A growing anti-privatisation movement, allegations of government corruption and revelations of the repression of Muslims are all causing headaches for the government of Thaksin Shinawatra, and creating new opportunities for a re-emerging Thai left. Green Left Weekly's Nick Fredman spoke to Ji Giles Ungpakorn, a politics lecturer at Bangkok's Chulalongkorn University and leading member of the Workers Democracy group.
Several years after the devastating 1997 economic crash, Thailand now has the appearance of a boom, and a recent government report claimed that the number of poor has been reduced from 15.9 million in 1999 to 9.8 million today.
Ungpakorn stresses, however, that although "the number of layoffs and the level of unemployment has decreased, both during the boom and the crisis the difference between the rich and the poor increased".
Ungpakorn says that an important aspect of Thaksin's Thai Rak Thai (Thais Love Thais) party government is that it's populist. After the crisis "the party felt that there was a feeling within the country that the rich had caused the debt and the crisis, that the tax-payers were having to bail out the banks, so they were worried about social peace".
"They brought in a universal health-care scheme where you pay 30 baht [around 80c] to go to hospital if you're not covered by other forms of insurance. There were housing projects, there were loans for the poor. All these things are real benefits, but we have to see it in terms of attempts to buy social peace".
However, "not much has been delivered to the organised working class". Unions recently protested that the first increase for several years to the Bangkok-area minimum wage of 169 baht was a mere three baht, much less than the rate of inflation.
Ungpakorn adds that "along with these populist measures, the government has significant authoritarian tendencies. Last year, it started what it called the 'war on drugs' during which more than 2000 people were killed without going to court or anything. Most human rights activists believe they were killed by members of the security forces."
Also in mid-March "prominent lawyer Somchai Neelapaijit, who was defending many Islamic people, including members of Jemiah Islamiah, disappeared. The feeling among human rights activists is that the police have killed him." It is widely believed that security forces and politicians have organised recent attacks on police in largely Islamic southern Thailand in order to create a "terrorism" panic for their own ends.
Union uprising
The government's strategy involved "co-opting a number of old activists from the 1970s into the government. It has both co-opted and tried to create a climate of fear among NGO workers".
The government's strong position has suffered since the electricity workers' union began "a very significant campaign against privatisation. The union has been holding continuous mass meetings [since late February] with support from other trade unions in the public sector and from a number of social movements. This is the most powerful challenge to this government to date and is one of the most biggest movements since the 1992 uprising against the military."
The unions are demanding that a bill to privatise all state assets be scrapped. "Another demand is that electricity and water not be privatised. At the top of the demands is that the government should hold a referendum".
"Already the government has delayed the privatisation which was due to go ahead in early April, so there has been a partial, temporary victory by the workers, but the question is how to go forward."
At the March 24 interview, Ungpakorn thought that "the public sector unions are very reluctant to go on strike", and that the small forces of Workers Democracy would have an uphill battle arguing for this as the next step.
However on April 21, after numerous rallies and meetings attended by up to 50,000 people, and supported by up to 135 organisations, union leaders announced that 100,000 electricity and water utility workers would strike soon if privatisation is not scrapped. Ungpakorn was quoted in the April 22 Nation supporting this move.
The once strong Thai left was largely destroyed by a massacre and other brutal repression by the military in 1976, and, by the mid-1980s, the collapse of the Communist Party of Thailand's rural guerrilla struggle, which many of the surviving student and worker activists had fled to.
One result was that organising in support of the poor was channelled into "non-government organisations" dependent on government or external funding.
Ungpakorn says: "The issue of NGOs is something that the left in developing countries, in Asia, has to take very seriously. When the left has collapsed, NGOs have played an important role, for example one of the reason that we can call ourselves a socialist organisation and talk about socialism is because NGO activists and other people have created democratic space within Thailand.
"In some ways NGOs in South-East Asia play the role of reformist political parties play in say Australia or Europe, and a similar sort of attitude has to be taken towards them. It's important to be critical of the politics of NGOs but avoid writing them off as being reactionary tools of imperialism. We have to regard NGOs as important social actors and the people that are involved in them as part of the left, even though they may not call themselves that.
"The particular problem with NGOs is that they concentrate on single issues, whereas what is really very clear in the anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist movement today is that you have to be able to link up all the different issues with some common theory ...
"Also they refuse to build a political organisation, a party or united front or whatever, something that organises people on a much more political basis rather than an issues basis."
Workers Democracy
The Workers Democracy group began to develop when "seven years ago, a meeting was called by a number of activists, mainly in the trade union movement, who felt that, since over 15 years had passed since collapse of the Communist Party, there was a need to have some form of political organisation. People weren't clear what sort.
"This organisation took a while to evolve, at first it was quite a loose group. It now has a very clear Marxist position, a revolutionary socialist position. We are Trotskyists and are affiliated to the International Socialist Tendency.
"To begin with, we had to be very hard on our Marxist politics, to actually argue there was an alternative socialist politics that wasn't Maoist or Stalinist and, in some ways, we were fairly inward looking in order to establish a core, but it's quite clear what is required now is much more an outgoing organisation to bring people into struggle against neoliberalism and imperialism.
"But in some ways, the defeats of the 1970s have meant that people were reluctant to talk about the left, were reluctant to call themselves socialists. I think this is actually changing. It partly I think reflects the level of the anti-capitalist struggle worldwide, it partly reflects the fact that we have called ourselves socialist and we haven't all been killed or put in jail yet and that can give some encouragement to other people, even though we are fairly small.
"What is very important is the level of international struggle, the anti-war movement, the World Social Forums, the movements against neoliberalism, have actually encouraged people who never really wanted to believe that there was only capitalism, it's encouraged them to become more active. There are signs of the younger generation, students, are prepared to be active, although the level of struggle is nothing like you'd see in South Korea or Western Europe or Latin America.
"To date we have about 40 members, most of them based in Bangkok, although we do have connections with some industrial towns north of Bangkok and cities like Chiang Mai. To begin with the organization was mostly made up of worker activists but we made a conscious decision about five years ago to take student work very seriously, so the organisation now has got a much younger face ...
Challenging repression
"We do have workers' study groups and have attempted to take our anti-war campaigning and a campaign for abortion rights into sections of the organised working class, especially the textile workers, and also we've constantly kept up a relationship with the public sector workers and the campaign against privatisation.
"We try to produce books in Thai on a regular basis, because, before the organisation was set up, it was almost impossible to read anything in Thai on socialism because of the level of repression. But ideas alone aren't enough in this period, you have to be prepared to be active."
In terms of the group working with the rest of the left, "there are ex-members of the Communist Party around who still regard themselves as socialists and it's possible to work with them, though they're not really properly organised. So it's not a question of regroupment, but there's a certain similarity with what's happening in other parts of the world, as it's important not be narrow-minded, but be prepared to work with different forces in united fronts. It's something you're learned from experience here but also processes in South Korea, in Britain or Australia. For example in the student movement there's a number of societies that we're trying to build a progressive front with.
"On the international level, at the World Social Forum in Mumbai about 37 left-wing organisations from around the world met together, Troskyists, Maoists, Stalinists! And there was a level of common agreement there. And it goes beyond just the organised left. So with us in Thailand there isn't any other organised left but we have to be prepared to build united fronts with progressive groupings and people."
From Green Left Weekly, May 5, 2004.
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