marxism in thai historical studies

Marxism in Thai Historical StudiesAuthor(s): Craig J. Reynolds and Hong LysaSource: The Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. 43, No. 1 (Nov., 1983), pp. 77-104Published by: Association for Asian StudiesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2054618 .

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VOL. XLIII, No. 1 JOURNAL OF ASIAN STUDIES NOVEMBER 1983

Marxism in Thai Historical Studies

CRAIG J. REYNOLDS HONG LYSA

W estern studies of Marxism in Thailand have come a long way since David 'Wilson proposed the thesis more than twenty years ago that Marxism and

communism were incompatible with Thai history and society (Wilson 1960). Wilson argued that indigenous Thai values and institutions had so far managed to resist, contain, and subordinate a radical and alien ideology and the dissidents committed to it; compared with other Southeast Asian states, Thailand was deemed not to be threatened by Marxism and communism. This "low-risk assessment," shared by a number of scholars, also derived from a judgment of Soviet foreign policy initiatives that was difficult to make because of scanty evidence. In Charles McLane's book on Soviet strategy in Southeast Asia, the analysis of Thai communism came under the headings "Mysterious Ways of Communism in Siam" (1941-47) and "Doldrums of Thai Communism" (1948-54), suggesting that the author found the Thai sections dull to contemplate and awkward to compose in comparison with his account of revolutionary events under way in Vietnam, Indonesia, Burma, Malaya, and the Philippines (McLane 1966). McLane, like Wilson, could barely discern in Thailand the phenomena that he was endeavoring to understand.

More recently, as a direct consequence of political change in Thailand during the 1970s, a number of works in English have begun to reassess Thai Marxism and to propose new paradigms and frameworks for understanding Thai politics, society, and history. These studies have been concerned with student radicalism and the political fortunes of the Communist Party of Thailand (Girling 1981: chap. 7; Kanok 1981; Morrell and Chai-anan 1981: chap. 11), the socioeconomic conditions and class conflicts that have given rise to radical politics (Anderson 1977; Turton 1978), the history of Thai Marxism and Marxist thought (Flood 1975; Wedel 1981), historical- materialist analysis of Thailand's social and political development from early times to the present (Elliott 1978), and the methods and assumptions that have constrained English-language studies of Thai politics and history (Anderson 1978; Bell 1982). Yet none of these works comes close to taking the full measure of Thai scholarship, in large part because so much of it remains in the vernacular.

The following account of Thai Marxist thought in the context of recent political history directs attention to the current debate in Thai on the political economy of Thai society, and it argues that while Thailand did not experience radical nationalism to the same degree as other Southeast Asian states, it had, nonetheless, a parallel Marxist phase in the decade or so following World War II. This revisionist view of

Craig J. Reynolds is Senior Lecturer, Depart- ment of History, University of Sydney.

Hong Lysa is Research Officer, Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, Singapore.

77



78 CRAIG J. REYNOLDS AND HONG LYSA

Thai socialist thinking may be extended back before the war-to the economic plans of Phraya Suriyanuwat and Pridi Phanomyong-but for reasons of space we limit our discussion to the recent period.1 Today, analysis of the political economy of Thai history and society constitutes a distinct school of thought within Thai studies as a whole and is deemed to be concerned with the very future of the Thai state (Somchai 1981a). This socioanalysis is also having an impact on social history, methodology, chronicle study, and research into intellectual and cultural life. The explosion in Thai-language scholarship over the past decade had its origins in the heady days of the mid-1970s, when Thai studies in literature and history were stimulated and rejuve- nated by dramatic and violent political change.

It is helpful to think of Thai history since the end of World War II in terms of periods or "frames," in which the climate for political, economic, social, and historical analyses as well as for imaginative literature was shaped by the nature of the regimes in power. Roughly drawn, these frames comprise three periods: 1944-58, when the Khuang Abhaivongse and Pridi Phanomyong civilian governments were succeeded by a coup group led by Field Marshal Plaek Phibunsongkhram; 1958-73, when Field Marshal Sarit Thanarat's dictatorship was followed by a regime headed by members of Sarit's own clique; and another civilian period, beginning with the mass demonstrations of 14 October 1973 and ending with the military-police attack on Thammasat University of 6 October 1976. With the qualification that none of these periods was homogeneous, these three frames may be characterized as two relatively open periods bracketing a restrictive one. The writers and activists working in the third frame, 1973-76, and from 1978 to the present have perceived political and literary affinities in the 1944-58 period with which they could identify: a domestic political climate, which, although increasingly violent, did permit public discussion of controversial issues; a relatively open censorship policy (less open after 1952 in the case of the earlier period) that allowed publication and distribution of Marxist works-some in translation, some original analyses in the vernacular; and a foreign policy in transition, (toward the American alliance in the earlier period; away from it, if only superficially, 1973-76) (Flood 1975). In both periods military intervention brought an end to open politics and ushered in a period of censorship and restriction on assembly. Between 1973 and 1976, students, university teachers, and writers rediscovered both in the nonfiction and imaginative writing of the late 1940s and 1950s a history that had been lost throughout the dark years of Sarit rule; one of the legacies of this rediscovery is the current political economy debate, which proceeded apace from the latter part of 1978 as the tension eased after October 6 and the military government began relaxing controls in preparation for parliamentary elec- tions to be held in April 1979. From mid-1979, former activists, who had retreated to the jungle following the October 6 coup, began to return to Bangkok with penetrating criticisms of the theory and strategy of the Communist Party of Thailand (CPT), thus adding further stimulus to the debate already taking place among urban intellectuals.

Analyses of Thai political economy have been concerned with defining and describing the sequence of social formations in Thai history from the earliest times to the present. The current debate centers on two events deemed to have moved the

1 It should be pointed out that the earliest writings were socioeconomic programs rather than histories; on Suriyanuwat and Pridi, see Wedel

(198 1:chap. 1). Studies of Thai Marxism in its first phase are typically studies of anticommunism (Thongchai 1978; Suwadi 1979).



MARXISM IN THAI HISTORICAL STUDIES 79

society into a transitional phase between distinct social formations: the signing of the Bowring Treaty in 1855, which opened the country to Western trade and foreign capitalist penetration, and the civilian-military coup of 1932, which brought an end to the absolute monarchy. What has been controversial since the mid-1970s is the "naming" of the social formations and modes of production delineated by these two dates, that is, the precapitalist social formation and mode of production before 1855 (feudal or Asiatic?), and the more complex and problematic social formation(s) with multiple modes of production between 1855 and 1932, and between 1932 and the present. The contribution of social formation analysis to revisionist Thai historiography is complex, and it would be incautious to summarize results and conse- quences at this point, but in general the impact lies in method, the vocabulary of social change, and the periodization of the Thai past.

The theoretical rigor with which this naming of social formations is undertaken varies greatly, and the participants in the debate differ in the emphasis they give: to historical studies vs. theory or strategies for action; to the precapitalist vs. the "partially" capitalist social formation; to twentieth-century dependency theory; and so on. Underlying this naming is a search for the causes of the country's retarded development (see, e.g., Lae 1979), for no solution to economic backwardness is considered possible without correct historical understanding. In the words of one scholar, 'A social scientific theory which neglects to examine historical change and to emphasize inquiry into the evolutionary process is incapable of analyzing the causes of social phenomena" (Chatthip et al. 1981:90). That social formation theory leads to action in an unbroken trajectory is clear from the following statement of a young editor who signs his monthly column with the English sobriquet "Mr. Intelligentsia":

The realities of a people's historical movements and expansion will reflect the successive stages of development of the social formations (FORMATION) which have "standard" or "universal" characteristics. But the task for our thinkers and activists ought to lie in a determined effort to identify those laws that have our own particular characteristics; it ought to (and it must) lie in attaining the "transitional [social] formation" appropriate to successive stages in the evolution of production and to the class conflicts in our society.2 (Somchai 1981b:34)

"Transitional formation" in this statement refers to the formation leading out of the present one in societies that are hampered from being truly socialist by vestiges of the old society, but the author's remarks expose the general conundrum of Thai social formation analysis: How is it possible to describe the Thai social formations (past, present, future) in such a way that the Thai particulars are individuated and intact within a schema of universal evolutionary change?

