Talk of class struggle in Thailand is academic folly

Oh yes, the concepts are beautiful, like “beauty quarks” (building blocks of matter) are beautiful, or Higgses Bosons, but do they have any weight in the world in which we actually live? 

It’s like the BBC reporters creeping up to the edge of the Rajprasong stage in their safari jackets in 2010, a good Harrison Ford over here ducking shrapnel, a rugged Jane Fonda being courageous with her mike. And in their goodness those reporters saw the banners for justice and tolerance just at camera level and reported that Karl Marx was right, the poor really are rising up against the rich at last and taking over right before our eyes on prime time. 

While the lobbyists who designed the display at camera level are laughing all the way to the bank!

The tragedy is that if it had been a simple black-and-white struggle there might have been some light at the end of the tunnel by now. There might have been an election way back on November 14, 2010, and a people’s government might have already started to tax the pants off the rich. There might even be a movement to redistribute all that farmland owned by absentee landlords in Bangkok, for example, and another to strengthen the regulations against industrial polluters – and another to ensure judges never let anybody off the hook. No more special dispensations because the prime minister would be from the working class at last, as would the foreign secretary and chief of police. No more “intellectual hegemony of Thailand’s monarchy-centred socio-political hierarchy”, as a Thai sociologist called it recently – and that sounds really good, doesn’t it, as if the class struggle were really working out at last in Thailand!

“Intellectual hegemony” – there’s a “beauty quark” if there ever was one. The sociologist lectures that the elite always keep the discourse to themselves, and that in Thailand we’re seeing the unwashed wrench that discourse back. And if you want to understand that you just have to think of all the damage the intellectual hegemony of the enlightenment did to Europe from Voltaire in Prussia right on up to Sigmund Freud in Vienna. Or the intellectual hegemony sponsored by the Medici in Florence, God forbid, or Alexander the Great in Gandhara. How they really messed things up for us all!

Well, that’s academic folly – it’s ivory tower gobbledigook. Human culture isn’t easy, indeed it’s even harder to keep hold of than staying alive! And the intellectual hegemony of Thailand’s educated men and women over the centuries has defined Thai culture just as much as the pakoma and kway has in Isaan. 

If Thai culture is to survive, its precious “higher culture” must be respected as well. Architects, Buddhist philosophers, hydraulic engineers, silk-worm agronomists, the renate ek master and all your children’s teachers must be heard, not just tossed out on the dust heap as degenerates. That’s business nonsense, despicable spin.

Lung Kip

Chiang Mai