Thai Spring?

Giles Ji Ungpakorn 2011

Thai Spring?
Giles Ji Ungpakorn
1

http://redthaisocialist.com/ , ji.ungpakorn@gmail.com

Abstract
This paper attempts to study the Thai political crisis in a global context, comparing the events with the Arab Spring of 2011. In Thailand military installed regimes have been the ones which pushed through greater neoliberal free-market policies, while democratically elected governments, especially the TRT government in 2001, had to consider the wishes and interests of the electorate, not just the rich corporations. The Thai crisis began as a conflict between the Military and their conservative allies against Taksin s political and electoral machine. This dispute then became expanded into an all-out class-related conflict when the Red Shirts were formed. Red Shirt anger was triggered by the 2006 coup d tat and all that followed. But the underlying tensions in society had been growing stronger for decades and were similar to tensions in the Middle-East. These tensions arose from a conflict between the conservative superstructure of the Thai elites and the changes in society resulting from uneven economic and social development. The role of the labour movement is vitally important because the inability to organise strikes in support of the Red Shirt protests in 2010 was a serious weakness, which helped the regime to crush the street demonstrations, resulting in over 90 deaths at the hands of the Military. This is in stark contrast to events in Egypt and Tunisia. The political participation of the working class is also crucial because Thai governments, including the new Peua Thai Government, will only start to adopt genuine economic and social reform policies for a more equal society if the labour movement applies political pressure, either by building its own party or by actively engaging in social movement agitation. An important step in this direction would be to build the links between the Red Shirt movement and the trade unions. The recent devastating floods, and how the Government chooses to act, can only serve to highlight the above tensions in society. A neoliberal policy for economic recovery along with a Peua Thai Military settlement will serve to strengthen authoritarianism and inequality.

The author was an Associate Professor of politics at Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok, until February 2009 when he was charged with lse majest for writing a book against the 2006 coup d tat. He is now in exile in Britain.

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To what extent can we talk about the Red Shirt struggle in Thailand as the Thai Spring ? Although the explosion of the Thai political crisis predates the Arab Spring , there are many useful similarities which can help us analyse the root causes of the political turmoil. In countries like Egypt and Tunisia the political super-structure which had been established some 30 years ago was in deep contradiction with significant changes which had taken place in society. The population had become more urbanised and more confident through education and through the experience of strikes and struggles. They were no longer prepared to put up with the old monopoly of power exercised by the elites. Added to this was the fact that the governments in the middle-east had been pursuing neoliberal growth policies since the 1980s, which resulted in a widening gap between rich and poor. In the context of the 2008 world economic crisis, they could no longer guarantee decent standards of living for the majority. There were astronomical levels of youth unemployment. But the struggles which resulted in the Egyptian and Tunisian revolutions did not suddenly materialise out of nowhere. In the decade before the uprising there had been a growth in workers strikes and political movements for democracy, especially in Egypt2. So the Arab Spring resulted from deep political and historical tensions in society which were cracked open by turmoil in the global economy. But the revolutions were no inevitable. They were made humanly possible by the growing experience and bravery of the working class, the youth and the opposition movements. In her book on growth without democracy in Vietnam, Eva Hansson asks a couple of questions which are very relevant to Thailand. Does the politics of growth, with economic liberalisation as a central feature, lead to democratisation, or does it reinforce authoritarianism? Is the exclusion of labour from national politics the missing link that explains why Southeast Asian countries seem to be stuck in different forms of more or less authoritarian rule? 3 An initial observation comparing the 2011 mass protests in Tahrir Square, Cairo, with the 2010 mass Red Shirt protests in Rajprasong, Bangkok, highlights the lack of a growing strike movement in the case of Thailand. It was the Egyptian workers strikes that finally broke the back of the blood-soaked Mubarak regime4. But the Thai protests ended in bloodshed and defeat as the Army shot down nearly 90 unarmed civilians in cold blood. This starts to point to the missing link, referred to by Hansson in her second question above.

The Thai Crisis

Political crises often have causes and components which go far beyond their superficial surface appearances. The superficial explanation for the Thai political crisis is to blame it all on the behaviour of one man, Taksin Shinawat. Taksin s Thai Rak Thai Party (TRT) won elections in 2001. The government was unique in being both popular and dynamic, with a whole raft of modernising
2

Rabab El-Mahdi (2009) The democracy movement: cycles of protest. In: Rabab El-Mahdi & Philip Marfleet (eds) Egypt. The Moment of Change. Zed Books, London & New York. 3 Eva Hansson (2011) Growth without Democracy. (Stockholm Studies in Politics 137) The Department of Political Science Stockholm University. See introductory discussion in Chapter 1. 4 Sameh Naguib (2011) The Egyptian Revolution. A political analysis and eyewitness account. Bookmarks, U.K.

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and pro-poor policies which were used to win the election and which were then implemented afterwards. Its policies came to challenge many elements of the old elite order, although this was not Taksin s conscious aim at all. This government was eventually overthrown by a royalist coup d tat in 2006, amid middle-class right-wing anti-government protests. The same superficial analysis which pins the blame for the Thai crisis on Taksin, also claims that the Red Shirt pro-democracy movement, which began life in 2008, was just a puppet movement manipulated by Taksin . The nature of the Red Shirts is much more complicated than this. In the period after 2007, when the Military and the courts continued to frustrate the democratic process, the Red Shirts began to evolve under the leadership of three ex-TRT politicians who had run a television programme called Truth Today . Mass meetings of ordinary people, numbering hundreds of thousands, were held in sports stadiums in Bangkok. The movement was initially built by former TRT politicians, but it quickly evolved into a grass-roots movement with branches in most rural and urban communities throughout the country. Community radio stations, websites and educational meetings were set up in order to circumvent Government censorship and control of the media. The movement politicised and activated millions of citizens and many people became more radical than the initial leaders. There is a dialectical relationship between Taksin and the Red Shirts. His leadership provides encouragement and confidence to fight. Yet by 2009, the Red Shirts were selforganised in community groups and some were showing frustration with Taksin s lack of progressive leadership, especially over his insistence that they continue to be loyal to the Crown. A recent research paper in Thai by Pinkeaw Leuangaramsi, from Chiang Mai University, looks at the class composition and consciousness of Red Shirts in Chiang Mai province. She found that there was a high degree of self-organisation and her conclusions were that the Red Shirt movement was in no way just the arms and legs of TRT5. If the crisis was not all Taksin s fault , neither were the tensions in society, which eventually led to the 2006 coup d tat, a dispute between anti-Monarchy free-market globalised capital, represented by TRT, and conservative national capital under the leadership of the Palace, as argued by some6. The reality is that the military junta of 2006 and the Military-installed Democrat Party Government of Abhisit Vejjajiva were extreme supporters of free-market neoliberalism, while Taksin s TRT Government used a mixture of neoliberalism and State-led Keynesian economics. Taksin s management of the Thai economy was also bringing about a recovery from the 1996 crisis, which benefitted most large business groups, including the royal Crown Property Bureau and the globalised royal Siam Commercial Bank. It is necessary to stress that economic liberalisation in Thailand has occurred in stages ever since the switch to laissez-faire policies under the military dictatorship of Field Marshall Sarit Tanarat in the early 1960s. Thai economic bureaucrats since then have always worked closely with the World Bank

)"

" Pinkeaw

Leuangaramsi (2011) The Development of Consciousness and Political Activity of Red Shirts in Chiang Mai Province. http://www.prachatham.com/detail.htm?code=i1_05092011_01 (Posted 5/9/2011). 6 See Sren Ivarsson and Lotte Isager, Eds (2010) Saying the Unsayable. Monarchy and Democracy in Thailand. Nias Press, Copenhagen.