When social formation analysis first emerged in the late 1940s and early 1950s (the first frame sketched above), it adhered to a rigid unilinear schema that had its origins in prevailing Sino-Soviet theory. This unilinear sequence of social formations -primitive commune, slave society, feudal society, capitalism, socialism-omitted the very form that Marx and Engels in scattered references had used to incorporate non-Western societies into their general theory, the Asiatic mode of production or "Oriental society." The Asiatic mode had been expunged from the schema in the Soviet Union following a vigorous debate in the late 1920s and early 1930s; as

2 The quotation marks are in the Thai text. Here and elsewhere, terms printed in upper-case letters are in roman script in the Thai text.




Stalinist historiography took hold it became important both to minimize the 'Asiatic" features of Russian society and to deny the crucial role of Western-based capitalism in the evolution out of Asiatic society implied by Marx's Asiatic mode (Sawer 1977:75ff.; Mandel 1971:chap. 8).

Interest in the Asiatic mode and multilinear development has been revived with the increasing attention among Western and Asian Marxists alike to Marx's long- unpublished Grundrisse of 1857-58, and Thai political economists have sometimes resorted to this mode to describe their society before 1855 as static and unable to develop its own dynamic, transforming capitalism. But most Thai scholars (e.g., Lae and Chatthip) find this mode as such deficient in explanatory power, although, as discussed below, Thai "feudalism" looks very much like the Asiatic mode. Whereas Thai political economists in the past decade have begun to free themselves from a theoretical strait jacket, social theorists writing in the first frame immediately after World War II labored under an orthodoxy made all the more imposing by the fact that China had not yet distanced itself from the Russian revolutionary model; the Sino-Soviet dispute was to begin only toward the end of the 1950s. In China itself, where discussion in the 1930s reflected the Comintern debates, the Asiatic mode was also largely rejected, and it has fared no better in other Asian states with developed Marxist historiographies, such as Vietnam and North Korea (Dirlik 1978:191-99; Whitmore 1980:27; Ch'oe 1981:514).

The vehicles of print which transmitted Marxist socioanalysis to Thailand after World War II were translations, imported books, and Thai-language summaries of Marxist socioeconomic theory. English-language editions of Selected Works by Marx and Engels, Lenin's Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, and Stalin's Problems of Leninism were all available in a Bangkok bookstore (Aks9nsan 1951:94), but far more important than foreign-language works were Thai-language essays and translations. Aks2nsan, a monthly journal edited and published from 1949 to 1952 by Supha Sirimanond, is a key document of the period because of its social theory, its articles on international affairs, and the kind of literary criticism its editorial policy fostered. It was in Aks9nsan that Kulap Saipradit published in 1950 "The Philosophy of Marxism," a compilation based on the work of Emile Burns; in 1954 he published a summary translation of Engels's The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State in the weekly Piyamit (Kulap 1974, 1978). Supha himself sought to educate his Thai readers about historical materialism and the evolution of social formations in Capitalism (1974), published originally in 1951 and first presented as extension lectures at Thammasat University. The year 1950 also saw the publication of The Evolution of Society, by "Decha Rattayothin" (literally, "Power of the Red Soldier") (1979). This translation of a Russian work via Chinese (so it can be surmised from an elliptical remark in the preface) is filled with Russian proper names and historical events; the only Thai element is the orthography. Such works typify Thai exposure to Marxist socioanalysis in this period: very few Thai writers read Marx and Engels firsthand (Supha was one of the few), and they accepted a schema of social formations worked out for other societies, expressing no skepticism about its applicability to Thai conditions. Indeed, to demonstrate universal evolutionary progression from primitive commune to slave society, feudalism, capitalism, and socialism for Thai society was one of the chief objectives of the "progressive" movement, for such an exercise undermined the periodization of the Thai past according to conventional historiography. The unilinear sequence of these social formations occurs as a recurring




motif-rather like an identifying signature-in all the above works and in others of the time.

One work that departed slightly from the unilinear schema made orthodoxy by Stalin in 1938, and which sought to adapt a schema of social formations to events in the Thai past (and to fit the events into a schema-the two processes occurred simultaneously), was Thailand, A Semicolony, published in 1950 under the pen name 'Aran Phrommachomphu" (Udom 1979). 'Aran" is Udom Sisuwan, a Sino-Thai, born about 1920, who worked as a journalist and literary critic during the 1940s through the late 1950s until he was arrested and jailed by Field Marshal Sarit. On his release from prison in the mid- 1960s he left the capital to join the Communist Party of Thailand (CPT) in the jungle, where he rose in the party hierarchy to the Central Committee and to the chairmanship of the post-1976 united front, the Committee for Coordinating Patriotic and Democratic Forces (Turton 1978:144, 146, 154). The surprising defection of this party elder in September 1982 has been taken as further evidence of the turmoil in the CPT since 1979 (McBeth 1982).

In his 1950 history, 'Aran" portrayed pre-1855 Thailand as a feudal society, characterized by a subsistence agricultural economy in which external trade was thwarted by the monopolies and the exaction of customs duties under the saktina (feudal) system. The ruling class of saktina society consisted of the monarch, royalty, and nobility, and all land was owned by the monarch or ksatriya. The ruled class consisted of phrai (agricultural slaves/serfs), who were bound individually to the members of the ruling class, who were bought and sold at whim, and who were forced to labor three to six months of the year for their masters in cultivating the fields. The phrai could not move away from their landholdings; they possessed no political, economic, cultural, or nationality rights; and their conflict with the saktina class led to struggles that always ended in brutal suppression because the phrai lacked correct and forceful leadership. In the nineteenth century, when European imperialists asserted their interests in Asia, the saktina class was unable to withstand the pressure and was forced to concede to demands, especially from the British, for trading and extraterritorial rights (Udom 1979:27-28, 53-55).3

From 1855, the date of the treaty with the British, the penetration of foreign capital altered the relations of production, and Thailand became a semicolony. At the same time, the saktina system "which previously had been independent was forced to become a semisaktina system under imperialist influence" (p. 94). There were now two distinct kinds of exploitation: saktina exploitation of peasants by landlords and usurers; and semisaktina exploitation by rich peasants of hired peasant laborers and by the landlord class, rich peasants, and capitalists of the mass of impoverished peasants (p. 96). The reforms of the fifth Bangkok monarch (1868-1910) led to some improvements in the living conditions of the people, but the reforms did not create conditions for the development of indigenous capitalism. In fact, the monarch had to rely on foreign loans to finance capital-intensive projects in the reform program, thereby pushing the country even further into the imperialists' clutches (pp. 99-103). The overthrow of the absolute monarchy in 1932 succeeded because of tactical factors and not because of popular support. "The power to rule fell into the

3 Written and pronounced the same, Old Thai sakdina and Modern Thai saktina are transcribed differently in this article to underscore the new meanings that were created for sakdina during the

1950s. "Serf" was translated as "agricultural slave" (that kasikgn) and posited as equivalent to Thai phrai.




hands of the petty capitalist class, midlevel capitalists, and the Land-Lord class," which had once wielded power on its own (p. 124).4 The coup leaders vacillated in destroying the saktina class, so that the latter retained vast economic influence even though it found its political rights restricted. The imperialist economic structure was also left intact by the 1932 change in the political system (p. 133). When it came to the post-World War II period, 'Aran" turned to the international situation: the ascendancy of Soviet power following the war; the expansion of American commerce into markets previously dominated by the Axis powers; and the division of the world into two camps. The interpretation of postwar international relations rested on The International Situation, the publication of Andrei Zhdanov's September 1947 speech outlining a new Soviet foreign-policy position and announcing the two-camp doctrine, which called for rebellions in the East to create "People's democracies" (chap. 5).

Many aspects of the analysis by 'Aran" are undisputed in the current political economy debate; indeed, they underpin the new Marxist historiography. A subsistence village economy before 1855 that combined agriculture and handicraft for local use, the penetration of foreign capital after 1855 that led to changes in the relations of production and new kinds of exploitation-these elements of the analysis are more or less accepted. Yet the book was radical for its time, if less so now. Its merit lay in introducing a new vocabulary for historical analysis and in attacking conventional wisdom, by suggesting, for example, that the nineteenth-century monarchs had actually compromised the country's sovereignty; the "nationalism" espoused by Vajiravudh (1910-25) was but a veil for an emergent rightist ideology in Thailand that Thai and Japanese militarists later welded to Japan's imperialist ambitions in the Far East (pp. 64, 153-55). The value of the book for Thai historians today-apart from its arguable social formation analysis-lies in its broad sweep of history, its international context, and the way it links social, economic, and political relations in a manner that challenges acceptance of the Thai ruling class as beneficent, wise, and worthy of the people's unquestioning obedience.

