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

246 CREATING THE THAI MIDDLE CLASS
Despite the many books and articles that describe the 1992 uprising as a middleclass
victory, middle-class Thais are not unaware that the great majority among
them went home when the shooting started, while others from the less celebrated
classes fought on. Various accounts, encouraged by those who supported the
military government, claim that Chamlong led the people to their deaths. The
implications of this argument are twofold. First, it shifts some of the blame for the
killing from the military to Chamlong, who might otherwise be seen as the hero of
the uprising. Second, it implies that the demonstrations would have succeeded
without violence, if only Chamlong had not provoked the troops, in the process
absolving ‘the middle class’ for going home when the shooting began. While this
construction of the events is outside the mainstream, it is widely known, and may
account for the fact that Chamlong’s party actually lost seats in Bangkok in the
ensuing election.
CONCLUSION
It should be clear that it is at best analytically dubious to speak of a single middle
class in Thailand. There are instead diverse fragments and diverse constructions
that have not yet been conflated into a single social class. As Giddens (1980)
pointed out, in order for a middle class to become consolidated into a social class, a
closure of mobility is necessary. In Thailand, not only has there been no closure,
but rather the middle class continues to expand, adding more new rich to the
mixture.
The differences in the middle-class fragments are most clear between the
consumer middle class, many of them new rich, and the occupational (status) middle
class, many of them in the media and academe. Despite considerable overlap,
these two groups are fairly distinct in terms of income and education. Many in the
consumer middle class are relatively well off, but not highly educated. The owners
of medium-and small-size enterprises often fit into this category. By way of
contrast, academics, teachers and social workers are well educated and enjoy high
occupational status, but have incomes at the low end of the middle class. Not
surprisingly, this difference manifests itself in the two strands of construction of the
middle class. The occupational middle class–with its high levels of education and
its positions in universities, the media and NGOs–has constructed a middle class
based on an ideology associated with the uprisings of 1973, 1976 and 1992, an
ideology of democracy. High occupational status groups thus compensate for their
lower income through influence over political ideology. The consumer middle-class
construction is based instead on the prestige and lifestyles that come with owning
cars and mobile phones, and on making money. The 1992 uprising demonstrates
the discursive attempts to draw these two strands together.
Thai middle-class culture is still fragmentary in the age of the new rich, and
subject to varied active processes of construction; this has not prevented middleclass
cultural imperialism. It is not openly malicious in intent and often goes
unnoticed. In the main, it has amounted to an attempt by reformists to promote