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and IMF7. Further important steps to economic liberalisation took place in the early 1990s, especially under the military installed Anan Punyarachun Government, which deregulated many aspects of banking and finance. The laissez-faire policies of successive Thai governments can be seen by the unplanned and chaotic nature of the traffic system in Bangkok and the inadequate public transport network8. It is interesting to note that Taksin s TRT Government was planning large scale investment in a mass transit system just before the 2006 coup d tat. Mega-Projects such as this were often criticised by both neoliberals and NGOs which were opposed to large-scale State spending. Another aspect of laissez-faire policies of successive governments is the poorly developed welfare and benefits system. Taksin s TRT Government made an important step towards improving this situation by introducing the first ever universal health care scheme which charged a fixed fee of 30 baht for each hospital visit. After the 2006 coup d tat junta health officials started to talk about the need for a means-tested co-payments system9. Today, after the 2011 election victory of the Peua Thai Party, which is a decedent of TRT, the Government s rice price guarantee scheme has been attacked by the neoliberal academics Ammar Siamwala and Wirote Na Ranong from the Thailand Development Research Institute (TDRI). These free-market economists hate any use of State spending to improve the lives of the poor or ordinary citizens. They argue against State intervention against the free-market and Ammar is opposed to a Welfare State. But they stay quiet when Military installed governments push up State spending on the Military and the Palace. This is a good example of how the royalist conservatives have always been the true neoliberals in Thailand. It is quite right that the new Yingluk Government guarantees the price of rice for the peasantry, even middle-income farmers. The Government should also raise the minimum wage beyond 300 baht per day and start to build a Welfare State. It is necessary to buck the market in order to have stability and economic justice. Drastic new measures will be needed to bring about a recovery in peoples lives after the floods. The Thai 1996 economic crisis and the present 2008 World crisis were both caused by the anarchy of the market and required State intervention to save the banking systems. The Thai Government should sell the rice it has bought at a guaranteed price to the population at a reduced price and even consider exporting cheap rice to poor countries. The money for such State subsidies should come from taxing the rich and drastically cutting the military budget. Taking the media out of the hands of the Military and placing it under democratic State ownership would also transfer millions from the pockets of the blood-stained generals into Government funds. This is unlikely to happen unless the Government starts to challenge the extra-Constitutional power of the Military. The fact that the 11 person National Committee for Broadcasting, Television and Communications , elected by the half military-appointed Senate in early September 2011, was comprised of 5 military officers does not bode well.

Kevin Hewison (2003) Crafting a new social contract: Domestic capitalist responses to the challenge of neoliberalism. In Ji Giles Ungpakorn (ed.) Radicalising Thailand: new political perspectives. Institute of Asian Studies, Chulalongkorn University. 8 Walden Bello, Shea Cunningham and Li Kneng Poh (1998) A Siamese Tragedy: Development and Disintegration in Modern Thailand. Zed Books. 9 Giles Ji Ungpakorn (2007) A Coup for the Rich. WD Press. P. 17.

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So returning to Hansson s first question, the Thai experience is that military installed regimes have been the ones which pushed through greater free-market policies, while democratically elected governments, especially the TRT government in 2001, had to consider the wishes and interests of the electorate, not just the rich corporations. This is why the conservative academics contemptuously referred to Taksin s TRT government as populist as if it were a dirty word. The politics of growth, with economic liberalisation as a central feature, reinforces and is reinforced by authoritarianism in Thailand. However, this does not mean that the Red Shirts, who came out to fight for Democracy, were consciously fighting against the neoliberalism. Taksin and TRT were not opposed to neoliberalism either. But they also believed that the State had an important role to play. The lack of mass Red Shirt consciousness about neoliberalism is because such a consciousness requires the organised politics of the Left which talks about markets versus the State . In the past, the Maoist Communist Party of Thailand (CPT) certainly never raised such an issue, preferring to concentrate on the fight against imperialism and feudalism by entering into alliances with progressive capitalists. In addition to this, the NGO movement, and the new generation of academics, that grew up following the collapse of the CPT, tended to accept the free-market. Those that did not, were drawn towards narrow nationalist economics. These nationalists opposed TRT and supported the coup d tat and would therefore have had little influence on the Red Shirts anyway. A recent Facebook posting by Red Shirt leader Tida Tawornset10 shows that Tida believes that market forces can somehow democratise the media which is controlled by authoritarian institutions such as the Military. Many people had illusions in the so-called democratising nature of the market when the private TV channel ITV was set up in the early 1990s. Those illusions soon evaporated when the true nature of corporate control of the media was revealed. In the 1970s Tida was a member of the CPT. Tida also believes that the Thai crisis is a conflict between Old Capital and New Capital . This is a modern update of the original CPT analysis that the first stage of Thai revolution would be a struggle between semi-feudal forces and progressive capitalists. The Thai political crisis was certainly caused by tensions and growing contradictions between old and new in Thai society, but in order to really understand the crisis we have to look at Thai social history and the cyclic struggles between classes which have taken place since the 1970s. We have to look at the situation in the context of economic crisis and global political economy. We also have to look at the huge changes in society that have taken place, while the conservative elites have remained unchanged in their structures of power and outlook for over 30 years, since the last settlement after the collapse of the CPT. This kind of situation involves political, social and economic tensions at all levels of society, not just among the elites. The Red Shirts may not have been consciously fighting against neoliberalism but they were certainly struggling against the effects of neoliberal policies over the last three to four decades.

Cycles of class struggle

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Posted on 6th September 2011.

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Giles Ji Ungpakorn 2011

It is necessary to look at the recent history of Thailand in order to place the present crisis in its context. This is because no society stays the same, in a permanent state, despite what the elites try to claim. A good example is the attitude to the Monarchy, which has constantly changed11. The Monarchy was very unpopular among significant sections of the population in the 1930s, the mid 1970s and today it is unpopular again. In the early 1990s the monarchists had managed to create hegemony in society, helped by the defeat of the left-wing opposition and the manic promotion of the royals by the establishment. At other times, for example in the 1950s and towards the end of the nineteenth century, most of the population was merely indifferent to the Monarchy. Despite attempts by the right-wing academic followers of Fred Riggs12 to paint a picture of Thai society without class struggle, where the elites ruled over a child-like population, disinterested in politics, the reality has been very different. Like all classes throughout the world who are ruled over and exploited by powerful elites, Thai peasants and workers have either directly confronted their oppressors or have sought avoidance tactics and small-scale hidden fights13 in order to lessen the burden of exploitation. Strikes and demonstrations by trade unions and peasant movements have occurred on a regular basis during the twentieth century and large scale popular uprisings against dictatorial rulers have occurred in the 1970s, 1990s and in the present crisis. Sometimes these struggles have been mainly independent struggles by the oppressed classes. For example, the 1970s uprising against the military dictatorship, which was accompanied by economic strikes and protests, and then followed by a guerrilla war led by the CPT. At other times, sections of the ruling class have built strategic alliances with the oppressed in a struggle against their elite rivals. The alliance between the peasantry and King Rama 5th in the bourgeois revolution from above of the 1870s14, the alliance between the new State bureaucrats and the workers and peasants in the 1932 revolution, or the alliance between Taksin s TRT and the Red Shirts are good examples. But we should not assume that in such alliances the elite factions totally control the movement. Instead we should see these events as two-dimensional forms of class struggle, with intra- and inter- class antagonisms occurring simultaneously, along with elements of independence and dependence. This explains why the Yingluk Government today is trying to demobilise the Red Shirts. Objective factors, such as the encroachment of the Western imperialist powers and the capitalist market set the scene for the bourgeois revolution from above in the latter half of the nineteenth century. The old Sakdina State was in serious contradiction with the new economic conditions and the reality of geo-politics. The modernisation which then resulted from the bourgeois revolution, created new classes, especially the civilian and military bureaucracy, the free peasantry and it also expanded the business