Thai governments between 1958 and 1973 censored Thailand, A Semicolony, and since 1973 many Thai readers have continued to dismiss it as CPT propaganda, with good reason-the analysis of Thai society from 1855 through 1932 and up to the present as a semicolonial, semifeudal social formation remained unchallenged until recently as the centerpiece of CPT theory. Only in the late 1970s did Thai political economists begin to take the book seriously for its theoretical framework, to scruti- nize it, elaborate it, modify it, or reject it. In an important 1981 article, which we will discuss below, Thailand, A Semicolony was faulted on theoretical grounds -"semicolonial, semifeudal" was not a genuine social formation or mode of production in the Marx-Engels schema but was derived from Mao's "The Chinese Revolution and the Chinese Communist Party" of 1939, and on a number of crucial points this social formation simply did not apply to Thai conditions. More importantly, it was argued, the hybrid had led to the glossing over of developments in the Thai economy since 1855, thus blurring the need to assess the social formation of present-day Thailand.

4 The saktina class was a class ofLand-Lords. We transcribe chaothidin as "Land-Lord" and chao- khpngthidin as "landlord" in order to emphasize that the precapitalist ruling class (of Land-Lords)

wielded political, juridical, and cultural power and did not simply collect rents. In this context phrachaophaendin is best translated "Lord of Land," meaning Lord of all land, i.e., king.




For all the attention now being paid to the theory in Thailand, A Semicolony, it is not a very theoretical work. Moreover, it focused on Western imperialism and the impingement on Thai society of twentieth-century international economic conditions rather than on the pre-1855, precapitalist social formation. 'Aran" dealt with the pre-1855 period in a mere fifty-five pages, and he conceded in his preface that "although Thailand's saktina system at least has had a very long history, it has not been definitely established whether this system first appeared in Thai society during the Sukhothai period or during the Ayutthaya period." In 1957, seven years after 'Aran" published his book-in what was to be the twilight of the period -"Somsamai Srisudravarna" worked out his solution to this analytic problem (i.e., the origins of the saktina system) in "The Real Face of Thai Saktina Today," a study of the changes in Thai social formations from the mists of the distant past through the mid-nineteenth century and up to 1932 (Jit 1957).5 The two works complemented each other. Whereas 'Aran" looked "outward" to show how saktina and semisaktina society were dominated by extrinsic economic interests, "Somsamai" looked "inward" and "backward" in time to show when and how the saktina mode of production had come to dominate Thai society. In the opening pages "Somsamai" declared that deteriorating conditions in the peasantry, starvation, high rents and interest rates, corruption of government officials, and declining morals were now leading the Thai people to "call for land reform, rent and interest control, and the industrialization of the country in order to escape the backward agrarian order" (p. 358). This author, too, left no doubt that his study bore on the present, on the conditions he saw around him.

"Somsamai Srisudravarna" was Jit Poumisak (1930-66), a poet, musician, linguist, and essayist who was Udom's junior by some ten years (Flood 1977; KQngbannathikan 1979; Muang Bqyang 1980; Muang BQyang et al. 1980; Thqngbai 1974). Unlike Udom, Jit was not a member of the CPT during his lifetime. He joined the jungle resistance in the mid- 1960s, shortly before his untimely death, and he was made a party member posthumously. His relations with Udom, who had been close to the party from the outset, were prickly, and it may be that "The Real Face of Thai Saktina Today," which does not adhere at all closely to the "semicolonial, semifeudal" theory, should be read as an attempt to outdo Udom's analysis (Miuang BQyang et al. 1980:80). It is clear that Jit's imagination was not the sort to be tamed and channeled, either by party discipline or by the formal education he received at Chulalongkorn University in the early 1950s. He failed the second-year history course, and in 1953 he became embroiled with university authorities over his writings, one of which, "Spirits of the Yellow Leaves," was a critique of Buddhism and historical materialism. Jit's scrapbook of press clippings of the incident, in which he was denounced as a leftist at a famous student meeting and then suspended from his studies, documents the anticommunism of the times as well as his friendship with William J. Gedney, the American linguist, with whom he was then living (Miiang BQyang 1981). Jit returned to finish his degree, and by the time he published "The Real Face," in the 1957 yearbook of the Thammasat University Law Faculty commemorating the year 2500 of the Buddhist Era, he was a familiar figure in the

5 All references are to this, the original edition. Reprintings since 1973 (e.g., Jit 1979) contain many errors, and "today" (nai patchuban), which gave the work a contemporary thrust, has been

dropped from the title, presumably so that it would not seem dated many years after its original publication.




progressive literary world. No one was surprised when he was arrested in 1958 by Sarit and detained with other writers and political dissidents (Thak 1979:148-49).

The first third of "The Real Face" was an exposition of such central tenets of Marxist socioanalysis as modes of production, historical materialism, and class conflict set in world history. Accepting that slave society and feudal/saktina society were universal social formations, "Somsamai" discussed the class antagonisms that resulted in the one being replaced by the other and outlined the economic, political, and cultural characteristics of the saktina system. As the principal means of production in this system was land, "the class of exploiters perforce consisted of those owning the largest tracts of land," while "the class of those exploited consisted of all those who had no rights to land, the agricultural slave class or phrai or peasant class. . . . Out of the struggle between these two classes, the Land-Lord class emerged victorious and enjoyed political power, because the Land-Lord class had absolute rights to power over land, i.e., rights to economic power" (Jit 1957:367-68). The institutions of saktina society acquired and safeguarded the profits of the Land-Lord class, and the head of the saktina ruling group was the ksatriya or Lord of Land (phraohaophaendin). The purpose of this section was to "provide a sufficient basis for understanding the origins of the saktina system, a brief sketch of the conditions that prevailed in it, the ways in which it advanced and benefited production and human existence, and finally, how its stagnation in backwardness was detrimental to welfare and production in human society" (p. 394).

The remainder of the analysis investigated the social formations of Thai society itself, beginning with a brief primitive commune period before the Tai people descended into the Chaophraya River basin that now constitutes the heart of Thailand, and proceeding to a detailed study of the origins of the slave and saktina systems in Thai society. Unsurprisingly, "Somsamai" discovered these social formations within the periods already delineated for Thai history by court historiography. Thai society passed through the final phases of its slave stage during the Sukhothai period (thirteenth to fourteenth centuries), even as the foundations of saktina society were already in place. When the center of the kingdom shifted to Ayutthaya in the mid-fourteenth century the society entered wholly into the saktina stage. The slave system was discerned largely by means of linguistic evidence found in the inscriptions, while the evidence for saktina society came from the law codes, chronicles, and decrees-the staple sources employed by all historians of Thailand. The administrative code of fifteenth-century King Trailok was read as a finely graded and restrictive system of access to economic surplus through allocation of rights to land. From the mid-nineteenth century on, tax monopolies on spirits, opium, gambling houses, and prostitution were sold to tax farmers, most of whom were Chinese, who formed a new class, monopoly-comprador capitalists "who relied on the power of the saktina class to profit themselves and exploit the People" (p. 485). In the second decade of the twentieth century, when "the pungent smell of democracy began to spread every- where," the ksatriya, apprehensive of revolt, tried to turn the people against the monopoly-comprador capitalists with anti-Chinese polemics, when in fact the tax farmers were merely agents of the saktina. Here "Somsamai" exposed what Heilbroner has called the "systematic distortions" that veil political, economic, and social realities-anti-Chinese policies simply distracted the people from realizing the identity of their real enemy, the ruling class itself.

In his efforts to discover the unilinear schema in the Thai past, "Somsamai" gave more attention to the structure of the system than to change. He was preoccupied




with instances of class exploitation in saktina society to the neglect of the shifts and changes within the saktina system itself, as evinced, for example, by the occasional concessions to the peasants in the form of revised legal provisions. Although these did not amount to a change in the mode of production, they nevertheless did indicate both the role of the peasantry as a force in class conflict and the growing complexities within the saktina system (Anan 1981:70-72). The unilinear schema that governed "Somsamai" in his analysis was as rigid as the Stalinist historiography he evidently read. His acknowledged Marxian sources, a quirky combination because of what was available in Bangkok, included American Communists of yesteryear (Howard Fast and Wlliam Z. Foster), the Russian historical journal Voprossy Istorii, and various translated works that were no closer to the original Marx-Engels corpus than the sources used by 'Aran." Preface to the Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy and Grundrisse, both of which might have suggested a bilinear or multilinear schema, were unknown to "Somsamai" (Somkiat 1981:281-383).

