The purpose of the book was to expose how the plight of the rural Thai peasant in the 1950’s was a vestige rooted in the old feudal system, laying bare its horrors and its exploitative framework. Jit wrote this book as an antagonistic rebuttal against the revisionist history of the ruling classes taught to most Thai’s at the time (and still today), which typically depicts a utopian agrarian past, rather than the brutal exploitative reality. 

Som are the new Salim. How the self-described progressive movement in Thailand fell into the same political space as the reactionaries of old.

We spoke to Noor Netusha Nusaybah, a Malaysian Patani historian, about how today’s insurgency is connected and shaped by its post-WWII roots, which are often shrouded in misunderstandings, conflicting or competing narratives and secrecy. 

Thaksin Shinawatra defined Thai politics for a generation and forever reshaped it. Somehow, this elite capitalist billionaire became the unquestioned champion for a destitute peasantry. Thaksin’s politics defied left-right categorisations, creating an economic miracle, lifting millions out of poverty while further developing the very same mechanisms of capital that had placed them in said destitution.

The reality of Cambodian socialism was brutal, but it was made brutal by the forces of reaction sponsored by The West and its allies. For all its flaws, real Cambodian socialism did exist, if not in the halls of ministries of Phnom Penh, it existed in its purest form through the economy of solidarity. What else other than communism or socialism can we call a communal and social construction project alongside the revolutionary will to discard the previous system?

There is virtually no material production in the north, only service capital— debt and foreign holdings. The material existence of the northern proletariat is dependent on global south labour and continued material extraction. This raises the question of whether successful proletarian revolutions in the north are even remotely plausible.

In the 1930s, Thailand began a project of mass homogeneity based on western Euro-Fascism. This project was refined by the monarchy in the 1950s, leading to a reactionary consensus lasting a half-century. However, many elements in the recent protest movement, so far, fail to recognise their own deep-seated Euro-fascist tendencies when challenging the contemporary Thai state.

Every year, for 2-3 months, the entire Northern region of Thailand, Laos and Burma, suffocate under smoke. This annual climate apocalypse is a relatively new phenomenon, beginning around 20-30 years ago and seemingly increasing in intensity. The cause, in our opinion, is a conspiracy, a product of decades-long interplay between state and capital, the birthing of mass agribusiness, monopolisation of markets, of coups, of massacres in the streets and of networks of dark finance and patronage.