use their tax revenues to “buy votes” from the
> “greedy poor.” Or, in a more subtle language, the “uneducated rural
> masses are easy prey for politicians who promise them everything in an
> effort to get a hold of power.”
> 
> Thus, Saxer concludes, from the viewpoint of the urban middle class,
> 
> policies delivering to local constituencies are nothing but “populism,”
> or another form of “vote buying” by power hungry politicians. The Thai
> Constitutional Court, in a seminal ruling, thus equated the very
> principle of elections with corruption. Consequently, time and again,
> the “yellow” alliance of feudal elites along with the Bangkok middle
> class called for the disenfranchisement of the “uneducated poor,” or
> even more bluntly the suspension of electoral democracy.
> 
> Impossible Dream
> 
> However, the elite-middle class alliance is deceiving itself if it
> thinks the adoption of a constitution institutionalizing minority rule
> will be possible. For Thailand is no longer the Thailand of 20 years
> ago, where political conflicts were still largely conflicts among
> elites, with the vast lower classes being either onlookers or passive
> followers of warring elite factions.
> 
> What is now the driving force of Thai politics is class conflict with
> Thai characteristics, to borrow from Mao. The central figure that has
> transformed the Thai political landscape is the exiled Thaksin
> Shinawatra, a charismatic, if corrupt, billionaire who managed through a
> combination of populism, patronage, and the skillful deployment of cash
> to create a massive electoral majority. While for Thaksin the aim of
> this coalition might be the cornering or monopolization of elite power,
> for the social sectors he has mobilized, the goal is the redistribution
> of wealth and power from the elites to the masses and—equally
> important—extracting respect for people that had been scorned as
> “country bumpkins” or “buffaloes.” However much Thaksin’s “Redshirt”
> movement may be derided as a coalition between corrupt politicians and
> the “greedy poor,” it has become the vehicle for the acquisition of full
> citizenship rights by Thailand’s marginalized classes.
> 
> The elite-middle class alliance is dreaming if it thinks that the
> Redshirts will stand aside and allow them to dictate the terms of
> surrender, much less institutionalize these in a new constitution. But
> neither do the Redshirts at present possess the necessary coercive power
> to alter the political balance in the short and medium term. It is now
> their turn to wage civil resistance.
> 
> Since the coup, about 150 people have been reported detained—including
> Pravit Rojanaphruk, a prominent reporter for Thailand’s Nation newspaper
> known for his criticism of the anti-government protest movement that
> precipitated the military’s intervention.
> 
> What now seems likely is that, with violent and non-violent civil
> protest by the Redshirts, Thailand will experience a prolonged and
> bitter descent into virtual civil war, with the Pheu Thai regional
> strongholds—the North, Northeast, and parts of the central region of the
> country—becoming increasingly ungovernable from imperial Bangkok. It is
> a tragic denouement to which an anti-democratic opposition disdaining
> all political compromise has plunged this once promising Southeast Asian
> nation.
> 
> 
> Walden Bello, a member of the House of Representatives of the
> Philippines, was the principal author of A Siamese Tragedy: Development
> and Disintegration in Modern Thailand (London: Zed Press, 1998). 
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