Yet the contribution of the book to Thai Marxist historiography lies as much in the linguistic domain as in the socioanalytic one, for more than any other text of the period it created new meanings for Old Thai sakdina. The Thai term is given as equivalent to English "feudalism" and French "feodalisme," and this Thai social formation is declared to be identical to the European one (Jit 1957:389). By using the term as an adjective instead of a noun, by mocking the habits and behavior of the saktina class, and by clever manipulation of the royal language standard Thai prescribes for monarchs, Buddha images, and auspicious white elephants, the text allows disparaging accretions to grow around the old term while tracing its etymology, thus planting deep roots for "feudalism" in Thai soil. In this play of differences and resemblances between "feudalism" and "saktina" (the text declares them identical, but Thai content constantly intrudes and makes them different), Old Thai sakdina becomes, page by page, Modern Thai saktina. Notwithstanding the fact that Thai scholars have seen assertion of the similarities/identities of "saktina" and "feudal" by "Somsamai" as a weakness of the analysis (e.g., Anan 1981:57, 63), the text demonstrates how and why the term comes to mean "backward agrarian order," "authoritarian rule," and "exploitative relations of production," transforming the Old Thai term into what literary analysis would call a trope.

At this point we must briefly add another dimension to the socioanalyses of the "progressives," as they were to be termed by their heirs, in the immediate postwar period. Many of the authors of this new social history also wrote poetry, fiction, and literary criticism characterized by such rubrics as "social realism" and "art for life, art for the People" (e.g., Udom 1978; Jit 1978). This literature and literary criticism- as well as the socioanalyses we have been discussing-rested on philosophical propositions articulated with sweeping comprehensiveness by Samak Burawat, a London- trained geologist and mining engineer who taught philosophy at the Mahamakut Buddhist Academy in Bangkok from 1947 until 1952. His thick volumes of the 1950s integrated Marxism, Buddhism, and Social Darwinism in a complete restruc- turing of the Thai world-view. Samak's historical materialism was grounded in the bedrock that was his vocational study: "Thus material objects, as the fundamental phenomena, give rise to other phenomena in a continuous chain that extends to a given thought. It must be emphasized that thought is an essential factor in social change, but it is subordinate to and follows from change in material objects" (Samak 1954:469). There was also a visionary side to Samak's ideas, exemplified in his The New Science and the Metteya Buddha (Samak 1970), which prophesied utopia (commonly




translated into Thai as "land of the Metteya Buddha," the Buddha who will usher in the millennium) through the scientific perfection of human society. Samak's imagination now seems old-fashioned to younger readers, his long treatises cumbersome for a generation raised in a changed political culture, but he is a much-neglected writer whose thought-system is a landmark in twentieth-century Thai intellectual history.

Social realist literature, Samak's neocosmologies, and the work of Udom, Jit, and others were all virtually buried by the Sarit coup of 1958; they were forgotten for the next fourteen years as a mentality congruent with Sarit's ideology came to dominate Thai studies. This mentality drew a sharp distinction between European feudalism and precapitalist Thai society; it emphasized the control of manpower rather than land as the basis of political power; and it saw patron-client relations rather than class as the determining factor in Thai social relations.6 In keeping with Sarit's political philosophy, which emphasized indigenous values and institutions at the expense of foreign models and ideologies (Thak 1979:152-71), Thailand was unique- so the argument went-and Marxist analysis was not applicable to it, although one Marxist socioanalysis-a more facile interpretation than either Jit's or Udom's-did appear in 1961, at the very beginning of the Sarit era (San 1979). In the decade since the dramatic events of 1973 Thai scholars have been developing a critical perspective on this "closed" 1958-73 frame as well as on the writings of the progressives from the first postwar open period.

Although 14 October 1973 is still on everyone's lips as a turning point in Thai history, there were stirrings before then of the revisionist social history that was to come. Evidence of the changing consciousness may be seen in the pages of Sangkhomsat parithat (Social Science Review) and in the reprinting of Jit's literary criticism in 1972 (Jit 1972). At university seminars in 1971 (Chatthip 1972; Somchai 1981b:249-308) writers and academics met to deliberate on ideology and Thai society, and Anut Aphaphirom, an editor and writer of children's books who joined the maquis after 6 October 1976 and recently returned to Bangkok (Parithatsan Dec. 1981), revived the trope of saktina society, describing the premodern Thai social formation as "partially saktina, partially capitalist, and partially colonial" in terms of social values and socioeconomic conditions (Chatthip 1972:6-12). In saktina society before 1932 men were not equal, the social structure was class based, and order was maintained by police and military forces concentrated in the palace and aided by foreign mercenaries. Anut stressed the importance of such values as "face-saving," "obligations for favors bestowed," "acceptance of fate," "deference to elders and seniors," and the like, to which in contrast to the writers of the 1958-73 period-he attached negative valences: such values thwarted the development of skeptical inquiry and science. Religion inculcated these values and attitudes and thus kept saktina ideology in place. When the West-i.e., capitalism-arrived with its high regard for human equality and science, its respect for the individual, and its venturesome use of capital, it came into conflict with saktina society. Contributing to the consciousness that made 14 October possible, Anut was concerned with ideology and socialist ethics rather than with the economic system as such; after 1973, in works

6 For the most influential examples of this interpretation, see Khiukrit (1975), who also wrote Faorang sakdina (1961), which appeared serially from late 1957 to early 1958, ridiculing the idea that Thai society was in any sense feudal. The most widely known study in English of Thai social

organization (Akin 1969) also belongs to this lineage; it is a direct descendant of KhaehQ9ns ThanandQn phrai (Khiikrit 1975), which first appeared in Chumnumdhula, December 1959, just after the Sarit period began.




that resemble Samak's neocosmological treatises of the 1950s (Anut 1979a, 1979b), Anut was to move beyond characterization of saktina society and its contemporary remnants toward a holistic vision of a new society.

The fiction, poetry, and socioanalysis of the pre-1958 period finally came alive again only after 14 October 1973, when massive student demonstrations led to the fall of the Thanom government and ushered in a new era in post-World War II Thai history. Censorship was relaxed, and publishers were quick to produce books that would sell in the heightened political consciousness of the time. Many of these books were reprintings from the earlier period; in some cases, parts of books or articles or serialized works were collected and issued in single volumes, thus creating books where before there had been but fragments (Akagi 1978). Jit's "The Real Face," a small section of the Thammasat Law Faculty yearbook, is a case in point. As university students seized upon it and confronted their teachers with its iconoclastic and irreverent interpretation of Thai history, it went through a number of reprintings and acquired talismanic power. Jit's life was reconstructed and publicized, but in the highly charged atmosphere of 1973-76 what captivated Thai youth most was Jit's example as a revolutionary poet and intellectual. His reputation as a scholar has taken time to establish, a process begun at a seminar sponsored by the Social Science Association in September 1974 (Suchat 1974; Charnvit 1979) and continued by the publication of newly discovered manuscripts (Jit 1976, 1981, 1982a, 1982b) as well as by persistent critical attention.

The resumption of Thai socioanalysis after 14 October 1973 can be seen in a brief, general essay first published in February 1974 by Chatthip Nartsupha (Chatthip et al. 1981:109-122), an economic historian whose approach and dedication to his work have virtually created a school of political economy studies in Thailand. Chatthip's purpose was both exhortatory and analytic: he wanted to draw attention to the importance of interpreting the history of Thai society from a materialist perspective, and he wanted to sketch what such a history would look like. The catchwords of this approach-and of the research encouraged by the Chatthip school-are "economic system," "mode of production," and "class," and from early in 1974 these terms came increasingly into Thai academic historical discourse.

Chatthip's periodization of Thai history was similar to Jit's. He began with the Sukhothai period, which he declined to identify as a slave stage (although slaves were present in the society) but as one possessing elements of saktina society in its class structure. Saktina society, emerging full blown in the Ayutthaya period of the mid-fifteenth century, was characterized by the backward state of its agricultural production, and inasmuch as production was increased by expanding the amount of land under cultivation rather than by changing the nature of production, the mode of production could not change. Irrigation works were constructed by local initiative, not by the state, so despite similarities with the Asiatic mode of production (AMP) of Marx and Engels, Chatthip's precapitalist social formation differs from the AMP on this fundamental point. The post-1855 economic system was "saktina combined with capitalism," in which the capitalist element dominated only exchange and not production itself (Chatthip et al. 1981:113). Chatthip did not attribute any important changes to the Thai social formation as a result of the 1932 "revolution"; indeed, he did not even mention the event. He argued that saktina society persisted through the mid-twentieth century. A new laboring class emerged to serve the small indus- trialized sector of the economy, but as there was no change in the structure of society, this working class amounted to a mere 5 percent of the labor force. The mass of Thai




people continued "to own the means of production" or "to possess the means of production" in tenancy rather than sell their labor (p. 116). As he did not see any fundamental structural change from 1932, Chatthip held that the continued domination of the Thai economy by the saktina system necessarily retarded the development of Thai industry. Similarly, the lack of structural change meant that the accumulation of indigenous capital for industrialization remained at a low level.

