excerpt from thailand political peasants by andrew walker

8/13/2019 Excerpt From Thailand Political Peasants by Andrew Walker

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Excerpt from Thai land Poli tical Peasants by Andrew Walker

Four interrelated transformations have created a new environment for political action (in

Thailand)

First, peasants in Thailand are, for the most part, no longer poor. They are now middle-

income peasants. They are not necessarily well-off, nor do they enjoy the consumer comfortsof the urban middle class, but dramatic improvements in the rural standard of living have

raised most of them well above the water level of outright livelihood failure. In most areas of

rural Thailand, the primary livelihood challenges have moved away from the classic low-

income challenges of food security and subsistence survival to the middle-income challenges

of diversification and productivity improvement.

Second, Thailand's middle-income peasants have a diversified economy. Subsistence

cultivation is now only a modest component of agricultural activity. There has been a

dramatic increase in cash crop production for local and international markets. Even more

important is the fact that nonagricultural sources of income have proliferated and they are

now more significant than farming for a great many rural households. Only about one in five

peasant households rely solely on agricultural income. Agriculture is still important, but

peasant livelihoods are no longer predominantly agricultural livelihoods. Peasants are no

longer just farmers.

Third, peasants in Thailand confront a new form of economic disparity. Thailand has been

remarkably successful in tackling absolute poverty, but its performance on relative poverty

(inequality) has been much worse. This inequality is not the product of surplus extraction by

dominating elites; it is a product of uneven economic development. Disparity is caused by the

relatively low productivity of the rural economy, especially the agricultural sector. Incomes

in rural areas have certainly improved, but not as fast as incomes in other parts of theeconomy. In this context, the political challenge for middle-income peasants is not to avoid

subsistence-disrupting extractions but to attract productivity-enhancing inputs.

Fourth, the Thai state now plays a central role in supporting the peasant economy . As

countries develop, their governments often try to address economic disparity by subsidizing

the rural economy. The Thai government has enthusiastically taken up this challenge,

especially since the mid-1970s. Recognizing the implications of this fiscal shift requires a

radical conceptual reorientation. The peasantry has conventionally been defined in terms of

its subordinate relationship with external power. An enormous amount of scholarly attention

has been placed on the political tussle between state extraction and local resistance. However,

in Thailand a new relationship has developed between the state and the rural economy,characterized not by taxation but by subsidy. Thaksin Shinawatra's government epitomized

this new arrangement, but it did not create it: Thaksin's rural populism was the product of a

long-term shift in the structural dynamics of Thailand's political economy. The contemporary


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moral reckoning of the middle-income peasant is not concerned with limiting the state's

impositions but with maximizing its largesse

POWER IN RURAL THAILAND

Studies of power relations in rural Thailand have emphasized three different dimensions: (1)

vertical linkages between people of different social status, (2) horizontal class or community

solidarities, and (3) dispersed networks of power and potency. The first two approaches tell

us a lot about the politics, or lack of it, of Thailand's poor peasantryand they provide some

useful insights into recent political developmentsbut they struggle to account for the

ambitions and strategies of the new middle-income peasantry. The third, though seemingly

somewhat tangential in its attention to supernatural affairs, points in some useful new

directions.

Vertical L inkages

During the 1960s and early 1970s, discussions of politics in rural Thailand were dominated

by the patron-client model. American anthropological research, much of it conducted in the

village of Bang Chan on the outskirts of Bangkok, played a crucial role in introducing thisidea to Thai studies. In two influential articles, Lucien M. Hanks, one of the principle

researchers at Bang Chan, argued that social hierarchies in Thailand were based on the

differential accumulation of Buddhist merit and, secondarily, inequalities in power and

material resources.7These pervasive hierarchies provided a framework for the development

of reciprocal relationships in which those of higher status provided protection and other

benefits to those below them in return for tribute, loyalty, and personal service. Patron-client

ties extended from the poor peasant household to the king himself, organizing Thai society

into numerous overlapping entourages that cut across status divisions. Within these

entourages, relations between patrons and clients were multistranded, drawing together

economic, social, religious, and legal connections. Yet, despite this intertwining of roles,

patron-client relationships were flexible, both because of movement up and down thehierarchy as merit and status were accumulated and lost and because the relationships were

easily terminated if they failed to satisfy either party. The system has the familiar shape of

Adam Smith's free enterprise, a major study of Bang Chan pointed out, as each person

bargains in the open market for the best arrangement he can make, and if this is not

satisfactory, he may move elsewhere.

