A year ago we published an article titled The Death of Class Politics. The piece was an immediate reaction to the surge of Move Forward party and the seeming collapse of Phue Thai’s popularity following the 2023 general election. A lot has happened in this past year, shortly after that article, via some black magic deals, Phue Thai managed to take the government. Class politics, however, is still dead and we at DinDeng are, without a doubt, more part of the problem than any solution.
The major polemic here is the schism between the small l left and the big L Left. The small l left, being the general material interests of the working class and those who seek to benefit from achieving those interests, while the big L Left is the wider web of those who identify themselves as Leftwing, think trade-union cheerleaders, people with hammer and sickle avatars on twitter, vocally Leftwing university professors, etc, or likely, you reading this article– the big L Left is those who define their political existence from the small l left without being part of it.
In short, there is a very tangible divide between the working class and those who consider themselves to be the Left. Class politics is the synthesis of these two L/lefts, a synthesis to the point where there is no possible distinction between them, whereas a divide between the two forms the absence of working class politics. In Thailand this divide is nothing short of a chasm.
Academy & NGOs
Recently I was speaking with a friend who is working at a major Thai university. He was bemoaning how, despite trying to teach far left perspectives and receiving a positive response, he felt he was ultimately just preparing the next generation of NGOs and academic workers who would then reproduce the same cycle again and again. Of course this was within the context of the academy, but the same phenomenon extends beyond its walls.
In, or out of, university, the children of the bourgeois classes love to flirt with working class politics. When we, at DinDeng, used to organise participatory talks with Thammasat University Marxism Studies a few years ago, at the time at least 80% of participants came from middle class or elite backgrounds, while those who didn’t ultimately aspired to. What we were organising was in essence a recreation of the previous generations of Left student based activism, most famously seen in Thailand around the early 70s. During that era, it was again, largely, the children of the bourgeois classes that became the leaders of the Left, many of whom hold high positions in NGOs and academia to this day, which they achieved thanks to the cache of their prior Left-activism.
This is not to downplay the presence of the millions of working class people who insist on and agitate for change. Within Thailand groups such as Assembly of the Poor, the Four Regions Slum Network, P-Move etc, are full of earnest, brave and impressive members of the working class. It is widely known, however, that much of the leadership and organisation capacity within these organisations come from those same university educated children of the bourgeois classes. This is not a new observation, and has been critiqued since Karl Kautsky wrote of the Labour Aristocracy at the turn of the century– describing it as a small elite class of workers who lead the proletariat and, compromisingly, gain significant social and economic capital as a result.
If these radical Left children of the bourgeois class don’t fancy a role in the NGO sphere, they have another option, the aforementioned academy. Here we find the last retreat of the left, a space of ideas, a purely idealist space devoid of material reality. Such spaces have fostered their own mini-cults of personalities, decent publishing industries and include this very journal. It’s in these safe spaces of no material consequence, that the big L Left can bask in forever pondering itself, seemingly developing itself behind the paywall of the campus gates, forever reproducing itself within its walls.
It’s on the campuses that the children of the bourgeois can learn how to perform class politics. That is to say, learn how to appear to bridge the divide between the Left and left. How to use the lingo, make the right references, argue in the right dialectical way and display their learnedness and intellectual dedication to the cause of the working class, without having to set foot outside of its walls, again, we at DinDeng are no different. And again this is by no means a Thai phenomenon and can be seen across the world.
This retreat is something of a compromise between the Left and capital. Within living memory the L/left took to not only the streets, but the forests. For better or for worse, forming a genuine challenge to the capitalist status quo. People, some of them the children of the bourgeoisie classes, literally gave their lives in the fight against capital, the ultimate sacrifice– an act which bridges that divide between left and Left like no other, literal revolutionary class suicide. However, this evidently was not enough. The insurgency was defeated, the peasant movements were crushed and the Red Shirts were functionally wiped out. The L/left became the Left and the left.
The relationship between the Left and the left
Today we have a marriage between the NGO sphere and the academy. The mother and father of the Left. One which has built a home for the Left to live in relative comfort. Outside of the walls of the home there is the, often forgotten, left. This is the working class which is incapable of fitting neatly into this arrangement, as oftentimes the interests of the working class do not at all align with the interests of the NGO sphere and the academy.
