Cliffites Back Capitalist Party in Elections

Thailand: Imperialists Demand “Stability”

Abolish the Monarchy!

For a Workers and Peasants Government!

The following article is reprinted from Australasian Spartacist No. 214 (Spring 2011), newspaper of the Spartacist League of Australia, section of the International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist).

In a widely anticipated outcome, the bourgeois party Pheu Thai (PT) won Thailand’s 3 July general elections, defeating Abhisit Vejjajiva’s ruling Democrat Party (DP), which had been installed in government following a judicial coup in 2008. Yingluck Shinawatra, the newly elected PT prime minister, is the sister of exiled former prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra, broadly seen as de facto leader of the party. Among those backing PT in the elections was Giles Ji Ungpakorn, exiled founding member of Turn Left Thailand and a member of the Cliffite British Socialist Workers Party. His article trumpeting the PT election victory as “a slap in the face for the dictatorship” was eagerly republished by much of the reformist left in Australia, including Solidarity, Socialist Alternative and Socialist Alliance. However this was far from a victory for the oppressed Thai masses.

Like Thaksin’s earlier Thai Rak Thai party (banned after the 2006 military coup that ousted Thaksin), the bourgeois Pheu Thai presents a nationalist, populist program that postures to ameliorate conditions for the oppressed masses. Election pledges such as raising the minimum daily wage to 300 baht (about $10), debt restructuring for the poor and a guaranteed price for rice farmers ensured widespread support for PT among the impoverished rural masses in the populous north and north-east of the country. For Pheu Thai, such reforms serve to co-opt and contain plebeian discontent within the framework of the brutal and exploitative capitalist system. With concerns among the imperialists about parts of PT’s populist platform, particularly raising the minimum wage, a key purpose of Thaksin’s visit to Japan in August was to assure the Japanese imperialists that “wage increases [will] not be that high and corporate taxes [will] also be reduced” (Nikkei Shimbun, 24 August).

Economically, Thailand is largely a neocolony of Japan—some 40 percent of total foreign investment is from Japan—while the anti-communist alliance with the U.S. dominates politically. The imperialists have made it clear that they are running out of patience with the ongoing bitter divisions within the Thai bourgeoisie, centred around PT and its Red Shirt supporters on one side and the DP and Yellow Shirts on the other. The neocolonial masters are demanding their Thai underlings come together to keep the oppressed and poor down and ensure a stable environment for capitalist exploitation. U.S. president Barack Obama phoned Yingluck after the election to congratulate her. Together they affirmed the importance of the U.S.-Thai alliance and pledged to ensure “peace and stability” in the Asia-Pacific region. Earlier, Nikkei Shimbun, mouthpiece of Japanese imperialism, wrote in a 5 July post-election editorial: “It is desirable also for stability in the region that an end will be put to the serious domestic strife. More than anything else, it is necessary for the next PM Yingluck to work towards national reconciliation.”

Indeed, Yingluck Shinawatra campaigned under the banner of “reconciliation” during the elections. With its large victory, and particularly its support from the poorer layers of society, PT is well placed to deliver on the demands of the imperialist masters and Thai bourgeoisie for “stability.” Furthermore, as reported in a 30 June Asia Times article, since February, “high-level secret talks” had been held between the royal palace, military and Thaksin camps in which the military agreed to allow Pheu Thai to form a government. In exchange, Thaksin’s PT would not pursue reprisals against military leaders over the 2006 coup and the 2010 bloody crackdown against anti-government Red Shirt protesters, and “refrain broadly from intervening in military affairs.”

Thaksin’s envoy was also pushed to “rein in the anti-monarchy elements in his camp.” In her first official address to the nation as PM, Yingluck pledged her loyalty to the deeply repressive monarchy, a symbol and purveyor of Thai nationalism, and historic rallying point for capitalist reaction in Thailand. In mid-September, the new PT coalition government denied bail to labour activist and Red Shirt supporter, Somyot Prueksakasemsuk, in prison for allegedly insulting the king, and has already jailed a further three people under the lèse majesté law. We say: Free all those arrested under this draconian law! Drop the charges! Down with the lèse majesté law! Abolish the monarchy!

As revolutionary Marxists, the International Communist League (ICL) has defended the Red Shirt activists against bloody state repression. At the same time we stand in political opposition to this bourgeois-populist movement, which is closely allied to Pheu Thai and is defined by its support to, and from, the billionaire telecommunications mogul Thaksin. The Red Shirts’ aims and politics are counterposed to the interests of the workers and rural toilers who have rallied behind it (see “Thailand: For a Workers and Peasants Government!” WV No. 972, 21 January).