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Giles Ji Ungpakorn (2010) Thailand s Crisis and the Fight for Democracy. WD Press, U.K. Chapter 3. Fred Riggs (1966) Thailand. The modernisation of a Bureaucratic Polity. East West Press. USA. David Morell & Chai-anan Samudavanija (1981) Political conflict in Thailand: reform, reaction and revolution. Oelgeschlager, Gunn & Hain. David Wilson (1962) Politics in Thailand. Cornell University Press. John Girling (1981) Thailand. Society and politics. Cornell University Press, USA. 13 James C. Scott (1985) Weapons of the weak: everyday forms of peasant resistance. Yale University Press. 14 Giles Ji Ungpakorn (2010) already quoted, P.112.
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class. These classes began to confront the State run by the Absolute Monarchy15. The confrontation mixed with the discontent among workers and peasants, resulting from the world economic crisis, and gave birth to the 1932 revolution. The 1970s upheavals were a result of the rapid growth in the working class, and especially the growth of the student population, which became impatient with the military dictatorship that tried to keep the low-waged conservative society unchanged. The Cold War and the 1968 revolts around the world fed into this domestic contradiction. The result was a decade of mass popular uprisings and a civil war between the CPT and the Thai State. The last major political settlement before the present crisis, which determined the nature of the ruling elites and their relationship with the rest of society, occurred in the early 1980s after the collapse of the CPT16. It was lubricated by the economic boom in East Asia which started in this period and ended in the crisis of 1997. This boom helped to damp down class antagonisms. Because these cycles of struggle all included elements of discontent by workers, peasants and some sections of the urban middle class, there have always been demands which challenge the interests of the elites present in each case. The 1932 revolution saw Pridi Panomyong s manifesto or blue print for a new Thai economy. This proposed a form of Welfare State. The uprisings in the 1970s saw demands for socialism and the abolition of capitalism17. On both these occasions the conservative elites hit back with coup d tats and violent repression. The present crisis saw the conservative elites staging a coup d tat in 2006 in response to popular basic welfare and pro-poor policies by the TRT Government. Of course, due to the complex nature of these disputes and the various classes involved, demands which serve the interests of the poor and oppressed were never the only demands which were present. Those sections of the elites which were challenging the old order or their rivals also had their own agendas. The dispute between Taksin and his opponents was neither automatic nor inevitable. In the early years of the Government, he received wide spread support from all section of the elite. What gradually turned the conservatives against him was their fear that they would lose their privileges in the face of Taksin s widespread modernisation programme and his overwhelming electoral support. Neither Taksin and his TRT Party, nor the conservative royalists, who organised and supported the 2006 coup d tat, intended their dispute to turn into a class conflict involving the poor. Taksin had no real role in creating the Red Shirts and certainly did not wish to lead a mass pro-democracy movement which would start to question the entire elite structure, including the Monarchy. Instead, it is the arrogant attitude of the conservative royalists, plus the self-organisation of millions of Red Shirts at grass roots level, which has transformed the elite dispute into a class conflict involving the poor.

15 16

Kullada Kesboonchoo Mead (2004) The Rise and Decline of Thai Absolutism. RoutledgeCurzon. Giles Ji Ungpakorn (2010) already quoted, Chapter 4. Giles Ji Ungpakorn (2006) The Impact of the Thai Sixties on the Peoples Movement today. Inter-Asia Cultural Studies: 7(4) December 2006, 570-588. Giles Ji Ungpakorn (2001) The political economy of class struggle in modern Thailand. Historical Materialism 8, Summer 2001, 153-183. 17 Despite the Stalinist-Maoist distortions of these concepts.

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The 1997 economic crisis in a global context

The World economy had been facing declining GDP growth and a general trend towards declining rates of profits since the end of the long post-war boom in the early 1970s. In the industrialised world there were two economic crises in the 1970s, another in the 1980s and one in the early 1990s. After each recession there were recoveries, but they were weak and could not restore growth and rates of profits to the levels seen in the early 1970s. The experiences around the globe were uneven, with some areas finding specialist niches to create temporary spurts of growth. In the early 1990s the economies of a handful of East Asian countries, including Thailand, appeared to be booming, with what some called miracle growth . Yet this could only occur because foreign and domestic investment was channelled into export manufacturing, while holding down wages. Soon this blind competition resulted in various East Asian economies all producing the same kind of exports for the same markets. Because the Western importing markets could not absorb this, the result was overproduction and falling profits18. In Thailand, the resulting decline in export profits, which may also have been caused by increased labour militancy and upward pressure on wages, led to frantic investment in property, causing a bubble economy, which burst in 199719. The bubble resulted in the first place because of declining profits in export manufacturing, not purely because of previous financial de-regulation or mismanagement. Economic bubbles are characteristic of pre-crisis situations in capitalism, including the 2008 world economic crisis which is still with us today. In Thailand during the late 1990s, because wages had been historically held down for so long, a switch to manufacturing for the Thai domestic market, to compensate for falling exports, was not possible in the short term. Investors turned to speculation in property instead. The 2008 sub-prime bubble in the United States was a way of stimulating the economy by encouraging unsustainable loans to the poor, while holding down wages. When the Thai crisis broke in 1997 and the Thai financial system s complete insolvency was exposed, the middle-classes and top business people became frenzied. The New Aspirations Party coalition Government, headed by the bumbling ex-general Chawalit Yongjaiyut, was seen as incompetent to deal with the pressing need to safe-guard the middle-class savings and investments in the now defunct banks and financial institutions. These savings and investments had been placed with the expectations of attracting large rates of return during the financial bubble. Now they were in danger of disappearing. All accounts were temporarily frozen. Despite the fact that the Chawalit Government had virtually nationalised these financial institutions, paving the way to protecting welloff savers, the Democrat Party was seen as a safer pair of hands and the Chawalit Government was pushed out by a middle-class protest. The new Democrat Party Government pursued a classic neoliberal agenda in line with IMF policy. The Government used massive amounts of public funds, raised by taxing the poor20, to prop up the banks and finance companies in order to save the rich. They turned their backs on the general
18

