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

JIM OCKEY 239
Other scholarship, while attributing the primary role to students, has
reemphasised the role of older intellectuals and academics in the uprising
(Withayakan 1993: ch. 5; Khamhaeng 1994; Flood 1975:61). It might thus
be argued that the 1973 uprising was instigated by the educated ‘middle class’. This
is reminiscent of Lipset (1959), who argued that education would lead to
democracy. In the Thai case, scholars seem to have made the connection in
reverse, noting the democracy, then searching out a middle class that must have
created it. This also led to a re-examination of the 1932 event, to discover if a
middle class was present at that time, or alternatively if it had not been a
democratic revolution after all. 9
In 1976, this connection of middle class and democracy was undermined as
student demonstrations again erupted in violence. Support for the students failed to
materialise and, on 6 October, many were massacred as the military returned to
power in a coup. Although these events were initially characterised as ‘left’ against
‘right’, analysis soon turned to the role of ‘the middle class’. The massacre
demonstrated that there was no single unified middle class with a clear awareness
of its interests. There were members of middle classes on both sides. Many of the
educated middle class were again calling for a more just society. But, as Anderson
points out, many new rich turned against them:
We are to visualize then a very insecure, suddenly created bourgeois strata…
faced by strained economic circumstances and the menace of worse troubles
still to come…haunted by the fear that…their ascent from back-street dust
would end where it had begun… Such, I think, is the explanation of why
many of the same people who sincerely supported the mass demonstrations
of October 1973 welcomed the return to dictatorship three years later.
(1977:19)
Anderson is perceptive in emphasising how the insecurity of the new rich, and
their support for a return to authoritarian government, was rooted in the very
newness of their riches. Yet, Anderson is reluctant to recognise that the ‘middle
class’ was divided by the event. The students who were massacred are not
described as ‘middle-class’. Similarly, Wyatt writes of the same event:
Judging only by its members’ behavior, one might conclude that the growth
of a middle class has strengthened a traditionalistic sort of Thai political
conservatism… While they would support the overthrow of the
ThanomPraphas regime in 1973, they also would join the right-wing reaction
against the political chaos of 1976.
(1982:296)
Again the middle class is depicted as singular, and opposed to the uprising.
The 1976 massacre was constructed by the martial law regime as a victory over
Communism. Not until the mid-1980s, after the Communist Party of Thailand had