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29 We could argue that it is always the specter of an open rebellion by the peasantry which haunts the consciousness of the dominant classes in agrarian societies and shapes and modifies their forms of exercise of domination. Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments Housed in the former headquarters of the Railway Labour Union, the Thai Labour Museum is only a short distance from the hotels, banks, and gleaming high-rises on Petchburi Road in Bangkok. The permanent exhibits at the museum narrate the struggles of Thai workers from the feudal era to the present day. While many of the displays focus on workers as urban dwellers and producers , one of the Cold War era posters caught my eye.The poster was a Thai government creation included in a display about workers’ lives in the 1950s. It was divided into two panels of equal size. Emblazoned across the top was the text “Communist or Freedom.” On the left, the communist side, was an image of many people working in a parched field with neither rice nor buffalo.Underneath , the viewer was told, “In Communist countries, citizens do not have the right to own land. Everyone is forced to work as though they are buffalo.” On the right, the side of freedom, life was brighter. Four farmers worked with one plump buffalo to harvest abundant rice. A wooden house on stilts was on the edge of the frame. Written across the bottom was the assertion, “Thai farmers love and zealously guard their land.They own it.” For the class of farmers wealthy enough to own their rice fields,landownership may have served as a powerful preemptive reason against joining the communist insurgency. Yet not all Thai farmers in the 1950s were able to purchase land. Instead, some farmers rented land and shared the rice harvest with  Breaking the Backbone of the Nation 30 . Breaking the Backbone of the Nation landowners as rental payment. Other farmers hired out their labor to landowners for a cash or rice wage; they often did so before the rice-planting season began and therefore sold their labor for a relatively low wage. Looking for a solution to their chronic poverty and hunger, tenant farmers in Chiang Mai demanded land rent relief in 1951.The tenant farmers organized and called for the decree of the 1950 LRCA in Chiang Mai province.The act,which standardized and lowered land rent prices, did not immediately apply anywhere in the country; instead the use of the law in a particular province had to be mandated by royal decree. Although their struggle aroused fears of communism in some quarters, at the heart of it was a call for the fuller realization of participatory, democratic politics.The farmers cited 1932 and the transformation of Thailand from an absolute to a constitutional monarchy as inaugurating a new era and offered a logic for the changes in tenancy practices they sought.Ironically,given accusations by landowners and some state actors that their demands for land rent control were “communist,” the farmers did not receive support from Thai communist forces, either in 1951 or when the struggle resurfaced in 1974. Land rent relief, particularly relief defined by passage of and adherence to a legal act, did not comprise revolutionary structural change in their eyes. In contrast, I argue that in struggling for land rent control, the farmers fomented fundamental change in multiple registers.The tenant farmers’demands in 1951 and later in the 1970s for the legal regulation of land rental practices first threatened and then unseated centuries of patron-client relationships in Chiang Mai. The anxiety expressed by landowners indicated concern about the spread of communism (and their own potential loss of land), but it also reflected a significantly different vision of the rural balance of power than that of the dissenting tenant farmers. In this chapter, I trace the contention over the 1950 LRCA in Chiang Mai as a precursor to the movement for land rent relief in Chiang Mai in 1974. My analysis here historicizes the struggles and violence that I discuss in the remainder of the book and also contributes to creating an interpretive framework within which the contention in the 1970s becomes meaningful. Grasping the significance of the farmers’ actions about land rent control demands an analysis of farmers as a specific kind of political subject. By developing an optic that accounts for this farmer political subject, in...

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