After four decades of absence, the sickle and hammer has returned to Thai politics in 2020 thanks to student protesters.
In the year of great abnormalities, Free Youth’s controversial decision to use a symbol closely tied to the Communist Regimes of previous years is baffling to say the least.
Let us remind ourselves quickly that the Cold War ended not because of any great conflict but because the Soviet’s economic model did not work. The Communist regimes that still exist today, such as China and Vietnam, have now incorporated capitalism into their economic model to various degrees.
Communism, as Marx imagined it, is dead.
But Communism represents more than just an outdated economic model. It represents class warfare and worker’s rights, which is presumably what naively appealed to Free Youth.
And although the goal is noble in its nature, it risks alienating widespread support. The strategy to use a communist symbol as a representation for worker’s rights is poor taste and ineffective because it misses the forest for the tree. The polar opposite of communism is not a democracy, nor is it a monarchy. Rather, the direct opposite of communism is capitalism.
The twin pillars to the governance of any society, civilization, country are legitimacy and efficiency. One simply cannot maintain the position of power without one or the other, regardless of the type of political or economic system. At the very center of communism ideology is the abolition of private property to prevent the exploitation of the working class by the capitalist class. The group of people that came to power from communist revolutions – usually in a form of a revolutionary committee – derive its legitimacy from the violent overthrow of the establishment and a promise of representing the interests of the working class. All forms of private property are abolished and everybody has to participate directly in economic production equally: a theoretical equitable utopia.
However, as the Soviet Union and China painfully found out, the absence of economic incentives and motivation proves to be an insurmountable obstacle from an economic efficiency perspective.
With the absence of economic motivation, the overall productivity and the quality of life drops to severe degrees illustrated through events such as The Great Chinese Famine, North Korea Famine, and the Soviet Famine.
Concurrently, USSR’s gradual transformation from its Marxist’s ideology to Stalinist’s Bureaucratic Collectivism reveals Soviet’s futile effort to eliminate the concept of privileged class. Privileged aristocrats in Tsarist Russia were replaced with a revolutionary committee, while the crown property was nationalized under the control of a revolutionary committee. Ultimately, it becomes just another transition of power from one group of privileged rulers to another, while the living conditions of the working class remain as poor as before if not worse.
The perception of Democracy and Communist being mortal enemies is heavily propagated during the Cold War by the Americans. But with abundant proof of America’s willingness to support authoritarian regimes around the world, her commitment to democracy is secondary to her commitment to spreading capitalism, promoting the Pax Americana agenda and establishing herself as the world’s biggest economy.
But while America has betrayed democracies on many occasions, she is right about capitalism. It is the most efficient economic model mankind has witnessed. It has produced economic miracles after the industrial revolution and lifted billions of people around the world out of poverty. Ultimately, Gordon Gekko was right: “Greed IS good”.
More accurately, greed is part of human nature and is the most powerful driver for economic production. The key to bring about human happiness is not the false promise of equitable utopia, but in constant improvement, manifesting in improvement to the quality of life and/or social mobility. To put it simply, we are happy because today is better than yesterday.
While capitalists bear the burden of economic productivity, the government’s job is to improve the quality of life. Balancing the right level of tax collection to finance society’s welfare programs and maintaining capitalists’ economic motivation is the government’s most important function. The global problem with capitalism in 2020 is while economic productivity is stronger than ever before, the quality of life for the lower classes has not improved at the same rate, resulting in a worsening quality of life. Thailand is no exception to such a phenomenon. The collusion between the capitalists, politicians, and military has resulted in the negligence to balance the right level of tax collection from the privileged class to finance the quality of life improvement for society. However, this pretext is not a legitimate rationale to be looking backward to communism.
Communism failed and to have any second thoughts about that is not only historically naive but is plain stupid. Advocacy for worker’s rights by campaigning for worker’s welfare and the right to unions is much more reasonable and in-line with democratic socialism akin to those in Scandinavia. And although Free Youth may claim that is its intention, the use of sickle and hammer symbol is not an appropriate choice to represent its socialist agenda. It is in poor taste and disrespectful, especially to our fellow countrymen who were accused of being communists and were killed. It is disrespectful to the Milk Tea Alliance. It is disrespectful to your supporters who are fighting for democracy.
The fight must be for a legitimate governing body that comes from the voice of the people. We are not fighting to replace one privileged class that derives its legitimacy from the divine with another.
Not only will this symbol alienate a significant part of Free Youth’s supporters, but it also put Free Youth into a similar position that PDRC experienced in 2014. From a legitimate protest to call for the abandonment of the amnesty bill and parliament dissolution, the movement was eventually delegitimized by its insistence to continue protesting after the demands were met. Don’t make the same mistake. PDRC also claimed that they were fighting for Thai democracy. Free Youth can do better than this.
by Serichon