In contrast to this principled class line, Ungpakorn, and his pseudo-Marxist cheerleaders internationally, enthusiastically promote the Red Shirts. In doing so, they reinforce deadly illusions in the capitalist state by pushing the liberal reformist lie that, with enough pressure from the masses, the state can be forced to reorder its priorities in the interests of the working class and oppressed. Following the elections, Ungpakorn wrote, “It will be up to the Red Shirt movement to push the Government into making more radical reforms rather than doing secret and dirty compromises with the Military and the elites.” Calling on the new PT government to “start to build a welfare state,” he counsels that money for state subsidies such as cheap, government-subsidised rice “should come from taxing the rich and drastically cutting the Military budget” (redthaisocialist.com, 6 September). The blood-drenched Thai military stands at the core of the capitalist state, along with the police, courts and prisons. This state exists to defend the rule of the Thai bourgeoisie. It cannot be reformed but must be shattered and replaced by a workers state.

For a Trotskyist Party, Tribune of the People

In semicolonial countries like Thailand, the role of bourgeois-nationalist governments, including that of Yingluck’s Pheu Thai, is to ensure the exploitation of the masses and the plunder of resources to strengthen the power and the profits of the local bourgeoisie and their imperialist masters. In doing so they act to ruthlessly enforce the capitalist order. During the election campaign PT pledged to reinforce “drug suppression,” with Thaksin ominously promising to “eliminate the drugs problem within 12 months” (The Nation on Sunday, 24 April). The Thaksin government’s savage “war on drugs” resulted in some 3,000 extrajudicial killings by the police and military. Such campaigns mean general state repression against anybody deemed “undesirable,” serving to regiment and intimidate the masses and directly threaten the working class. Similarly, Thaksin’s bloody campaign against the Malay Muslim minority in the south also meant the slaughter of many. “Emergency rule,” introduced in three southern provinces by the Thaksin government in 2005, was extended by the outgoing Vejjajiva government this July. The Thai working class must defend the Muslim minority against the ongoing state repression, without giving any political support to the Islamists. Fighting for full democratic and national rights, it must demand that the Thai military and security forces get out of the southern provinces.

The antagonisms between the Red Shirt and Yellow Shirt camps that have dominated Thai politics over the past few years reflect the divisions within the ruling class over how to deal with the fundamental contradictions of Thai capitalist society. With its strong, modern industrial sector based on massive imperialist investment resting alongside an impoverished rural and urban petty bourgeoisie, Thailand is a classic case of combined and uneven development. The growth of industry has created a modern industrial proletariat with immense social weight and potential social power. Women, deeply oppressed in the predominantly Buddhist Thai society, form a large majority of heavily exploited factory workers. Millions of workers in Thailand barely eke out an existence, with immigrant workers from Burma, Laos and Cambodia facing the worst conditions of all.

It is necessary to struggle for the Trotskyist perspective of permanent revolution. In countries of belated capitalist development, such as Thailand, the democratic aspirations of the masses can only be met through the dictatorship of the proletariat. The conquest of power by the proletariat, with the support of the poor and landless peasant masses, can only be consolidated through extending the revolution internationally, particularly to the advanced capitalist countries. This perspective requires building a Leninist-Trotskyist party to mobilise the proletariat, standing as a tribune of the people, against all wings of the Thai bourgeoisie in the struggle to overthrow the exploitative capitalist system through socialist revolution. For a workers and peasants government in Thailand!

Cliffite Drummer Boys for Imperialism

Ungpakorn broadcast his unprincipled call for a vote to Pheu Thai in a 15 June post on his website:

“Normally, no socialists should ever call for a vote for a capitalist party in any election. To do so would risk making the kind of mistakes that the Stalinists used to make when they adopted the Popular Front strategy, building alliances with the bourgeoisie and making anti-working class concessions. But it is my opinion, that in the coming general election in Thailand, socialists have no choice but to call for a vote for the Peua Thai Party. Peua Thai is a thoroughly capitalist party.”