Chris Harman (2009) Zombie Capitalism. Global crisis and the relevance of Marx. Bookmarks, London. P. 242 Jim Glassman(2003) Interpreting the economic crisis in Thailand: Lessons learned and lessons obscured. In Ji Giles Ungpakorn (ed.) Radicalising Thailand: new political perspectives. Institute of Asian Studies, Chulalongkorn University. 20 In Thailand the poor pay a larger proportion of their income than the rich in indirect taxes.
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population. The unemployed were told to go back to their villages and depend on their already poor relatives. Those in work were expected to take pay cuts and the level of V.A.T., the main regressive tax on the poor, was raised. Despite media headlines about middle class business people having to sell noodles on the streets, according to World Bank figures, more than a million extra workers and peasants fell below the poverty line, which was set at $US 1 per day21. The rural northeast was particularly hit hard and the quality of employment fell dramatically in a country with no Welfare State, free health care or unemployment benefits. Since 2010 many governments in Western Europe have been using similar neoliberal policies to cut public spending and jobs in order to make the poor pay for propping up the failing banks after the sub-prime bubble. Today we hear the mainstream media repeating lies about over-paid lazy Greeks who caused the Euro crisis. Back in 1997 the Thai King chipped in with his Sufficiency Economy ideology, which argued that the poor needed to learn to be self-sufficient and not to spend too much. The main message of this reactionary ideology was that the poor could only blame themselves for their troubles and that the answer was not any re-distribution of wealth or the building of economic and social equality. According to Forbes magazine, the Thai King is the richest man in Thailand and the richest monarch in the world. Naturally, the extreme neoliberals see the benefits of quoting the Sufficiency Economy in support of their laissez-faire economic beliefs. Apart from the post-crisis 1997 Democrat Party Government, others who enthusiastically supported the Sufficiency Economy ideology included the 2006 military junta and its appointed government22, the NGOs, and right-wing academics like Chris Baker and Peter Warr23. The Thai elites had always behaved as though the poor were just there to be taxed and exploited and they assumed that they could carry on doing so. They had also ignored the crying need to develop Thailand s chaotic transport and communications infrastructure and to improve health care and education for the majority. Taksin and TRT saw these tasks as central to improving the efficiency of the economy from the point of view of the modernising section of the capitalist class. Taksin and TRT responded to the 1997 economic crisis with a modernisation programme which involved real development policies aimed at improving the lives of the poor who make up the majority of the population. He called this a dual track policy. Taksin and TRT advocated neoliberalism and free market policies at the national level in order to make Thai businesses able to compete on a global stage. For example, he promoted privatisation of State Enterprises. But at the same time, Taksin and TRT used grass-roots Keynesianism to pump State funds into stimulating the village level economy and into building up national universal health care and education schemes. The political slogans which TRT used to capture the imagination of the public in the 2001 general election, the first after the economic crisis, were: We will help everyone, not just the rich and New thinking, new acting . Taksin was unwittingly laying the ground for a confrontation between his Government, backed up by the electorate, and the old elite political superstructure.

21

Kevin Hewison (2003) already quoted. Giles Ji Ungpakorn (2007) already quoted. 23 Peter Warr (2007)The Economics of Enough:Thailand s Sufficiency Economy Debate. Paper presented at a seminar at the National Thai Studies Centre, National University, Canberra, Australia, 1 June, 2007. Chris Baker helped to write the 2007 UNDP Human Development Report on Thailand which stressed the Sufficiency Economy.
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Kevin Hewsion has argued that Taksin s initial aim in introducing pro-poor policies was to buy social peace in post crisis Thailand24. This partly explains why the majority of the business class backed Taksin in the early days. The economy recovered from the crisis. But five years after his first election victory in 2001, when that social peace started to unravel with the mass protests led by the rightwing Peoples Alliance for Democracy (PAD), Taksin s business supporters dropped away. They were unhappy that he seemed to have monopolised the rich business pickings and excluded many of them.

Taksin s modernisation programme also involved such things as undermining local political mafia, illegal activities like gambling, and the monopoly of the black market in the South by the armed forces. Taksin tried to upgrade the role of the police in providing Government security in the South. His Government also cut the Military budget. The power of Taksin s political machine came from the fact that TRT could win the hearts and minds of the electorate through genuine pro-poor policies. This political power was thus based upon the democratic process and backed up by Taksin s wealth as a successful businessman. He used this power to try to consolidate the Prime Minister s control over the Army and the Bureaucracy. Despite cries of nepotism from some people, his attempt to control the Army and the Bureaucracy, as an elected Prime Minister, were quite legitimate in democratic terms. Local political bosses found that their use of gangsters, illegal activities and money politics was being undercut by TRT s direct links to the electorate through real policies. Many politicians faced the choice of either joining TRT or sinking into electoral oblivion. Most of these new policies created enemies among the old-style elites. However, the Government also waged a vicious war against those it claimed to be small time drug dealers. Over 3000 people were killed without trials in this drugs war and gross human rights abuses also took place in the Muslim Malay South, especially in 2004. In the bad old days, mainstream parties, including the Democrats, had not relied on any policies to win votes. Taksin was threatening the old networks of money politics, which had resulted in weak political parties, governing the country in corrupt and unstable coalition governments. Taksin upset the apple cart by proving that the electorate were responsive to genuine pro-poor policies. Previously, politicians and the elites had just assumed that they could enrich themselves while ignoring the majority of citizens. Governments in the past had just muddled along , making sure that they maintained the self-interests of the elites. Workers and farmers were simply regarded as the ignorant poor . Taksin also saw the poor as stakeholders in society and partners in development, while the conservatives saw the poor as either people to be exploited or a burden on society. Taksin was not a socialist. Nor was he a principled democrat or advocate of human rights. His vision was to build a modernised society where the State and Big Business could incorporate the majority of the population in development. He looked to countries like Singapore for inspiration. Taksin s model was not incompatible with being a royalist and maintaining the Monarchy. It just meant that the Monarchy would be used to protect and legitimise a modern, class divided, status quo.

24

Kevin Hewison (2003) already quoted.

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Throughout the last six decades, King Pumipon has sat on the throne, surrounded by myths and grovelling subjects and protected by the Military and the draconian lse majest law. However, the King has shown no serious leadership, moral courage, responsibility or strength of character. On one level he is a pawn of the Military and the other elites, always going with the flow and making inscrutable speeches which can be interpreted by those same elites in order to fit their own agendas. He is used by the Military in order to provide them with legitimacy for all that they do, including the staging of coup d tats and the shooting of unarmed pro-democracy demonstrators on at least 4 occasions. But he also greatly benefits in economic terms and prestige from his position as King. He is a multi-billionaire, richer than any European monarch25. This is why the present crisis did not start in the form of a conflict between Taksin, as an antiMonarchy free-market globalised capitalist, and conservative national capital under the leadership of the Palace. It was more like a conflict between the Military and their conservative elite allies against Taksin s political machine. This dispute then became expanded into an all-out class-related conflict, which split the entire nation into two camps, when the Red Shirts were formed. Of course, the sense of injustice and anger among Red Shirts and Peua Thai voters was not simply about economic crisis or poverty in a mechanical way. The 1997 crisis ignited some angry out bursts by workers, some of whom set fire to their factory. But in the main the crisis cause fear mixed with discontent, which in the short term dampened down overt struggle. But when Taksin s TRT offered new policies to raise standards of living for the poor, people embraced these policies with positive expectations. When the TRT government actually delivered on these policies after the election, people became firm supporters of the party. And when the Army, the elites and the middle-class conspired to overthrow this government through the 2006 coup d tat and various judicial coups, the majority of the population, especially the poor, became extremely angry. Apart from economic inequality there is also an important social and political dimension to the present crisis which arises from the unchanged political superstructure presiding over a much changed society.

Social changes brought about by economic growth combined with inequality

Economic growth in any economy does improve most peoples lives, but the degree to which it improves their lives significantly depends on the level of freedom and democracy and the power of social movements to push for equality of distribution. In 1954 88% of the working population were involved in agriculture26. By 2002, at the beginning of the TRT Government, this figure had declined to 37%, with 63% in industry and services27. Even those people classified as working in agriculture were in fact involved in occupational multiplicity ,

25

Giles Ji Ungpakorn (2011) Lse Majest, the Monarchy, and the Military in Thailand. Paper given to Pax et Bellum, Department of Peace and Conflict Research, University of Uppsala, 29th April 2011. Available at http://redthaisocialist.com/ See also Giles Ji Ungpakorn (2010) already quoted. Chapter 3. 26 James C. Ingram (1971) Economic Change in Thailand 1850-1970. Stanford University Press. P. 236 27 Thailand National Statistical Office.

