Culture and Privilege in Capitalist Asia - Jurusan Antropologi ...

9
Creating the Thai middle class
Jim Ockey
The new rich in Thailand have invariably been described as a new middle class.
That this new rich middle class was responsible for the democratic uprising of
1992 goes virtually unquestioned. 1 Yet, there has been surprisingly little debate on
just what constitutes the middle class in Thailand. Rather, the middle class is left
undefined, as if somehow everyone knows just what it is and all that is left is to
determine how it functions. In fact, the Thai word for middle class is a direct
translation from English, literally meaning ‘people of the middle level’, which has
only recently spread beyond the academic community, and is still unknown to
many Thais. In this chapter, I discuss the new rich in reference to variable
constructions of the Thai middle class. I will describe some of the ways the middle
class is being constructed to include the new rich. I will also examine the role of the
middle class in politics, particularly since the rise of the new rich.
Academic literature on the development of middle classes can, for my purposes,
be divided into structural approaches and historical approaches. In structural
approaches, the middle class is described according to its position in the social
structure, with the appropriate structural criteria a matter of considerable debate.
For Marx, the criterion was the relationship to the means of production. 2 For Mills
(1956), it was necessary to distinguish between the old middle class, made up of
independent farmers and small entrepreneurs, and the ‘new’ or white-collar middle
class, made up of salaried professionals. For Weber (1946), the criteria included
lifestyle and status. For Giddens (1980), there were qualifications. Each of these
writers constructs a different ‘middle class’, and while there may be considerable
overlap between them, we might thus expect each of these differently defined
groups to act somewhat differently. In the Thai case, this is particularly important
as many traditionally high-status occupations do not allow, either morally or
materially, for a lifestyle of high consumption, while many traditionally low-status
occupations do. This results in an unusually high level of fragmentation among the
various structurally defined middle classes.
The historical approach to class formation is best exemplified in E.P.
Thompson’s description of the English working class. Thompson (1968) argued
that classes create themselves. This type of approach has been applied to the middle
class by Frykman and Lofgren (1987). According to Frykman and Lofgren, the
middle class constructs a distinct lifestyle in order to set itself apart from both the