In Chatthip's essay of early 1974, with no footnotes and no references to Udom's and Jit's analyses, the naming of social formations was not rigorous-the essay was very brief and very early-although "saktina combined with capitalism," however imprecise, has served many Thai social historians since then. The analysis was also weakened by a lack of comparative perspective and temporal relativism. By what standards was saktina society backward? Was it so for the fifteenth century? And Chatthip's conclusion that 1932 did not change the Thai economy (no change in mode, no new class formation of significance) led him to propose a continuity in the century following 1855 that is one of the most controversial issues in the current debate. But at the time he wrote it, Chatthip's essay was pathbreaking in the emphasis it gave to Thai economic history. It heralded the revival of political economy studies, and as the revisionist historiography gathered momentum, "saktina system" grew as a representational trope for precapitalist Thai society (e.g., Suppharat 1976). Over the past decade Chatthip has been in the forefront of efforts to develop Thai economic studies. In 1975 he organized the reprinting of Phraya Suriyanuwat's treatise of 1911, tracing the narrow focus of economic studies in Thailand to suppression of the treatise by Vajiravudh some sixty years before (Chatthip 1977; Sirilak 1980b; Suriyanuwat 1975). And he was not alone in bemoaning the sad state of his discipline (Ammar 1976:44).

The breakthrough in Thai Marxist historical studies came with the realization that the unilinear sequence of social formations was a theoretical strait jacket and that various multilinear models needed to be considered. At a seminar in December 1975 Chai-anan Samudavanija, an American-trained political scientist, made the first sustained assessment of Jit's history. Chai-anan's long paper, originally entitled "The Real Face of Thai Saktina" (in invidious reference to Jit's analysis), was then published as Saktina and the Development of Thai Society, complete with a critique by Chatthip and a lengthy appendix listing the sakdina ranks of all secular and ecclesiastical officials (Chai-anan 1976). Chai-anan challenged Jit's social formations by arguing that while Jit had demonstrated the existence of slaves in Sukhothai society, the idea of a slave mode of production was altogether unconvincing. Inquiring into why Thai society had taken so long to reach the capitalist stage if, like Europe and Japan, it was saktina/feudal, Chai-anan asked whether or not Thai society really was saktina/feudal in Marx's sense (p. 11). He took up a suggestion from one of the many Marxist exegeses that had appeared since October 1973 and held that precapitalist Thai society was Asiatic, not feudal, and that Karl Wittfogel's extrapolation of the Asiatic mode in Oriental Despotism. A Comparative Study of Total Power applied to Thai society (Suraphong 1974; Chai-anan 1976:30). The research of the Japanese scholar Tanabe Shigeharu helped Chai-anan characterize central Thailand in the Sukhothai and Ayutthaya periods as a "simple hydraulic society," which became hydraulic only in the Bangkok period after the Bowring Treaty had stimulated the growth of a rice-export economy (Chai-anan 1976: chap. 3; Tanabe 1975-76). Chai-anan then laid stress on the deeply ingrained, long-standing factors in the superstructure-the cultural,




religious, and especially the legal and the political-to explain the slow rate of change, and he invoked Wittfogel for theoretical underpinning.

By holding sole ownership of land and granting producers only usufructuary rights, the Thai absolute monarch monopolized the country's resources and state power, rendering the genesis of an independent nobility-the key to the development of capitalism in Western society-impossible. Unlike the European feudal lords who had their own serfs and land, the Thai nobility was an official class in the service of the absolute monarch: the low level of class conflict and struggle "was owing to the lack of power centers which could rise up to challenge total state power" (Chai-anan 1976:92; also 83-84). In Chai-anan's view, the absence of overt class conflict in premodern Thai society did not mean the absence of exploitation; on the contrary (and here he took the law code quite literally), it was because of the extreme oppression exerted through the administrative-legal system that made nobles and peasants alike too weak to challenge the monarchy. Thai people therefore lived in TOTAL SUBMISSION to and in TOTAL TERROR of the TOTAL POWER of Wittfogel's Oriental Despot (pp. 88-89).

Just as a number of scholars have sought to save China and Marx from Wittfogel, so a number of Thai reviewers of Chai-anan's study set out to save Thailand, Marx, and Jit from Wittfogel and Chai-anan. One speaker at the December 1975 seminar, Anut Aphaphirom, accused Chai-anan of using Marxism to destroy Jit and of using Jit to destroy Marxism, a forceful criticism reflecting the continued influence of the unilinear schema and impatience with fine theoretical distinctions on the part of activists (Muang BQyang et al. 1980:228). Apart from Jit's study, Chai-anan was also criticizing another neo-Marxist work by 'Amnat Yutthawiwat" (Phin 1975), who had been with the CPT but now works with the government in ideological warfare programs. Critics of Chai-anan found Wittfogel's model unacceptable on empirical grounds: historical evidence did not support the conclusion that the precapitalist Thai state constructed irrigation works for agriculture or had need to develop irrigation technology in the bountiful central plains, except for flood control (Chatthip in preface to Chai-anan 1976; Sanit 1976). This was said in spite of Chai-anan's conceding as much to Thai conditions; he acknowledged that the precapitalist Thai state did not build canals and dams for peasant production. Tanabe (1977:39) later confirmed that canals in the Ayutthaya period were "not excavated for improvement of agricultural production, but for inland navigation in the coastal provinces, and south to the Malay Peninsula," and Thai historical geographers nowadays agree that extensive irrigation works, such as those at Sukhothai, served the water supply needs of the royal base but not the production needs of the peasantry. Another empirical point was that the regional nobility had opportunities to accumulate economic power, Chai- anan's argument to the contrary, thus casting doubt on the tight state control of the nobility he had suggested (Lae 1979:97).

On theoretical grounds, the excessively political element in the Wittfogel explanation all but extinguished the economic factors, thus rendering the analysis "insuf- ficiently Marxist," meaning the materialist interpretation of history had been slighted (Lae 1979:98; PhQnphen 1976b: 147; Suraphong 1976:147). A related theoretical issue, not pointed out by Thai critics, was that if the state did not intervene directly in agricultural production-was not in fact part of the productive base-in what sense was the mode of production Asiatic (Sawer 1977:48-49, 52)? Chai-anan himself saw the precapitalist Thai state maintaining order and extracting taxes from




producers but not providing the communal conditions of production. What would seem useful to show at this point, along the lines suggested by Perry Anderson, is how "the 'superstructures' of kinship, religion, law or the state necessarily enter into the constitutive structure" of the Thai precapitalist formation (Anderson 1974:403).

Yet Saktina and the Development of Thai Society was salutary: it gave impetus to the debate about social formations from two directions. First, Chai-anan went to great lengths to show that the historical experiences of Thai and European society were different and that a separate Marxist category other than Western feudalism existed for analyzing the Thai case. This was an effective answer to the historical studies that sought to discredit the Marxist analyses of the 1950s by emphasizing the uniqueness of Thai society. Second, Chai-anan's study encouraged Thai scholars to look beyond the Marx-Engels corpus, to European Marxist intellectuals as well as to dependency theorists. As a result, their analyses of Thai social formations have become increasingly complex and sophisticated. Wittfogel's "hydraulic society" was finally rejected as a useful analytic concept, although the fate of the AMP has been more ambiguous.

The 6 October 1976 coup and the rightist regime that ruled for the following twelve months silenced the political economy debate. The government issued two lists of banned publications (Ratchakitchanubeksa 1977), and both Udom's and Jit's histories were once again proscribed, leading some enterprising Thais to publish "The Real Face" in America (Jit 1977). But the tight security measures of that regime were considerably relaxed by its successor's policy of reconciliation, and since the second half of 1978 the list of Thai-language publications has looked more and more like that of the 1973-76 period. Occasionally titles or authors are altered in these reprintings (Jit's "The Real Face" reappeared under his own name in a 1979 reprint; for a title change, see Udom 1979), though these ploys-if they are such-by no means fool the authorities, even if they do cause confusion for the novice book buyer.