The relationship between the big L Left, as it is today, and the working class is a toxic one, marred by a huge imbalance of capital both social and economic. The Left relies on the working class to define its very existence, but the same is not true vise versa. The working class in no way depends upon the Left to maintain its existence. Once we accept the terms of this relationship it appears not as symbiotic, as it should, but rather parasitic.
Assumingly, those on the Left truly believe their activities are contributing to helping the working class incrementally. If they truly believe these activities synthesise the interests of the Left and the working class then this is already admitting defeat to centrist thinking. As the old adage goes: “The bird needs a left and right wing to fly and we make up the leftwing”. This is not in any way anti-capitalist thinking or practice. It’s rather a coalition between the Left, the centre and the right. Those incrementalists serve an essential function for capital, that of the perpetual and non-threatening social management and economic maintenance. They will always say that the time is not right for revolution or that revolutionary ends can be achieved through minute incremental progress. This is anathema to anti-capitalism, every moment lived by the working class is an emergency and there is a constant casus-belli for class war.
What does the left look like?
It is widely accepted that the Thai Communist Party was unsuccessful, in large part, because they modelled their revolution on Chinese Maoism, and failed to adapt to the specific material conditions found in Thailand. This line is oft-repeated by the Left with confidence. The very same Left who, to this day, are dependent on importing more foreign trapping of Leftism into Thailand. Scandinavian welfare states, Labour parties, rose emojis, Western jurisprudence, etc. Again they make the same mistake as the old comrades, they fail to recognise and adapt to Thai conditions.
What could the L/left look like in a Thai context? Does it need to have a hammer and sickle? Does it need to use the word Comrade? Does it need a Scandinavian social welfare party? Here Thailand is gripped by aphantasia, the inability to imagine something that is not present.
If we return to our definition of the left rather than the Left… The left; the general material interests of the working class and those who seek to benefit from achieving those interests. Thailand has seen this left merge with the Left in living memory. For better or for worse, that’s exactly what the Red Shirts were. Yes they were a compromise between capital and the poor, but they, without question, still meet the definition of the small l left, again; the general material interests of the working class and those who seek to benefit from achieving those interests.
The relationship between the Red Shirts and Thai Rak Thai, however we might critique it, was not a parasitic one, each genuinely depended on the other for their own survival. It was a conscious co-dependency agreement in which the working class gave the capitalist Thaksin and his allies their votes in return for policies which genuinely improved the quality of their lives. At times it may have been ugly, at times it may have been corrupt, at times it was brutal and criminal, but it was class politics in a nutshell.
But there were no hammer and sickles, no rose emojis, no Scandinavian welfare policy copy and pasting. This led to the phenomenon whereby the Left (today) fails to even recognise what class politics is. The only thing the Left is capable of recognising is itself in the mirror through that performative Leftism mentioned earlier: How to use the lingo, make the right references, argue in the right dialectical way and display their learnedness (Rose emojis in bios). Phue Thai do not perform these rituals of the Left, ergo today the Left can recognise them, even historically, as the left.
So what does the Thai left look like in the political realm? This is an extremely uncomfortable question for the Thai Left. While the big L Left dogmatically adheres to theoretical, ideological and aesthetic coherence, small l left politics uses any means and any tools available to it, it is constantly reacting and developing, without any pre-developed ideological guardrails. Small left politics aren’t bound by the historical baggage of the big L Left. Small left politics are purely about adaptation, functionality and survival. This does not make it at all perfect or even something to aspire to.
Political organisations like Bhumjai Thai are certainly not Leftwing. However, the political interests that cause people to vote for them are certainly an element of the current Thai left, whether we like it or not. Again, this is something the capital L Left could never recognise, what with Bhumjai Thai’s corruption, dependence on local elites, sexism, racism, islamophobia and even classism. Bhumjai Thai are not capital L Left and not necessarily small left either, but what they’re doing is appealing to the small left regardless. They recognise the small left (not in name) but in constituency, and offer a uniquely Thai or Surin or Buriram alternative to the localised struggles as felt by those in the small l left, be it cynically or in good faith.