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mixing farm jobs with off-farm jobs 28. Throughout the decades since the 1950s the decline in the proportion of GDP arising from agriculture was more rapid than the decline in the number people working in this sector, which indicates that the productivity of agriculture was losing out to other economic sectors and hence the viability of seeking a livelihood as a small-scale peasant was becoming untenable. Andrew Walker in a recent paper suggests that most of the rural agricultural population are now middle-income peasants and that these people form an important component of the Red Shirt movement29. The division between rural and urban lives is also not as clear cut as some would make out. Socalled rural areas are becoming more and more urban, rural does not totally equate with an agricultural occupation and rural and urban areas are very interdependent30. Economic inequality occurs in urban as well as rural areas. Moreover, those registered as living in rural areas are often permanently working and living in the cities31. This has implications for understanding the nature of the Red Shirt movement as being more than a movement with a rural base in the North and NorthEast. It is clear that there were large numbers of Red Shirts living and working in Bangkok and this could be seen by their participation in prolonged street demonstrations in that city in 2010. It can also be seen in the electoral support for Peua Thai Party in the 2011 election. The party won some seats in Bangkok and polled significant numbers of votes in constituencies where it did not win. TRT policies to stimulate rural jobs, roll-over existing debt and to create universal health care clearly benefitted rural people directly, but they also benefitted urban workers, who were already covered by a national insurance scheme. This is because these policies reduced the need for workers to subsidise their rural relatives. Although Thai women have always participated in work, with a very tiny handful ever having been house-wives , the change from agricultural work to industry and services has had a big impact on the lives of women, since work outside agriculture is not tied to the family and the home and women have become more economically independent and more self-confident32. This is an important factor which helps to explain the high participation of women in Thai grass-roots social movements, including the Red Shirts. In 1960 no more than 20% of the population attained lower secondary school qualifications, with men enjoying marginally better education than women33. By 1999 the Ministry of education reported that 84% of all 12-14 year olds were in lower secondary school. In the education system as a whole, girls or women were achieving marginally better than boys or men.

28

Andrew Walker (2008) The rural constitution and the everyday politics of elections in northern Thailand. Journal of Contemporary Asia, 38:1, 84 -105. 29 Andrew Walker (2011) The Political Culture of Thailand's Middle-income Peasants. Paper given at the Association for Asian Studies (AAS) joint conference with the International Convention of Asia Scholars (ICAS) in Honolulu, March 31 April 3, 2011. 30 Jonathan Rigg (2001) Southeast Asia. The human landscape of modernization and development. Routledge. 31 Giles Ji Ungpakorn (1999) Thailand: Class Struggle in an Era of Economic Crisis. Asia Monitor Resource Center, Hongkong & Workers Democracy Book Club, Bangkok. Chapter 5. 32 Mary Beth Mills (1999) Thai Women in the Global Labour Force. Rutgers University Press. Also Giles Ji Ungpakorn (1999) already quoted. Chapter 5. 33 J.C. Caldwell (1967) The Demographic Structure. In T. H. Silcock Thailand. Social and Economic Studies in Development. ANU Press. P 52

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People do not need to be educated at school or college in order to understand democracy, human rights or social justice34, as many of the conservative elites or Yellow Shirts continuously make out35, but education can increase self-confidence to get organised and stand up and fight. The proliferation of secondary education in Thailand can help to partly explain why the Red Shirt movement became the largest social movement in Thai history. Education and basic computer skills have also been useful for rank and file Red Shirts in a climate of severe Government censorship in order to access opposition websites, blogs and internet radio, as well as for communicating with each other via email, Facebook and Skype. But it is not implied here that the Red Shirt movement was some kind of Twitter phenomenon as some over-enthusiastic commentators have tried to imply for the Arab Spring36. There is no question that the Thai economy has experienced real economic growth. In 1960 GDP per capita was $100. By 1996 this had risen to $3000 and in 2008 it was $400037. Yet this growth was not distributed evenly. Real wage growth between the end of the Second World War and 1975 was minimal and did not reflect rises in labour productivity38. In the 1975 the Gini coefficient for Thailand stood at 0.4339 but in 2009 this had increased to 0.54, indicating growing inequality. This compares with a Gini Coefficient of 0.42 for China and 0.37 for India40. In 2009 the share of national income owned by the top 20% was 59% while the share of the bottom 20% was only 3.9%. Even the middle 20% owned only 11.4% 41. The sense of economic injustice among Red Shirts does not arise from absolute poverty. It is more about most people not gaining from the benefits of economic growth as much as the top elites. TRT s announcement that they believed that the poor were not a burden but stake-holders in development appealed to the majority of people. Therefore the military coup d tat in 2006, and various actions by the conservative elites to exclude TRT politicians from office, caused a real sense of anger. This anger was fuelled by a general discontent with the hierarchical and conservative nature of society.

Increasing social and political tensions

Thai society has long been intensely hierarchical, with Pu-noi having to grovel and crawl to Puyai , and an atmosphere at total odds with the idea of democratic citizenship . All this was reinforced through the ideology of the Monarchy, promoted by the elites, especially the Military. The compulsory respect for the Monarchy includes the enforced belief in the royals as some kind of deity, the use of complex royal language and the halting of all traffic for royal cavalcades to pass
34

For an anthropological account of the political thinking of villagers in the north, see Andrew Walker (2008) already quoted. 35 Giles Ji Ungpakorn (2010) already quoted. P 31,42,76. Giles Ji Ungpakorn (2007) already quoted. P 20. 36 For a realistic analysis of the comparative importance of social media, see Jonny Jones (2011) Social media and social movements. International Socialism Journal 130, Spring 2011, 75-94. Jodi Dean (2009) Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies. Communicative Capitalism and Left Politics. Duke University Press. 37 World Bank data at current US$ rates. 38 Jim Glassman (2003) already quoted. 39 Jonathan Rigg (2001) already quoted. 40 The Economist 20 July 2011 and World Bank. 41 Wolfram Mathematica 2011.

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through the choked streets of Bangkok. Emergency ambulances do not enjoy the same privileges . A recent leaked cable from the U.S. Embassy in Bangkok exposed the fact that even senior members of the Thai elite think that the Crown Prince s practice of ordering police to close all upstairs windows along his travel route is causing resentment42. While society remains calm and there is no real active opposition to prevailing ideas, like in the period after the collapse of the CPT, the general population are prepared to accept the idea of loving the Monarchy. Many come to sincerely hold royalist views and do not challenge the various absurdities surrounding the Palace. This was also a period of economic boom where everyone expected things to get better. But when things dramatically change in society, as they have in recent years, all the absurdities about the royal myths, the royal scandals and the blatant inequalities surrounding the Monarchy have an opposite effect. They cause deep resentment and ridicule, especially when the Military overthrew a popular elected government in the name of the King, or when the Queen openly sided with the supporters of the dictatorship, and more than anything, when the King was exposed as not caring one little bit if the Military and the Democrat Party gunned down nearly 90 pro-democracy civilians. Any astute political analyst could have predicted this change in attitude towards the Monarchy, but the conservative Thai elites were so self-confident in their belief that the general population were stupid and uneducated, that they thought that they could achieve loyalty by merely quoting the King, despite all their actions. In 2009 thousands of Red Shirts took part in a petition to the King, calling for an amnesty for Taksin. Many Red Shirts already had mixed feelings about petitioning the King. But by September 2010, after the bloody massacre of nearly 90 Red Shirt civilians by the Abhisit government and the Military, Red Shirts were openly shouting that the iguana had ordered the shooting. This referred directly to the King. Calling someone an iguana is one of the worst insults in the Thai language, short of insulting someone s mother. It is doubtful if King Pumipon did in fact order the shooting. But when people who are encouraged to believe that the King is a deity, responsible for all that is good in Thai society , turn against the Monarchy, they can easily believe that the King is now the root of all evil . Many now even believe that he ordered the devastating floods. The hierarchical of Pu-yai and Pu-noi in Thai society is not just about the royal family. The elites get away with any illegal and immoral activity. Ordinary folk are expected to lower their heads in the presence of their betters . Domestic servants must crawl to their masters and mistresses and work all hours of the day. This is reinforced by the behaviour of a weak bureaucracy, which terrorises and lives parasitically off the majority of the population, while allowing the upper classes to break all rules and regulations. It is reinforced by the use of language, with different personal pronouns and vocabulary used to indicate one s place in the social hierarchy. Women of all ages are encouraged to refer to themselves as Nu (little mouse), which is a term also used for small children. One interesting new development is the recent use, in some engineering trade union meetings, of the personal pronoun Tan to refer to all members. It roughly means excellency . Another is the sarcastic use of the term Prai (slave) by Red Shirts to describe themselves during the 2010 mass