In any case, it is not uncommon today for a browser in Bangkok bookshops and newstands to find magazines with large photographs of Karl Marx and book illustrations or poster art depicting the toil of peasants and laborers, the determined faces of young cadres, and the muscular physiques of the new socialist men and women. In fact, the whole question of poster art, book illustrations, and cover photos in the post-1973 period deserves to be thought about and interpreted. Social realism, the portrayal of the capital's Democracy Monument as a symbol of youth's struggle and the blood spilled in October 1973, and parts of Western paintings (Millet's The Gleaners and Picasso's Guernica, to name two among many) can all be read as a system of signs in competition with, opposition to, and substitution for Buddhist- monarchical symbolism that dominates Thai public life. Any spectator at the annual Thammasat-Chulalongkorn football game may witness this clash of sign systems, a spectacle that delights the crowd as much as the game itself.

Even amid the tension following the 1976 coup-and as if to test the wind by carrying on the debate in English-Chatthip and Suthy Prasartset presented a paper at the conference of the International Association of Historians of Asia in Bangkok, August 1977, in which they argued that the transformation of Siam's economy from self-sufficiency to commodity production was a result of external forces; hence the monetization of the economy caused the growth of usury and foreign merchant capital, rather than industrial capital. After collecting some supporting documents and publishing them in Singapore in October 1977 (Chatthip and Suthy, eds. 1977), they expanded this thesis in 1978 into an introduction to two volumes of documents (Chatthip, Suthy, Montri 1981; Hewison 1980). In their opening essay they call the




precapitalist economy saktina, but its characteristics, including the self-sufficient village economy, look very much like the AMP:

In conclusion the king controlled the largest portion of land, labor, and capital funds in nineteenth-century Siam. Consequently he absorbed a disproportionately large share of the surplus product. This seizure of the essential production of the peasant, the very source of the peasant's livelihood, restricted the development of the productive forces of the economy. It also inhibited the process of class or estate differentiation. Centralized saktina control was an obstacle to the development of a capitalist mode of production. What emerged was merchant capital subservient to saktina lords and the royalty (Chatthip, Suthy, Montri, eds. Political Economy, 1851-1910, 1981:30-3 1).

Many Thai scholars-Marxist and non-Marxist-accept "saktina system" as a social formation characterizing precapitalist Thai society; at the same time, it is recognized that this system is not "feudal" in the European sense (no parcellized sovereignty, no fief system, and so forth) and that it resembles the AMP But "saktina" is so important a trope, it has so much rhetorical and ideological force, that it cannot be abandoned for the more detached and neutral "precapitalist formation," whose usage would avoid confusion when comparisons come to be made, as some day they must, with other Third World societies. It is for this reason that such awkward hybrids as 'Asian feudal" and "Thai saktina" linger on in the empirical studies now being done.

These empirical studies, which assume a centralized state absorbing all surplus production and a self-sufficient economy before the Bowring Treaty and a dependent Chinese merchant capitalist class unable to transform the economy after it, mark an important development in the new historiography: the extensive use of archival sources and interviews to strengthen the theoretical scaffolding (Hong 1981; Suwadi and Phiphada, comps. n.d.; Wuttichai 1979). The encouragement Chatthip and others have given to Thai political economy has now borne fruit in the publication of masters' theses by younger scholars-many of them Chatthip's students-on such topics as the tax farming system (Yada 1981), the pre-1855 village economy (Suwit n.d.), and the Chinese merchant and comprador class (Sirilak 1980a). These studies demonstrate how Thai historiography has, so to speak, internalized the standard Western works (e.g., Johnston 1975) on the Thai economy and economic nationalism. And the Marxist framework that more or less holds these studies together illustrates how the language of Thai historical discourse has changed over the past decade. Sirilak's work on the emerging capitalist class reinforced "class" as a central analytic concept, and Yada's thesis on the tax farming system studied the nineteenth-century Chinese tax farmers not as a minority group or as an overseas Chinese problem but as a semiofficial class acting as the fiscal agents for the ruling, official class. We may also note that the priority given to shaking up the periodization and preoccupations of earlier Thai historiography (reign dates, monarchs, royal piety, and so forth) has sometimes overstated the significance of 1855. The pre-1855 economy was more dynamic, flexible, and responsive to the changes flowing from the provisions of the Bowring Treaty than the political economists are willing to recognize (Hong 1981:chaps. 3, 4, 6; Somsak 1982:154-55, 157). The Thai economy in the early Bangkok period does not warrant the "static" or "stagnant" label that an AMP-like characterization would give it.

Emphasis on the exploitative capacity of the saktina class and centralized state to absorb surplus production has led to certain propositions about Thai socioeconomic development in the century or so since 1855. Unlike Marxist historians of some other




Asian societies, Thai historians do not imagine that precapitalist society was able to create the conditions for an indigenous capitalism. Whereas European capitalism arose out of feudalism and destroyed it in the process, capitalism in Thailand originated from outside the country: 'Attaching itself to the old saktina system, it did not destroy that system but of necessity relied on it to extract the surplus. If Thailand had not been opened to international trade it would have remained pure saktina for many hundreds of years" (Chatthip et al. 1981:105). The entrenched position of the saktina class enabled it to adapt to the new conditions while simultaneously prevent- ing the new comprador class from developing into a bourgeoisie. Members of the saktina class (royalty, nobility) served as patrons and protectors of the Chinese merchants, who, in their comprador role, stood between the world market and the indigenous agricultural economy; this "bureaucratic capitalism" perforce drained away surplus production and at the same time retarded development of the Thai economy (Sangsit 1980, 1981).7 "Foreign domination of the Thai economy became an extremely important concern when the new ruling class rose to power with the overthrow of the absolute monarchy in 1932," and the coup leaders initiated state enterprises to counter foreign penetration of the economy (Suthy 1980:163). However, "state capitalism in underdeveloped countries, including Thailand, degen- erates into bureaucratic capitalism as state enterprises become sources of political patronage through which economic rewards are distributed to factions and followers" (Suthy 1980:199). Prebendalism, in other words, is seen as one of the factors that doomed the vision of the more progressive leaders of the 1932 coup, whose lack of economic base led them to pursue their own class interests that soon tied them to the economic influence of Chinese compradors (Rangsan ThanaphQnphan, commenting on Suthy, in Chatthip 1980:240-42; Pa(harayasan 1981:87-89).

But the overall significance of 1932 is far from settled. If there is now a measure of agreement among Thai political economists on the naming and functioning of the precapitalist social formation, the post-1855 social formation poses many problems. The arguments pivot on the 1932 coup, a key event in modern Thai history. Despite the fact that the new leadership undertook no land reform and that Pridi Phanomyong's plan for economic reconstruction was defeated, did the coup mark a change in the social formation? Or was it a political event only, that is, a change in the superstructure? What impact did it have on class formation? If the saktina class was overthrown, in what way have elements of the precapitalist saktina formation persisted to the present day and affected socioeconomic development? What significance did the coup have for the growth of capitalism in the Thai economy (Warit Phao-ariya 1981; Pa(harayasan 1981:74-97)? The resurgence of interest in the 1932 coup and its unsuccessful predecessor, the coup attempt of the "Young Turks" in 1912, was inspired directly by the student mobilizations and the fall of the military government in October 1973 (AtcharaphQn 1981; Thaemsuk 1979).

The complexities of the transitional formation since 1855 lie along two axes: the impact of foreign capital and world markets on the Thai producer, whether in agriculture or manufacturing, and the unbalanced, unequal development in the rural and urban sectors of the economy. With the return of several Thai political economists from study overseas in the 1970s, the writings of Andre Gunder Frank, Samir Amin,

7 Thai usage of "bureaucratic capitalism" is idiosyncratic. Sometimes it is translated as thunniyom kharatchakan (lit., civil-servant capitalism),

sometimes as thunniyom khunnang; the latter, if translated back into English, is closer to "aristo- capitalism."




and other dependency theorists have been drawn into the debate, raising questions about the relative weight to be given to indigenous vs. exogenous factors in account- ing for Thai underdevelopment. The idea of a dependent Thai economy is not, however, a late-twentieth-century import. The touchstone for ideas about post-1855 dependency has been van der Heide (1906), described by Chatthip and Suthy as the first systematic analysis of Thai political economy.