It is no surprise then that the big L Left can not appeal to the small l left, as they can’t even recognise it. The dream of many of the children of the bourgeois classes in the Left when imagining what their movement could look like is to say “it looks like me”. Young, well spoken, well educated, well informed, modern, sophisticated and optimistic. In short, Move Forward Party and their surrounding media/NGO/academic sphere. While parties like Phue Thai and Bhumjai Thai are driven by reactive material necessities, Move Forward, like the big L Left, are guided solely by ideology, this is by definition idealism rather than materialism, not class politics but imported abstract concepts from the academy. Given this dependency on ideology, it’s no wonder that Move Forward have attracted the bulk of the self defined Left to their, largely successful, crusade against Phue Thai, their crusade against material politics. For the Left ideological coherence is paramount, a game of aligning signs and symbolism, the performance of radical politics rather than the engagement.
Just like the big L Left they are incapable of seeing a difference between big and small L left politics. Why does the left have to be young, well spoken and well educated? Why does it have to be well informed, modern and sophisticated? Why does it have to have roses or hammers and sickles? Why does it have to look like the children of the bourgeois classes calling each other comrade? Is there room for your socially conservative auntie in your struggle? Is there room for drug addicts? Is there a space for the dek-wens? Why did no one reach out to the kids in the DinDaeng neighbourhood in 2020? Can you recognise the struggles that are right in front of you everyday on their own terms, without having to paint it with a red brush? Can you recognise it when it’s ugly or makes you uncomfortable? The revolution doesn’t always appear revolutionary, and revolutionaries don’t always wear green caps with red stars.
Guilt
Sociology as a practice developed into an elitist discipline for the educated classes to make sense of the misery they saw in the world around them, what they were functionally doing was rationalising away the guilt they felt when they encountered class suffering. This is in essence what the Left has become today.
Those of us who are appalled by the suffering of the working class and recognise the cause of that suffering as capitalism rightly call ourselves socialists, anarchists or communists regardless of how we practise that ideology. This is our means of processing the guilt we feel about that suffering. Naturally this drives us further down the rabbit hole. Reading books and articles, listening to podcasts, watching documentaries, understanding that suffering as best we can, supposedly so we can stand against it. Again, here we find DinDeng.
This journey down the rabbit hole, this self identification of the Left as the Left is little more than intellectual masturbation to ease the tension of class guilt we feel on a day to day basis. We are not christians. There is nothing wrong with masturbation. Please enjoy yourselves. But do not kid yourself into thinking that masturbation is a revolutionary act. It’s not surprising then, that today, the Left finds itself most at home in the sociology department of the elite universities.
With the existing chasm between the Left and the left, the argument made on behalf of the working class by the Left in Thailand is dependent on that aforementioned guilty conscience, the argument then becomes purely moralistic, therefore idealistic, not materialist and certainly not left.
This is not inevitable
There is no inevitability in this Left/left paradigm. Class society has been defeated in the past, and it will lose again. There have been moments in living history where windows have opened, where currents have emerged for the Left and the left to merge. The Communist Party Insurgency, The Peasants Federation, The Red Shirts and even Thalugaz were all moments that were not fully capitalised on, but where potential lay in the open.
The danger then of having a Left independence of the left is that it becomes increasingly unable to recognise these moments and open those windows. A Left standing on its own develops a form of political rigidity where class politics is performed within and according to the ideological guard rails it imposes on itself, unable to develop, protecting itself in its current recognisable guise, ironically practising the truest form of conservatism– conservation. A Left standing on its own is not fighting for or with anyone, only self indulgently introspecting and reproducing itself while a class war is forever being waged on the working classes right in front of it.
DinDeng was named for the red soil that lay under the feet of so many exploited peasants for so many generations. Knowingly playing on the colour red, we increasingly found that the response to our work grew when we used those pre-loaded signs and symbols of the Left, the hammer and sickle, the anarchist A, Marx’s face, etc. We were sharing the supposed forbidden knowledge, the power of political economy, dialectics or materialist thinking… The weaknesses detailed above are weaknesses that we perpetuated. There is nothing wrong with being interested in political economy, dialectical and materialist thinking, but please enjoy it for mastabatory purposes, rather than again performing the endless spiral of the Left. We named this journal DinDeng as a source of strength and inspiration, but red soil is weak soil, difficult to cultivate, lacking vitality. Those exploited peasants didn’t want to live on the Red Soil, nor did they want to read our journal.