42

U.S. Embassy cable, Monday, 25 January 2010, guardian.co.uk, 1 5 December 2010.

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protests. It was not a term used to invoke sympathy, but a badge of honour in an unequal world, giving the finger to the elites. These are signs of a society in revolt against the old order. Not only does the general population feel a lack of social equality, they are also right in feeling that those who occupy positions of wealth and power have only contempt for them. This contempt has been articulated by middle-class royalist Yellow Shirts who accuse ordinary people, especially those from the North and North-East of being stupid 43. The 2006 military coup d tat, where the coup leader accused most Thais of not understanding democracy and the close association between the actions of the Army and the Democrat Party with the ideology of the Monarchy, merely serve to undermine any respect for the Monarchy by showing people that the Monarchy has little respect or regard for the majority of the population as well. In political terms, after the defeat of the left-wing section of the 1932 revolutionary movement against the absolute monarchy, and the later defeat of the Communist Party in the 1980s, the mass of the population had been forcibly excluded from any real participation in politics, either by the use of the gun or the use of money politics in elections. The natural right of the Military, business and political elites and the Privy Council to hold the reins of power was assumed. This was not unchallenged. Strikes and demonstrations have been a constant feature of the Thai political landscape. A mass uprising overthrew a military dictatorship in 1992, but the resulting settlement and new Constitution, drawn up in 1997, still allowed the elites a monopoly of power, although with some additional cosmetic representation from NGOs. All these social and political factors, along with the changes which resulted from economic growth over decades, were the fuel which powered the Red Shirt struggles. But without a spark to ignite the struggles, they might have remained as hidden tensions within society. The spark was the 2006 coup d tat, and all that followed. Apart from the successive judicial coups which destroyed democracy and resulted in the Military-installed Democrat Party government of 2008, blatant double standards in the justice system, where royalist Yellow Shirts behaved with impunity, only increased the anger among Red Shirts. Added to this was the bare-faced lying by government ministers and army generals about democracy, censorship, lse majest and the Red Shirts, especially the lies told by Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva. Abhisit is clearly an upper-class Thai, a graduate from Eton and Oxford, and his blatant lying showed that he arrogantly did not give a fig about the fact that the general population knew that he was lying. He did not feel that he was ever accountable to them. There is also deep-seated resentment felt by millions of Red Shirts towards what they perceive as the middle class and the feeling is mutual. Ordinary Red Shirts have experienced the way the middle class, in their royalist yellow shirts, came out to support the semi-fascist Peoples Alliance for Democracy (PAD), which called for and supported the 2006 coup d tat and used violence with impunity to take over Government House and the international airports. Red Shirts are resentful of the middle class who vote on mass for the Democrat Party in quite a few Bangkok constituencies. They are resentful of their middle class workplace bosses, the right-wing academics who supported the dictatorship and even the middle class NGO leaders who backed the PAD. The Thai middle class has vacillated on the issue of democracy. It supported struggles for democracy in 1973 and 1992, but supported bloody reaction in 1976 and 2010.
43

Giles Ji Ungpakorn (2007 and 2010) already quoted. Recently a royalist wrote an article insulting the intelligence of the Prime Minister because it was claimed that she was a stupid northern woman .

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There is clearly a crisis of legitimacy of the conservative ruling class, in economic, social and political terms, coinciding with an increase in confidence and organisation of the Red Shirt social movement. This is the result of economic growth alongside inequality and without genuine participatory democracy and social justice. But the revolt from below has not expressed clear independent class interests. The Red Shirts are a social movement made up of the workers, middle-income peasants and small business people, with most of the top leaders being middle class politicians. In modern society, only social movements which are led by the working class can express clear independent class demands of the poor and oppressed, together with the economic power needed to achieve these goals.

The working class

The Red Shirt-backed Peua Thai Party, which won the elections in July 2011, made a clear promise to increase the daily minimum wage to 300 baht. This was clearly aimed at winning over industrial and low paid service workers and also designed to help stimulate domestic demand. Never the less, the class composition of the Red Shirt movement44, and its original leaders who were TRT politicians, meant that no real attempts were ever made to organise among the working class. The working class was also too weak, in political terms, to force its way onto the stage of Red Shirt mass protests. The inability to organise strikes in support of the Red Shirt demands in 2010 was a serious weakness which helped the regime to violently crush the street protests. In contrast, the labour movement strikes in Egypt in early 2011 were a significant factor in the fall of Mubarak. For years activists of the Egyptian Left had worked underground among workers and they were present in the great strike wave of 200645. This strike wave raised the issue of the need to build new unions, independent of the State, and to start to oppose the authoritarian State politically. In post-Mubarak Egypt the newly established independent trade unions have formed a Democratic Workers and Peasants Party. The new independent unions have also declared that it is a fundamental principle of independent unions to oppose funding from outside bodies or NGOs. In contrast, many Thai unions receive funding from foreign NGOs and no such political party of the trade union movement has been proposed. The lack of a clear pro-democracy political current within the Thai unions is a fundamental weakness in the Red Shirt struggle for participatory democracy and social justice. In 2007 Thai trade union membership stood at 3.5% of the workforce. However, such an average figure can be misleading. Most State Enterprises and large factories in the private sector are fully unionised or at least dominated by unions. This includes some offices, especially the banks. Apart from this, unionised workers are mainly concentrated in Bangkok and the surrounding provinces of the Central region and the Eastern industrial Seaboard. Such concentrations of working class organisations allow for more influence than would be supposed from just looking at the national

44 45

See Pinkeaw Leuangaramsi (2011) already quoted. Joel Beinin (2009) Workers struggles under socialism and neoliberalism. In: Rabab El-Mahdi & Philip Marfleet (eds) Egypt. The Moment of Change. Zed Books, London & New York.

