[p2p-research] Fwd: online coverage of thai political crisis

[Michel Bauwens]

Interesting article,

but I remain convinced that the PAD is mostly middle class, and gets
enormous support from state forces, including monetary support from the
highest level of a 'central institution' in thai life (pad protesters got
100 baht per day, but they were from the city, daad protesters from isaan
received 1,000, but that barely covers the cost of coming to bkk). Both
movements are popular and genuine, but also sustained by different factions
of the establishment. The PAD could not have won without complicity, which
is lacking for the DAAD. So the persistence can be partly explained by the
funding available, which equals at least a minimum wage for those that are
very active

anti-capitalism is not necessarily from the left, and they indeed equate
capitalism with westernism, harking back to the good old days of
hierarchical feudalism ...; I seen nothing progressive about that
anti-westernism, but rather a nationalist reaction to evacuate problems with
their own rulers;
the thai unions are part of the state apparatus, very well connected and
their workers are amongst the most privileged in the country

Giles Ungpakorn is also adamant that it is an anti-democratic movement and
he has studied them well ...

agree with your points on thaksin and his treatment of minorities .. but
take note that this doesn't bother the thais themselves, he had majority
support, popular support, both for his policies in the south, and for his
war on drugs ..; he was a thug indeed, perhaps comparable to Peron?


On 4/14/09, Andy Robinson <ldxar1 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I'd add that we need to keep in mind the marginal peoples as well.  Thaksin
> was a populist of the "unmarked" Thais, and very much an enemy of the
> marginal peoples - the peoples of the Northwest and the Muslims of the
> South.  Particularly notorious are the genocidal "war on drugs" in the
> northwest and the massacre of Muslim protesters in the south; the situation
> of the Akha also needs to be borne in mind.  This is the reason certain
> broadly "progressive" or excluded forces (human rights groups, southern
> Muslims) have sided with PAD, even while socialists and the rural poor seem
> to have sided with DAAD.
>
> see here:
>
>
> http://globalvoicesonline.org/2008/09/01/thailand-protesters-misunderstood-by-western-media/
>
>
> I have to say the protest mobilisations by both sides have been rather
> impressive, and shown the power of networks in relation to state forces.
> The airport shutdown and the summit shutdown have shown the vulnerability of
> key nodes as capitalism relies on "just in time" flows through a limited
> range of nodes which are vulnerable to disruption.  As in much of the global
> South, social networks also seem to run within and through what are
> officially state organs, including the police and army.  The reaction to the
> DAAD mobilisations seems to have been a lot more violent than the reaction
> to the PAD mobilisations because of political sympathies.  But in both
> cases, the existing government seemed worried about being as violent or
> repressive as it might be.  There have been summit protests in the North for
> ten years now but there has never been a summit actually shut down
> completely.
>
>
> The persistence, and ability to revive, of these movements is also
> impressive.  We have seen instances of months-long protest mobilisations.
> The longest mobilisations I've seen in the North have lasted about two weeks
> (the France banlieue revolt om 2005 and the Greek unrest last December).
> I'd be very interested to know how, technically, this is possible.  How PAD
> was able to recover from the events of October and the apparent downturn,
> and how DAAD was able to re-mobilise after a break from December.  I've
> heard that protests at specific sites have rotating personnel, and the
> numbers seem to be greater.  But what else allows this kind of persistence?
>
>
>
> bw
>
> Andy
>
> _______________________________________________
> p2presearch mailing list
> p2presearch at listcultures.org
> http://listcultures.org/mailman/listinfo/p2presearch_listcultures.org
>
>


-- 
Working at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dhurakij_Pundit_University -
http://www.dpu.ac.th/dpuic/info/Research.html -
http://www.asianforesightinstitute.org/index.php/eng/The-AFI

Volunteering at the P2P Foundation:
http://p2pfoundation.net  - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net -
http://p2pfoundation.ning.com

Monitor updates at http://del.icio.us/mbauwens

The work of the P2P Foundation is supported by SHIFTN,
http://www.shiftn.com/
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/attachments/20090414/833bd0af/attachment.html>