Thailand’s Political Peasants: Power in the Modern Rural Economy

1. Thailand’s Persistent Peasantry

For more than one hundred years there have been claims from many parts of the world that the peasantry is disappearing. Writing at the end of the nineteenth century, Vladimir Lenin famously argued that “commodity exchange and capitalist production” in rural Russia meant that the peasantry was “being completely dissolved” and replaced with classes of bourgeois commodity producers and proletarian wage laborers.1 A hundred years later the historian Eric Hobsbawm declared that the work of international capitalism was done, writing that “the most dramatic and far-reaching social change of the second half of the twentieth century, and the one which cuts us off for ever from the world of the past, is the death of the peasantry.”2 Soon after, Michael Kearny criticized his fellow anthropologists’ nostalgic preoccupations with the peasantry, arguing that “peasants are mostly gone and . . . global conditions do not favour the perpetuation of those who remain.”3 Closer to home, another nail in the coffin was provided by Robert Elson’s The End of the Peasantry in Southeast Asia: “There can be no mistaking the romanticized shadow for the substance, which is that the peasantry, gradually from the early twentieth century, and from the mid-century on at an accelerating rate, has been radically reconstituted, through its own agency and that of broader forces of change, into a series of more modern categories of social formation. The world of Southeast Asia is no longer a world dominated by peasants and peasant modes of life.”4 In recent years, rural commentators have been particularly preoccupied with the role of “neoliberal” policies in accelerating this process of “depeasantization .”5 In the rural context, neoliberalism refers to free-market policies 34 1 Thailand’s Persistent Peasantry such as reducing tariffs on agricultural imports, encouraging exports, reducing farm subsidies, dismantling government marketing boards, halting land reform, making it easier to buy and sell land, and encouraging agribusinesses to get involved in farming. Many developing countries have adopted these policies in response to structural adjustment pressures from international financialinstitutions.WritingaboutAfricanpeasantries,DeborahFahyBryceson describes a series of neoliberal “turning point policies” that undercut the prosperity rural producers had achieved during the 1950s and 1960s. These policies have reduced the profitability of farming, promoted the fragmentation and individuation of livelihoods, undermined social cohesion, and prompted many rural households to revert to low-value subsistence cultivation .6 Echoing Lenin’s prognosis for Russia in the 1890s, Bryceson writes, “Agricultural restructuring has struck at the heart of the middle peasantries’ agrarian base. . . . As the middle peasantries’ productive base gives way, strong centrifugal forces of economic polarization and class differentiation set in . . . and the middle peasantry starts pulling apart at the seams.”7 Similar scholarship has also emerged from Latin America where the abandonment of agrarian reform and social welfare policies means that “Increasingly . . . peasant livelihoods and rural community trajectories will be determined by powerful global forces, resulting in dependency for those who survive as peasants and proletarianization for those who do not.”8 If these pessimistic assessments are correct, then the political society of the peasantry would best be interpreted as a rearguard attempt by an everdiminishing population to hold onto the last remnants of social identity and state support and to resist the incursion of market forces for as long as possible . The apparent threat of neoliberalism has provided fertile ground for a new generation of studies on resistance and the mobilization of transnational social movements to defend the rights and livelihoods of ever more marginal peasant farmers. Partha Chatterjee’s account of political society in India has been criticized for failing to recognize that state support for marginal population groups is tenuous and likely to be swept away by the rising tide of neoliberal policies. One critic argues that Chatterjee “seems to be curiously oblivious of the neoliberal turn in the global economy” and that contemporary India has witnessed the “withdrawal of the state from the economy and social sectors, not its intervention in favour of the dispossessed.”9 Another reviewer of Chatterjee’s work describes political society as “already part of an older world order” and a “social compromise which capital and the state have abandoned for aggressive neoliberal policies.”10 Thailand’s Persistent Peasantry 35 I don’t accept these predictions about the disappearance of the peasantry and the triumph of neoliberalism. Recent rural sociology has shown us that peasant societies encountering capitalist development do not follow any clear...