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CHAPTER 4 Turning Battlefields into Marketplace-Battlefields As the most powerful capitalist state in mainland Southeast Asia, the Thai state and investors from Thailand have played a central role in development of the GMS. In this chapter I outline the activities of different fractions of Thai capital in GMS projects. These activities include those of the Thai state, and I will begin not only with a brief discussion of this state but of various Thai “state capitalist” projects that have been especially noteworthy. I then look in some detail at the projects of Thai capitalists based in three different locations within the country—Bangkok, Chiang Mai, and Chiang Rai (see Map 1.1). Investors from each of these locations have played a large role in GMS development. They have played different kinds of roles, however, and explaining these roles requires examining the specific capacities and limitations of different class fractions, including some of the details of their relationship to the Thai state. In carrying out this examination, I note the activities of various capitalists and other class groups—in the case of the latter, I highlight the role of an unusual group of Chiang Mai workers, taxi drivers, who straddle the divide between working class and petty capitalist. A complex dialectic connecting capitalist competition and exploitation of labor permeates capitalist development, and the cases discussed here, as well as in subsequent chapters, will illustrate this. Moreover, as I argued in chapter 1, class processes, institutions, and discourses intertwine within the dialectic of competition and exploitation. I thus present the class story in ways that highlight both the role of the Thai state and the deployment—often by this state—of images and concepts that frame competition and exploitation in ways preferred by Thai elites. In all of this, it will also be evident that the kinds of uneven development highlighted in chapter 3 are not accidental or incidental but directly related to the class dynamics I outline. In addition, I address here with empirical evidence the dispute I raised in chapter 2 regarding “Braudel’s provocation.” As I will show, in the complex activities of different forms of capital in Thailand—as they cut across states and markets , firms and government agencies—one can discern the ubiquity of attempts to both “rise above” and shape the market, rather than to be submerged within it. TURNING bATTlEFIElDS INTo MARkETPlAcE-bATTlEFIElDS 65 Of course, not all such attempts are successful, but as these cases from Thailand show, monopolistic practices and attempts to promote favored forms of “state intervention” in the market that limit or regulate competition are the norm, not the exception. Such measures, moreover, are ably encouraged by capitalists (and petty capitalists) from across the spectrum, from large transnational corporations to smaller and more local firms. Positioning the Thai State As a brief prelude to my discussion of the roles of the Thai state and Thai capital in the GMS, I note the conceptual lens through which I view the Thai state (see Glassman 1999, 2004b). Two basic points about the Thai state are particularly relevant to the ensuing discussion. First, states are frequently discussed in development literature in relation to their autonomy from capital and/or their “capture” by specific capitalist interests. I take the view that theThai state has historically had comparatively little autonomy from the capitalist class as a whole, even though it has not been fully “captured” by any one fraction of capital. In some development literature—for instance the “embedded autonomy” literature spurred by Peter Evans’ work (Evans 1995)—the relative absence of autonomy is construed as a developmental liability, potentially leading to a “predatory” state that favors the interests of small groups of powerful officials and investors at the expense of broad-based development agendas. This approach is Weberian, suggesting both the possibility and desirability of a “plan rational” state with significant autonomy from capitalists. My approach, in line with the Poulantzian argument outlined in chapter 2, rejects this particular notion of autonomy. States can be relatively autonomous from specific fractions of capital, but no state is ever autonomous from society, and in a society where investment is dominated by capitalists a state cannot effectively be autonomous from the capitalist class as a whole. Insofar as there exists what can be seen as considerable state autonomy from specific capitalists, it is not because of special features of the state per se (e.g., its bureaucratic forms and processes of training and recruitment) but because other...

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