In the Cold War context of communist rebellion in Indochina, the idea that the gap between

rich and poor in Thailand was mediated by amiable and flexible relations of patronage was

reassuring to Thailand's powerful backers. The American government, which was pouring aid

and counterinsurgency funds into Thailand, hoped that its investments would create an

effective bulwark against communism. American social science provided the perfectrationale, portraying Thailand as a country where a peasant uprising was unlikely due to the

lack of horizontal classlike affiliations: There are no publics, no masses, nor even a

proletariat; instead of these, segments of the population are provided for more or less

adequately according to the circle of their affiliation. In a study of peasant personality in

Bang Chan, Herbert P. Phillips found that there was a strong emphasis on the munificence,

security and benevolence of the authority figure. This political outlook contributed to a

placid community characterized by gentleness, affability, and politeness in most face-

to-face relationships. Writing about the 1957 national election, Phillips argued that those

who voted for the prime minister did so because he is our Master. He has been very good

and kind to us. He is like our father, and we are like his children. A similar study in the

remote northeast of Thailand by Stephen B. Young described a non-participatorydemocracy based on peasant expectations that their involvement with government should be

minimal, powerful people should be obeyed, and duties were unquestioned obligations

imposed by the conditions of life.
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Given the apparent passivity and disengagement of the peasantry, the search was on for local

luminaries who could provide political leadership and form a vanguard for rural

advancement. Likely candidates included village headmen, monks, teachers, health workers,

irrigation group leaders, crop traders, rich landowners, and merchants. Based on research in

three northern Thai villages, the political scientist Clark D. Neher proposed that village

leaders operated as a bridge between the great masses of villagers and the minority group of

authorities. These leaders comprised a narrow political stratum that was actively involved

in dealings with government officials and in implementing development projects. They stoodin contrast to the apoliticals who comprised the vast majority of rural households for whom

the political system bears no meaningful relationship to daily activities. These apolitical

villagers expressed their needs not on the basis of their own livelihood challenges but

according to the specific development agenda of the village leadership. In another important

study from northern Thailand, Michael Moerman suggested that village headmen were

synaptic leaders who managed transactions between villagers and the national bureaucracy

and, perhaps even more important, prevented state officials from meddling in village affairs.

Although the role of local leaders has continued to be a core preoccupation of studies of rural

politics in Thailand, in the 1980s and 1990s the reputation of such leaders shifted sharply. In

a national economy experiencing extraordinarily rapid economic growth, accounts of

benevolent patrons and village notables pursuing rural improvement were pushed aside by

more confronting profiles of godfathers (jaw pho) who used charisma, money, and strong-

arm tactics to create local and provincial fiefdoms. These godfathers embodied an unpleasant

combination of business and politics. They used money from provincial enterprises, many of

them illegal, to mobilize electoral support, and they used the power of political office to

convert public resources into private wealth. In this context, a new paradigm emerged to

explain the political behavior of the peasantry: vote buying. The exchange of votes for money

was said to be coordinated by provincial power brokers and implemented by teams of cashed-

up canvassers who operated at the district and village levels. In studies of political behavior

this electoral corruption was described as a typically rural phenomenon, arising out ofpoverty, parochialism, low levels of education, and a lack of civic morality. Whereas

members of the urban middle class made political decisions on the basis of policies and

public interest, gullible and grateful voters in the countryside were readily persuaded to

exchange their votes for cash, development projects, or protection. This division in political

culture was famously described by the political scientist Anek Laothamatas as a tale of two

democracies that could only be united when rural development transformed patronage-

ridden villages into small towns of middle-class farmers or well-paid workers.Most studies

of modern patronage and vote buying describe the political influence of local leaders in

morally negative terms, although some have pointed out that provincial godfathers emerged

out of a quite specific cultural milieu and often derived legitimacy from old-style idioms of

patronage, generosity, and local identity. Some accounts pointed out that vote buying itselfwas embedded in local systems of evaluation and exchange, belatedly granting the

beleaguered peasant a modicum of agency within the overarching patron-client framework.

excerpt from thailand political peasants by andrew walker

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