The modern Thai social formation has been made even more problematic by the recent fortunes of the CPT. Splits within the CPT following the Vietnamese occupa- tion of Cambodia in 1978-79 as well as criticism of party theory, strategy, and leadership by writers and former students returning from jungle bases since mid- 1979 have stimulated re-examination of the "semicolonial, semifeudal" thesis. The CPT interpretation of Thai history is now the focal point of a discourse on the theory and strategy of social revolution, a discourse conducted more or less in the academic domain, in seminars, magazines, and journals as thinkers both inside and outside the universities appropriate and revise what has to date been an "illegal" ideology of radical change. To take one example, the political economy group at Chulalongkorn University, which has produced studies on the oil and sugar cane industries, has several nonacademics who join in the discussions (Khaoihaturat 1981).

The single most rigorous criticism of the "semicolonial, semifeudal" hybrid has been made by a French-educated newcomer to the political economy debate, "Songchai na Yala," in a long, carefully reasoned article assessing the theoretical grounds for a "semicolonial, semifeudal" Thai formation (Songchai na Yala 1981; Chayan 1981). "Songchai" located the origins of the formation in Mao's 1939 essay, "The Chinese Revolution and the Chinese Communist Party" and, after comparing Chinese and Thai conditions in the second half of the nineteenth century, he concluded that the use of this social formation for the Thai case obscured socioeconomic realities and concealed changes in Thai modes of production. Apropos of the observation above on recent criticism of the CPT, this emphasis by "Songchai" on the inapplicability of Mao's theory to the Thai situation to some extent reflects the general disenchantment with Sino-Thai leadership of the CPT and Chinese revolutionary theory, though it must be stressed that "Songchai" himself is not a returnee from the jungle. Drawing on the famous Sweezy-Dobb debate of the 1950s, he argued that whereas multiple modes and relations of production might constitute a social formation, only one mode dominated, and the naming of that mode rested, in part, on identifying the class that held state power (Songchai na Yala 1981:11-14). For Thailand this argument meant that the Thai social formation from the Bowring Treaty through at least 1910 (the end of the fifth Bangkok king's reign) was not "saktina" combined with "semisaktina," as 'Aran" had stated, but still fundamentally saktina (p. 31). The period was, strictly speaking, still "precapitalist," because capitalism could only exert its control through unequal exchange and market manipulation rather than through production itself.

But what of Thai society after the 1932 "change of government," as it is sometimes referred to in Thai, begging the question of revolution that is on occasion claimed for it? Here "Songchai" parts company with those who would insist on minimizing the impact of 1932, for fundamental to his naming and analysis of the complex Thai social formation since 1855 (dependent and underdeveloped) is his interpretation of 1932 as a watershed event. Viewed from a historical materialist perspective, it had more importance than is generally acknowledged,




because it overthrew the saktina state and opened the way for the establishment of a capitalist mode of production dependent and underdeveloped in Thailand-which became the fundamental mode of production thereafter. It was not only saktina state power that was overthrown but the relations of production as well. I am referring, for example, to the proclamation in 1932 of the royal decree prohibiting the confiscation of agricultural assets and in 1938 of the royal decree on revenue collection which abolished the capitation and field taxes (promulgated 1 April 1939) (p. 44).

Another law of 1936 fixing a limit of 50 rai (1 rai = 1,600 sq. m.) per person on landholdings had a great impact on the profits of saktina Land-Lords. To the charge that this reading of the evidence is too legalistic, that the promulgation of laws did not transform saktina relations of production with the stroke of a pen, "Songchai" would reply that what matters is how the saktina class reproduced itself after 1932. The political-economic power of the saktina class as a class had crumbled, and the People's Party which led the coup instituted state capitalism in the late 1930s, thus altering the relations of production. Yet the capitalist mode came to dominate politically and economically only after 1947, following the defeat of the Pridi government, the return to power of the right wing of the 1932 coup group led by Plaek Phibunsongkhram, and the influx of American aid that resulted.

In his article, "Songchai" took issue with two academic political economists -Kraisak Chunnawan and Pricha Piamphongsan-who might be said to support a revisionist "semicolonial, semifeudal" thesis. They argue in their work that saktina remnants persist in ideology and consciousness and help to maintain the subservience of the peasantry and working classes (Kraisak 1979; Pricha 1979). These remnants exist in the form of values and attitudes and in the ceremonies that inculcate them. Offstage and unmentioned are the monarchy and the Buddhist monkhood, which military regimes since Sarit's time (indeed since 1932) have employed to legitimize their rule. With the monarchy now involved in right-wing politics, the lese majesty issue of October 1976 still fresh in everyone's mind, and succession to the throne a highly charged issue, such euphemisms as "saktina remnants" and the occasional reference to animism and superstition must suffice in any Thai-language socioanalysis of these legitimizing institutions and the role of ideology.

Because "Songchai" did not deal directly with the role of ideology and consciousness in naming the transitional Thai formation, the persistence of these saktina remnants, encapsulated by the revisionist "semifeudal" formation of Kraisak and Pricha, became a point of contention in the commentary stirred up by the article. As might be expected, "Songchai" was taken to task for overstating the destruction of saktina state power and failing to take into account the ideological role of saktina remnants after the 1932 coup (comment by Sangsit in Songchai na Yala 1981: 109-110). Another critic wondered whether naming the rural sector "precapitalist" was any improvement over "saktina" and asked how this precapitalist mode proposed by "Songchai" should be delimited (comment by Somkiat, p. 101). This kind of criticism has set off a search for economic indicators to provide criteria for the naming of the social formations, both precapitalist and partially capitalist. For reasons cited earlier, the preference for "precapitalist" proposed by "Songchai" touched a sensitive nerve in those scholars accustomed to "saktina," a preference he justifies by returning to Capital to support his arguments.

The target of the article by "Songchai" was not simply 'Aran" but, more vitally, CPT propagation of the "semicolonial, semifeudal" hybrid. His preference for "precapitalist formation" over "semifeudal" for the early twentieth century-a seem-




ingly semantic issue, as he himself admitted-involved practical considerations. By adhering to dogma that was proving to be anachronistic, the CPT had relied too heavily on the Maoist strategy that saw the countryside and the peasantry as the key to revolution. The contribution by "Songchai" was to offer a theoretical critique of the hybrid, questioning its validity, and, in the midst of party upheaval, suggesting alternative strategy.

It was in this context that he quoted a CPT official who conceded in an interview with a French journalist in September 1980 that the party needed to revise the "semicolonial, semifeudal" thesis (pp. 81-82). More recently, a Matuphum article (January 24, 1982) reported on a CPT meeting in the northeast, which concluded that Thai society is now 80 percent "semicolonial capitalist" with the remainder of the formation "saktina-influenced" consciousness (the information came from a high- ranking Thai military officer; the authenticity of the document attributed to the CPT would need to be established). Such statistical precision must be the envy of university political economists. Is the CPT statement a reaction to what Kraisak, Pricha, and others have been saying? Or are the political economists taking heed of the latest CPT pronouncements? Social formation analysis is a point where the two radical discourses-that of the CPT and that of city-based intellectuals-meet and overlap.

Conclusion

Marxism in Thailand during the first half of the twentieth century posed no immediate threat to the dominant official history, just as it posed little threat to the central government. But while we may agree with David Wilson that Marxism did not seriously challenge state power in Thailand through the decade or so after World War II, Thai Marxism even then would seem far too complex a phenomenon to be explained away in the narrowly strategic sense of Wilson's essay. By the 1950s Thai Marxism had supplied the terms and analysis for a discourse on radical change being conducted by a small but articulate and vocal group of urban intellectuals, who fashioned a literary criticism, turned Thai literature in new directions, and began to speak of the political economy of Thai society past and present.

