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

244 CREATING THE THAI MIDDLE CLASS
interpreted. The media soon designated the protesters as ‘the mobile telephone
mob’ and ‘the automobile mob’. Print journalists made explicit comparisons to the
1973 uprising, seeking to tie together the new rich, the protests and the earlier
political touchstones of middle-classness. The Social Science Association of
Thailand went so far as to produce a survey ‘proving’ that the protestors were
predominantly middle-class. 14 Thus from the beginning, the uprising of 1992 was
constructed as a middle-class event.
Academe followed in this path with relatively little questioning. According to
Thirayut: ‘it has never happened that a mob anywhere has been so full of
automobiles, mobile phones, hand-held radios, and workers of the “white-collar”
type’. It was, said Thirayut, a ‘yuppie’ revolution (Sayamrat Sapda Wichan, 14
June 1992:12). Likhit Dhiravegin argued that the event was of the same order as
the 1973 and 1976 uprisings, connecting the new rich to democracy, and even to
the 1976 demonstrations that many of them had opposed (Likhit 1992). Anek
Laothamathas (1993) wrote articles for various journals, rewrote them in popular
form in the weekly Matichon Sutsapda, and then published them as a book titled
Mob Mu Thu (or Mobile Telephone Mob). Anek, a student leader in 1976,
attributed the uprising to the ‘middle class’, and to ‘entrepreneurs’. Anek
reconstructs the earlier uprisings as well, calling the students a ‘proxy’ for the middle
class in those earlier events (1993:61).
Not long after the 1992 uprising, the Political Economy Center of Chulalongkorn
University organised a conference in ‘an attempt to come to grips with the
phenomenon of the “middle class” in the protests of May 1992’ (Sungsidh and
Pasuk 1993:27). Aimed at an academic audience, the analysis is more
sophisticated than that which appeared in the press, and several of the authors
attempt to determine the structural position of ‘the middle class’. There is no
agreement on definitions, yet there is a general assumption that there is a middle
class, and only one middle class. The introduction sets the tenor for much of the
book:
Many protestors arrived at the demonstration site in their large cars,
carrying their hand phones… Local newspaper [sic] reported that the
majority of the demonstrators were ‘middle-class’. They included business
executives, stockbrokers, civil servants, owners of small and medium
businesses, civil servants, academics, other white-collar workers, and
educated persons. Students and political activists were present, but formed a
small minority of the crowd… The typical member of the ‘mob’ was a well-off,
well-educated, white-collar worker.
(Sungsidh and Pasuk 1993a:27—8). 15
Aimed at an academic audience, the publication resulting from the conference
(Sungsidh and Pasuk 1993b) presents a more sophisticated analysis than that
which appeared in the press, and several of the authors attempt to determine the
structural position of ‘the middle class’. Some of the papers in the collection do