Ungpakorn talks of socialist principles only to trample on them. It takes some chutzpah for him to lecture against the Stalinists’ popular-front strategy...while peddling the same kind of class-collaborationist betrayal. The call for a vote to Pheu Thai, contrary to Ungpakorn’s cynical disclaimer that “We make no concessions to Peua Thai in doing so,” only serves to tie workers and the oppressed to the brutal Thai bourgeoisie. The deadly consequences of such class collaboration were played out in Indonesia in 1965-66 with the military-led massacre of more than a million Communists, workers, peasants and ethnic Chinese. This catastrophe was a direct product of the support by the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) to the capitalist government of the “progressive” Sukarno. Politically disarmed by the PKI’s “joint unity” course, the proletariat was unable to defend itself when the generals, backed by imperialism, struck to behead the PKI.

Of course, supporting bourgeois forces in elections is nothing new for the Cliffite International Socialists and its offshoots. It flows from their reformist program of working within the bounds of capitalism. In Australia, the competing Cliffite groups, Solidarity and Socialist Alternative, repeatedly call on workers to vote for the small-time capitalist Greens party, especially in order to pressure the Australian Labor Party. Grotesquely, a leader of the Zimbabwean Cliffites was elected to parliament in 2000 as a representative of the right-wing, pro-imperialist bourgeois party, Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), and the group supported the MDC leader in the 2002 presidential elections.

It is also no accident that Ungpakorn should call for political support to a representative of the viciously anti-communist Thai bourgeoisie, whose state has served as a bastion of counterrevolutionary terror within southeast Asia and which today plays an integral role in the U.S.-led imperialist military encirclement of the Chinese bureaucratically deformed workers state. In fact Ungpakorn’s support to PT is in line with his reformist claptrap that capitalist Thailand needs “economic Democracy where the people decide on investment and production. This is the true Democracy of Socialism. It is a million miles from the Stalinist dictatorships of North Korea, China, Laos, Vietnam or Cuba” (“The Red-Yellow Class Struggle for Democracy,” 20 January).

Here, Ungpakorn stands firmly in the anti-Communist traditions of the Cliff tendency, which began in Britain in 1950 with the late Tony Cliff and his followers, renegades from Trotskyism. Ensconced in the British Labour Party, and bowing to the pressures of Cold War I hysteria, Cliff and his supporters capitulated to British imperialism and refused to defend the Soviet Union, China and North Korea against imperialist attack during the Korean War. The “theoretical” justification for adopting this pro-imperialist program was Cliff’s claim that the Soviet Union, which at the time was a bureaucratically degenerated workers state, had become “state capitalist” some 20 years earlier.

Ever since, the Cliff tendency has been a loyal servant of capitalist democracy and an anti-Marxist opponent of the revolutionary workers movement and all those countries where capitalism has been overthrown. Throughout the anti-Soviet Cold War II 1980s they stood with the imperialists against the Soviet Union. They sided with the woman-hating, CIA-funded Islamic fundamentalist mujahedin cutthroats against the liberating forces of the Soviet Red Army in Afghanistan and championed the anti-Semitic, anti-abortion reactionary Solidarność—the chosen instrument of the Vatican, Wall Street and Western social democracy for capitalist counterrevolution in Poland. They celebrated the Yeltsin/Bush capitalist counterrevolution in the Soviet Union in 1991-92, which ushered in mass unemployment, starvation and nationalist fratricide. Today they back the imperialists’ counterrevolutionary drive against China and the remaining deformed workers states.

The overturn of capitalism in China, North Korea, Cuba, Vietnam and Laos are victories for the world’s working masses. However, in the absence of the working class fighting as a contender for power in its own name under the leadership of a revolutionary, internationalist party, these overturns resulted in bureaucratically deformed workers states. Resting atop the collectivised property forms are parasitic, nationalist regimes similar to the Stalinist bureaucratic caste in the former Soviet Union, which usurped political power from the working class in a political counterrevolution in 1923-24. Just as we defended the Soviet degenerated workers state, the ICL stands for the unconditional military defence of the remaining deformed workers states against imperialism and internal counterrevolution despite the bureaucratic misleaders who undermine the social overturns and are an obstacle to their international extension. We fight for proletarian political revolutions to oust the Stalinist bureaucracies and establish governments based on genuine workers councils and an internationalist program. This requires forging Leninist-Trotskyist parties.

Workers in Thailand must be won to the defence of the remaining deformed workers states if they are to successfully liberate themselves from the capitalist rulers. Fighting for a socialist federation of southeast Asia, and linked to the struggle for proletarian revolution in the imperialist heartlands, the creation of a workers and peasants government in Thailand would reverberate throughout the region and beyond. Our model is the October 1917 Russian Revolution led by Lenin and Trotsky’s Bolshevik Party, which established the world’s first workers state and was a beacon for the oppressed around the world. For new October Revolutions! For world socialist revolution!