This discourse did not occur in a political vacuum-it was born of post-1932 modernist concerns that were by no means confined to the writers and journalists identified as the leftists of the period, and it was directed against the Phibun dictatorship after 1947. With the monarchy weak and ineffectual except as an object of politics from the mid-1930s until the 1950s, and with the antimonarchical impulse of the 1932 coup leaders still strong, the most important civilian adviser to military governments in this century could also write a treatise on Thai political economy, use saktina" as a trope for a system of land allocation, and lament the proscription of Thai economic studies by the sixth Bangkok king (Wichit 1962).8

It remains for us to ask what the noun "Marxism" and the adjective "Marxist" mean when placed in the context of the past forty years of Thai history. Here we face a familiar problem in the study of Southeast Asia, a problem any student of Con- fucianism, Islam, Buddhism, or Social Darwinism-as well as Marxism-must

8 This treatise is, unfortunately, undated, though it seems to derive from lectures Luang Wichit gave around 1950. Although younger scholars see him as an unprincipled opportunist and official ideologue,

his writings helped to shape the consciousness of literate urban commoners in this period. See KQpkiia (1976).




confront: that of developing a language of explanation appropriate to a thought- system found lodged in an intellectual landscape and political culture yet not of them in terms of origin. Each thought-system is a superenriched source of metaphors which transpose and amplify familiar realities by renaming them in a way that retains indigenous identity and yet charts new terrain in the landscape, drawing new lines and making new connections between different points on the compass. The adoption of Arabic titles by Javanese and Malay kings, the use of (Sanskrit) varna to describe social groups in ancient Cambodian inscriptions, the Sino-Vietnamese educational vocabulary of the nineteenth century, the semicolonial, semifeudal social formation currently being debated in Thailand are all instances of this renaming. These metaphors range over the broadest possible spectrum: philosophy, spiritual life, administrative systems, social and political structure. In fact, they penetrate every domain of human endeavor and imagination that may be articulated in the word- pictures a society throws up to visualize itself.

Each foreign thought-system is manifest in a corpus of texts, often-to use the analogy of religious scripture-a two-part corpus of canonical core and exegetical commentary, where the commentary may vie with the canon for explanatory power and utilitarian value. Translation and explanation of the foreign-language exegeses of the thought-system are thus crucial to its ongoing transmission. In the case of Thai Marxism, European and American neo-Marxist writing, and even Wittfogel's hydraulic analysis, maverick that it is, are of more vital interest to some Thai scholars than Marx's Capital, which has yet to be translated into Thai. When the study of Marxism came alive again after October 1973, one of the first priorities was to explain basic terms and identify the principal texts for a generation of readers ignorant of these matters (PhQnphen 1976a; Thanet 1976). An essay of the late 1970s-another example of entirely foreign content in Thai orthography-displayed a virtuoso reading of Gramsci, Dobb, Sweezy, Braudel, Althusser, Perry Anderson, and Wallerstein to demonstrate how European Marxism has loosened in the post-Stalinist period (Somkiat 1979). The effort to keep Thai readers abreast of the enormous literature on comparative socialism requires as much attention as the application of Marxian analysis to Thai society and history-as a recent survey of Eastern bloc economies illustrates (Pricha and Chalatchai 1981). Even the metaphysics of socialism has an explicator (Suwinai 1981).

We have attempted to identify the principal works on Thai political economy since World War II, to locate them in a critical field, to relate their composition to recent political history, and to assess their impact on Thai historical studies during the last forty years. One consequence of Thailand's much-vaunted avoidance of direct colonization is that the royalist and court-centered historiography of precapitalist society was never cast aside and devalued by the colonizing process, not even by the semicolonized conditions, leaving to today's historians the task of dismantling that historiography and erecting a new one for the late twentieth century. In its attempts to gain control over Thai historiography, a new generation of historians uses Marxist socioanalysis as a lever to pry the chronicles and archives away from royalist and nationalist myth-making concerns. Thus reign dates decline in importance, while the trade treaty of 1855 or the royal proclamation on land charters of 1908 (granting the right to buy and sell land freely) become more telling chronological landmarks. Society is increasingly seen as an entity, a system (the term rabop is in wide use) whose constituent parts-institutions, classes, social groups-are interdependent, in con- stant flux, indeed in conflict. More than one Thai historian over the past decade has




attacked the "great man" theory of history, which would highlight the deeds of talented and compassionate monarchs and farsighted ministers, in favor of more complex historical causation rooted in the country's political economy. These new paradigms of historical change and the iconoclasm infusing them were forged in the months before and after the mass demonstrations and confrontational politics sur- rounding the change of government in October 1973, when conflict was visible in Bangkok streets. Until that date the subject of history seemed "placid" and to be just "marking time," whereas the social sciences were progressing (PhatcharaphQn and Chukiat 1981).

Many Thai historical studies in recent years could be reduced to a Marxist historiographic core, consisting of the deterministic role of material factors, a succession of specific social formations, the function of dialectics in historical change especially in relation to class struggle, the illusory nature of equilibrium and stasis, and so forth (Bernstein 1981). Thai scholars themselves are conscious of some such set of principles and from time to time spell them out (e.g., Pricha in Chatthip 1980:225-26). But it should be clear by now that as important as historical studies may be in a university curriculum, it is their place in a broader discourse on society, politics, and ideology that endows them with such vitality and demands serious consideration. The publications that contribute to this discourse range from the academic studies cited in this article to popularizing works which do not defend a particular position but illustrate Thailand's political economy by specifying the connections between banking interests and state power, the discrepancies between commodity prices on the international market and what the Thai peasant producer is paid, and by showing how surplus value extracted from the rural sector ends up in urban areas (Klumsuksa-itsara 1981).

If it is impossible to reduce the political economy debate to one about Marxist historiographic principles, it is because the debate is stretched between the poles of thought and action, between socioanalysis and aspirations for alternative political philosophies and systems. The naming of the modern Thai social formation leads in a direct line to strategies for radical change and programs for a socialist future (Thirayut et al. 1981:111-51; Parithatsan Nov. 1981). To an extraordinary degree, moreover, the debate is conducted jointly with the CPT, which is at once comrade and opponent. The goings and comings of some of Thailand's best and brightest over the past decade have broken down the city-jungle polarization (Kqngbannathikan 1980a). So many people had friends and relatives, students and teachers, who went into the jungle after October 1976 that their fate there has been of consuming media interest for a broad readership, much of it securely middle class. Magazines and journals have made reputations by keeping track of those who stayed in the jungle, those who returned, and, above all, what they have said about their experiences. CPT prospects and strategies are followed closely (KQngbannathikan 1980b), only to be countered by a government information unit through its Book Project for Dissemination of the Facts on Thai Society (Sitthan 1980). With the return of many since mid-1979, this interest has not abated but has been fueled by their criticism of CPT leadership, theory, and strategy, and by the CPT's realignments and publicized adjustments to changing times (Pridi 1981; Wedel 1982).

For the reader in English, "semicolonial," "semifeudal," "semicolonial capitalist," "dependent capitalist and underdeveloped, " and so forth may whir together as if in the blades of a fan, their analytic range diffuse, their power to evoke meaningful periodizations arguable; in Thai they are crucial coordinates on a map of contrasting




positions. The social formations in and of themselves, one might say, are not meaningful except as they are seen in contrast to one another, as relational contrasts. Thus the position of Thirayut Bunmi that Thailand is "semicapitalist, semisaktina, and dependent or neocolonial" is difficult to read unless one understands that he is one of the more famous of the returnees, having served as secretary to the CPT united front, the Committee for Coordinating Patriotic and Democratic Forces, and that his particular naming of the Thai social formation is a decisive break with CPT theory, if not a repudiation of it (Thirayut et al. 1981:79-107).

While it would be a mistake to attribute Marxist origins to all writing about social structure and social systems (many social scientists and historians in Thailand who insist on studying society as a system would not regard themselves as Marxists engaged in political economy studies), the lack of explicit claim to a Marxian lineage is deceptive. Here we may cite the work of Nidhi Aeusrivongse, who teaches at Chiengmai University and who wrote his doctoral dissertation at the University of Michigan on Indonesian history. His work over the past five years has sent shock waves through Thai historical studies, but he is not a member of the political economy group and is not an economic historian. Indeed, insofar as his writing on early Bangkok history has sought to inject a dynamism into that period, it is regarded by some as a direct challenge to the Chatthip school's static picture of pre- 1855 society (Somsak 1982). Two of Nidhi's recent papers have "bourgeois" (kratumphi) in the title (Nidhi 1981, 1982). For Chatthip and many others, the term does not apply to the early Bangkok period because saktina society was nonevolutionary, premodern, unable to produce a capitalist class. For Nidhi the term does apply. He uses it for demytholo- gizing purposes, to show the ordinariness of the ruling class. The chief Land-Lord of that class, the ksatriya, was not a Son of Heaven, a god-king, an incipient Buddha, or whatever, but a merchant trading in coffee and rice who had specific tastes in the literary and dramatic arts. The early Bangkok rulers were, in other words, simply Sino-Thai businessmen. The common ground on which Nidhi and the political economists stand is captured by the title of Somkiat's book, Dialectical Social Science, referring to the cross-examination of the Thai historical record in order to rectify misconceptions and understand Thai society as it really was, is, and should be.

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