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figures for unionisation. Strikes occur on a regular basis and trade union membership has expanded in manufacturing on the Eastern Seaboard, especially in auto-parts and auto assembly factories. In Thailand, as in other countries, trade union bureaucrats enjoy a better standard of living than their members. However, networks of unofficial rank and file activists, independent of top leaders, exist in Area Groups . Even official groupings, such as the Federation of Textile, Garment and Leather Workers Unions, are able to bring together different unions at rank and file level, independent of the various bureaucratised peak bodies and congresses. These area groupings are considerably more democratic than the peak bodies. The entire committee of the group is usually elected every year and made up of men and women lay-representatives covering different workplaces and industries. These rank and file union groupings are a way in which "enterprise unions" can build solidarity with one another across workplace boundaries. Trade unions and strikes have existed in Thailand for many years, but it is ideological factors which have held back the working class. This is due to a number of factors. Firstly, the CPT, which originally organised urban workers in the 1940s and 1950s, took a Maoist turn away from the working class, towards the peasantry, in the 1960s. For this reason there has been a lack of left-wing activists willing to agitate among workers for the past 30 years. Unlike South Korea, where student activists had a long tradition of going to work in urban settings with the aim of strengthening trade unions, Thai student activists headed for the countryside after graduation. After the collapse of the CPT we can see the influence of NGOs, using funds from U.S. and German foundations, and more recently the arrival of international bureaucratic union federations. This is the second main factor which accounts for the ideological weakness of the Thai labour movement. Labour-NGOs run by Thais receive funds from international foundations such as The American Center For International Labor Solidarity or the Solidarity Center , funded by the AFL-CIO and The Friedrich Ebert Stiftung , funded by the German Social Democrat Party (SPD). In recent years highly bureaucratised international unions have organised recruitment drives in some Thai workplaces. The aim is to increase membership of these international bodies, not to increase the combative and political nature of Thai unions. These NGOs and international unions have a number of commonly held beliefs. They actively support trade unions and workers struggles, as long as they stay within the law. Thai labour law stipulates that trade unions must remain non-political and most NGOs are totally opposed to trade unionists taking up socialist politics or forming political parties. Thai labour law also makes it hard to carry out strikes. A pamphlet on trade unions , issued in Thai, by the Solidarity Center, manages to completely avoid mentioning strike action or how to organise strikes. The Friedrich Ebert Stiftung promotes seminars on Third Way Social Democratic acceptance of the free-market. Thus the main thrust of NGO and international union ideology is to try to promote good industrial relations and professional trade unions, which concentrate only on economic issues. Some NGOs also support tripartite committees of unions, bosses and government officials. NGO activists are known as Pi-lieng (Nannies). These nannies , help child-like workers to organise unions, to know their rights under the labour laws and to conduct themselves properly in labour disputes. When a dispute arises at a workplace, various NGO nannies will be sent out to stay

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Thai Spring? with the workers mob scolded like children.

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Giles Ji Ungpakorn 2011 in their picket tents. On some occasions, more rebellious workers will be

While such NGO and international union activity has resulted in more trade unions being established, it also breeds worker dependency on outside funding and socialises union representatives into a life-style made up of seminars in luxury hotels and foreign trips to conferences. In the past, the State has also tried to intervene in trade unions by funding them directly or by using Security Service funds to control unions. More recently, political parties like TRT have also sponsored trade unionists. In the light of this, and in the light of the NGO ideological influence which shuns political parties or politics , many active trade unionists who wish to fight in a more politicised manner have turned to militant Syndicalism. Militant Syndicalism in the present day Thai context means engaging in the class struggle, supporting and organising strikes and being against cooperation with the State or the elites. These militants opposed the 2006 coup d tat and the PAD. The Rangsit Area Trade Union Group and the Red Workers Group for Democracy are good examples of this. But Syndicalists are also very anxious to protect their independence while being wary of all political parties or of forming political organisations. This means that Thai Syndicalists were wary of cooperating too closely with the Red Shirt movement. The ideological weakness of Thai unions and the lack of interest in the labour movement by most Red Shirts meant that there was a gulf between the Red Shirts and the labour movement. Despite this gulf, trade union activists from some unions in the public transport and electricity sectors and the private industrial sectors did attend the Red Shirt protests. However, they did not organise strikes against the dictatorship.

PAD influence in some unions The majority of the population, including the majority of the working class, voted for Taksin s TRT. For workers, the Universal Health Care Scheme did not affect them directly because they were already covered by Social Insurance. However, it benefitted all urban workers because their relatives and family members were now covered by TRT s health care scheme. This took an enormous burden off their shoulders. The village funds also benefitted their rural relatives. It is therefore reasonable to say that the majority of ordinary workers supported the Red Shirts. As already mentioned, the Red Shirt movement lacked a strategy for building among the trade unions. Instead, the Yellow Shirt PAD gained some influence in the trade union movement, although this was severely limited to sections of the State Enterprise workers and some sections of the trade unions from the Eastern Seaboard. These unions were influenced by retired railway union boss Somsak Kosaisuk, who was a PAD leader. The specific nature of sections of the labour movement who went in with PAD was as follows.
46

The word mob has become a commonly used term in Thai to describe mass pickets and street protests.

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1. They had personal connections with Somsak Kosaisuk and his allies in NGO-type organisations like Friends of the People (FOP). Somsak and his allies organised educational groups for these trade unionists, funded by outside bodies such as The Solidarity Center and The Friedrich Ebert Stiftung. But it was a top down form of education where people were not encouraged to question or debate with people like Somsak. Self-leadership and self-analysis were not encouraged. This is the only way that trade unionists could be drawn to support a conservative royalist agenda which had no practical benefits for workers. 2. There was a tendency for pro-PAD trade unionists to be full time union activists or NGOsponsored activists, distant from rank and file workers. If they were close to the rank and file, they would have felt pressure from Red Shirt ideas at grass roots levels because ordinary members benefitted from TRT policies. 3. The State Enterprise union mentality of putting more faith in talking to sympathetic management or elites, rather than organising and building a mass base drew some trade unionists towards the PAD. However, active support by groups such as the Electricity Generating Authority of Thailand Union for the PAD was generally confined to the leadership and did not involve great numbers of members. In most State Enterprise unions, support for the PAD was limited. There was a huge argument in the Thai Airways Union about supporting the PAD when some of the leaders wanted to organise a pro-PAD strike. When genuine action was taken by PAD influenced unions, there was a tendency to ignore the importance of solidarity from other workers because the leaders were too confident that they had powerful backers . A good example was the Ford Mazda strike over bonus payments in late 2008. The factory was on the Eastern Sea board and the union turned its back on the local Area Group. Another example was the railway union which was brave enough to strike once for PAD political demands in 2008, because it knew that management would not punish anyone. Before that, the union had failed to fight against the increased use of low paid casual workers on the railways. Later, in 2009, however, they did manage a genuine independent strike over railway safety in the South, but the union leadership were then sacked for this action. They are still fighting to get their jobs back. Unfortunately, because of the railway union s association with the PAD, there was much hostility from Red Shirts to this genuine strike. Among private sector unions support for the PAD did not really exists. The Thai Labour Solidarity Committee, which was originally made up of factory workers in Omm Noi, led by Wilaiwan Sa-Tia in alliance with Somsak Kosaisuk, pulled out of supporting the PAD in the 2nd half of 2008. Their members were horrified with what the PAD was doing. The leadership of the Eastern Seaboard Area Industrial Group was split between Red and Yellow and there were also some splits between proPAD leaders and their rank & file Red Shirt members in this area.

Thai governments will only start to adopt genuine economic and social reform policies for a more equal society if the labour movement applies political pressure, either by building its own party or by actively engaging in social movement agitation. An important step in this direction would be to expand the links between the Red Shirt movement and the trade unions.

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The new, post-election , settlement?

Following the 2011 election we are starting to see a new settlement between Peua Thai and the conservative elites in order to resolve the Thai crisis in the interests of the elites. This may or may not be a formal agreement, but by September 2011 we were already seeing the effects. Following the last crisis during the Cold War conflict with the Communist Party, the elites crafted a settlement where parliamentary democracy was tolerated so long as elections could be dominated by money politics and there was no challenge to the ruling class from the Left. Today s settlement is designed to maintain the power of the Military and also allow the Peua Thai Party to form a government and to eventually bring the Peua Thai leaders, including Taksin, back into the elite s exclusive club. We must remember that previous to the 2006 crisis, Taksin and Thai Rak Thai were part of the ruling elites. This means that the so-called reconciliation will have nothing to do with expanding the democratic space or bringing State murderers to justice. The anti-Taksin elites could not crudely and directly prevent the formation of the Peua Thai Government in August 2011 because the election result was so clear. But at the same time Peua Thai was prepared to enter into a process of compromise, under the banner of reconciliation, by promising not to touch the Military or any interests of the royalist elites. It is like we were seeing a silent coup , resulting from pressure being applied behind the scenes, in order to achieve the new settlement which betrays the aspirations of most Red Shirts. If we look at a number of important issues such as lse majest, the political prisoners and the influence of the Military, we can see the results of this new settlement. The Minister for Information Technology and Communication and the Deputy Prime Minister have both announced that they will be more vigorous in using the draconian lse majest law to crack down on dissenters. A special War Room has been set up in order to do this. Lse majest prisoners such as Somyot Pruksakasemsuk, Surachai Darnwattananusorn, Da Torpedo and many others are still in jail. Some are awaiting trial and others have been found guilty by courts which favour the dictatorship and the military. The Peua Thai government s defence of lse majest shows that it is prepared to accept the continuing influence of the Military in politics and hopes that the Military and royalists will stop accusing Taksin and Peua Thai of being against the Monarchy. Army Chief General Prayut Junocha previously campaigned openly against Puea Thai in the run up to the election. By most democratic standards he ought to be dismissed, but many months after the election he was still in post. The Government also gave the go-ahead for middle-ranking officers from the Burapa Payak group, who were directly involved with the sniper shootings of unarmed Red Shirts, to be rewarded with promotions. Prime Minister Yingluk also went out of her way to be seen touring flood-affected areas alongside General Prayut. Puea Thai Party promised before the elections to resolve the Southern conflict peacefully and by political means instead of using repression. A limited degree of autonomy and self-government was proposed. This was an important step forward, given the history of violent repression against Malay Muslims by the Thai Rak Thai Government in 2004. But the repression and injustice continued under the new Government with victims of police torture being charged and jailed for speaking out. It is 20

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clear from pre-election statements made by the Army Chief General Prayut Junocha that the Military do not favour any autonomy or political solution to the southern conflict. They want a military solution, which can never be successful. The settlement with the elites means that it will be harder to bring to justice those who were responsible for ordering the killings of civilians last year. This is a very important issue for the Red Shirts. The settlement with the elites is more than anything a settlement with the Military. The appointment of a military officer, with a dubious background in human rights, to the post of Defence Minister, also showed that the Government had no intention of creating a culture where elected civilians control the Military. The position of even some of the more radical Red Shirt leaders on the relationship between the Red Shirt social movement and the Peua Thai Government does not make the prospect of opposing this settlement very bright. At a Red Shirt concert on 3rd September 201147, Sombat Boon-Ngarmanong, Natawut Saikua and Jatuporn Prompan all called for Red Shirts to be patient and to support the people s Government . But to achieve real democratic change Red Shirts must organise a thorough debate within the movement in order to determine their strategy to counter the settlement with the elites which betrays everything for which they have been fighting and all their dreams and aspirations. This government should be pressurised into making real democratic reforms, and if it will not listen, it should be vigorously opposed. The election was important in that it showed that most Thais opposed the military dictatorship and the Democrat Party. But the election only marked the next round of the struggle.

The flood crisis

The serious flooding in Thailand was superimposed on the political situation after the 2011 election. It raised the prospect of a potentially catastrophic crisis. The flooding affected millions of people. Houses, property and infrastructure were seriously damaged. Factories and workplaces were closed and hundreds of thousands became temporarily unemployed. Agricultural land was flooded, leading to further loss of incomes. Millions of people, who were already living modest lives, saw their incomes and savings threatened and the economy could only be dragged down as a result. It should not surprise anyone that the sharp political crisis had an impact on measures to deal with the floods. The Military, the Democrat Party Bangkok Governor and various Yellow Shirt officials dragged their feet and were extremely reluctant to cooperate with the Government. In contrast to the rapid mobilisation of troops to kill pro-democracy Red Shirt protestors last year, troops were only just been mobilised to help with the floods, weeks after the water crisis started. The Governor of Bangkok, known by the nick-name idiot prince , spent time on a Hindu ceremony to push the water away instead of coordinating with the Government s efforts. Not surprisingly the Democrats and Yellow Shirts kept up a constant and vitriolic criticism of the Government s record over the
47

The concert was called Welcoming the day of freedom, the breath that was never defeated .

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floods. Yet this water crisis is a long term problem of a lack of planning, compounded with unusually heavy rainfall. The Democrat Party leader Abhisit Vejjajiva showed a total disregard for what Thais were suffering by going on an expensive holiday to the Maldives just as the crisis was worsening. Many Red Shirts have fallen to believing conspiracy theories about the floods. They claim that the floods were deliberately caused by the King . Conspiracy theories and rumours flourish in a country where there is no transparency and any discussion of the role of the King or the Military is forbidden by the draconian lse majest law. Yet, the King is not some all-powerful god who can order floods, famines, droughts or plagues. There were simultaneous floods in all neighbouring countries because of unusual levels of rainfall and lack of water management and planning. The longer term effects of the flood damage will become a real test for the Peua Thai Government of Yingluk Shinawat. If this crisis is not resolved, to the satisfaction of most citizens, the Government risks losing long-term public support. Again the question of the disadvantages of neoliberal economic policies enters the debate. If the Government listens to the neoliberal economists at institutes like the Thailand Development Research Institute, or it listens to the Democrat Party and the ruling elites, it will cut government spending in all areas. Already a 10% across the board cut was announced in October 2011. The neoliberals will also want to raise indirect taxes like VAT, which affect the poor. There have been calls to delay the much needed increase in the minimum wage to 300 baht per day. Naturally they favour raising funds to help businesses. But ordinary citizens will be left to fend for themselves. That was the kind of response we experienced from the free-market Democrat Party under Prime Minister Chuan, just after the 1996 Asian economic crisis. Neoliberal so-called solutions should be rejected. What is really needed in the face of this huge crisis today is a massive programme of government spending in order to repair houses and infrastructure, to compensate the poor for their losses and to create thousands of jobs. In addition to this there needs to be a serious project to build new canals to prevent the floods happening again in the future. Former Prime Minister Taksin has suggested a water management project and estimated the cost to be around 400 billion baht. All this would create jobs and stimulate economic recovery, especially if the minimum wage were to be raised in all provinces, as initially promised in the Government s manifesto. But the Government cannot hope to raise the money by not increasing taxes, borrowing money and making budget cuts. It is the way in which the Government does this that will be a crucial test. Direct and progressive taxes should be raised on Thailand s millionaires. That includes taxing the Royals. Severe government spending cuts should be imposed on the Military. There should be a total freeze on military spending, especially on weapons and hardware. Military salaries at the top should also be frozen or cut, while maintaining the salaries of ordinary soldiers. A total freeze on spending should be imposed for all Palace ceremonies. Not a single baht should be spent on the King s birthday and other wasteful activities. But to do this, would mean the Government breaking with the royalist elites, especially the Military. The new deal between the Government and the Military makes this so much more difficult. A neoliberal policy for economic recovery along with a Peua Thai serve to strengthen authoritarianism and inequality. Military settlement will only

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On its own the Government is unlikely to implement the necessary programme to solve the flood crisis. The Red Shirts and the organised labour movement face an important test today. Will the two movements rise to the occasion, work together, start debates and discussions around the issue and then move to pressurise the Government or will they sink into inactivity and eventual despair?

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