Excerpt from Thailand Political Peasants by Andrew Walker Four interrelated transformations have created a new environment for

political action (in Thailand) First, peasants in Thailand are, for the most part, no longer poor. They are now middleincome peasants. They are not necessarily well-off, nor do they enjoy the consumer comforts of the urban middle class, but dramatic improvements in the rural standard of living have raised most of them well above the water level of outright livelihood failure. In most areas of rural Thailand, the primary livelihood challenges have moved away from the classic lowincome challenges of food security and subsistence survival to the middle-income challenges of diversification and productivity improvement. Second, Thailand's middle-income peasants have a diversified economy. Subsistence cultivation is now only a modest component of agricultural activity. There has been a dramatic increase in cash crop production for local and international markets. Even more important is the fact that nonagricultural sources of income have proliferated and they are now more significant than farming for a great many rural households. Only about one in five peasant households rely solely on agricultural income. Agriculture is still important, but peasant livelihoods are no longer predominantly agricultural livelihoods. Peasants are no longer just farmers. Third, peasants in Thailand confront a new form of economic disparity. Thailand has been remarkably successful in tackling absolute poverty, but its performance on relative poverty (inequality) has been much worse. This inequality is not the product of surplus extraction by dominating elites; it is a product of uneven economic development. Disparity is caused by the relatively low productivity of the rural economy, especially the agricultural sector. Incomes in rural areas have certainly improved, but not as fast as incomes in other parts of the economy. In this context, the political challenge for middle-income peasants is not to avoid subsistence-disrupting extractions but to attract productivity-enhancing inputs. Fourth, the Thai state now plays a central role in supporting the peasant economy. As countries develop, their governments often try to address economic disparity by subsidizing the rural economy. The Thai government has enthusiastically taken up this challenge, especially since the mid-1970s. Recognizing the implications of this fiscal shift requires a radical conceptual reorientation. The peasantry has conventionally been defined in terms of its subordinate relationship with external power. An enormous amount of scholarly attention has been placed on the political tussle between state extraction and local resistance. However, in Thailand a new relationship has developed between the state and the rural economy, characterized not by taxation but by subsidy. Thaksin Shinawatra's government epitomized this new arrangement, but it did not create it: Thaksin's rural populism was the product of a long-term shift in the structural dynamics of Thailand's political economy. The contemporary

moral reckoning of the middle-income peasant is not concerned with limiting the state's impositions but with maximizing its largesse POWER IN RURAL THAILAND Studies of power relations in rural Thailand have emphasized three different dimensions: (1) vertical linkages between people of different social status, (2) horizontal class or community solidarities, and (3) dispersed networks of power and potency. The first two approaches tell us a lot about the politics, or lack of it, of Thailand's poor peasantryand they provide some useful insights into recent political developmentsbut they struggle to account for the ambitions and strategies of the new middle-income peasantry. The third, though seemingly somewhat tangential in its attention to supernatural affairs, points in some useful new directions. Vertical Linkages During the 1960s and early 1970s, discussions of politics in rural Thailand were dominated by the patron-client model. American anthropological research, much of it conducted in the village of Bang Chan on the outskirts of Bangkok, played a crucial role in introducing this idea to Thai studies. In two influential articles, Lucien M. Hanks, one of the principle researchers at Bang Chan, argued that social hierarchies in Thailand were based on the differential accumulation of Buddhist merit and, secondarily, inequalities in power and material resources.7 These pervasive hierarchies provided a framework for the development of reciprocal relationships in which those of higher status provided protection and other benefits to those below them in return for tribute, loyalty, and personal service. Patron-client ties extended from the poor peasant household to the king himself, organizing Thai society into numerous overlapping entourages that cut across status divisions. Within these entourages, relations between patrons and clients were multistranded, drawing together economic, social, religious, and legal connections. Yet, despite this intertwining of roles, patron-client relationships were flexible, both because of movement up and down the hierarchy as merit and status were accumulated and lost and because the relationships were easily terminated if they failed to satisfy either party. The system has the familiar shape of Adam Smith's free enterprise, a major study of Bang Chan pointed out, as each person bargains in the open market for the best arrangement he can make, and if this is not satisfactory, he may move elsewhere. In the Cold War context of communist rebellion in Indochina, the idea that the gap between rich and poor in Thailand was mediated by amiable and flexible relations of patronage was reassuring to Thailand's powerful backers. The American government, which was pouring aid and counterinsurgency funds into Thailand, hoped that its investments would create an effective bulwark against communism. American social science provided the perfect rationale, portraying Thailand as a country where a peasant uprising was unlikely due to the lack of horizontal classlike affiliations: There are no publics, no masses, nor even a proletariat; instead of these, segments of the population are provided for more or less adequately according to the circle of their affiliation. In a study of peasant personality in Bang Chan, Herbert P. Phillips found that there was a strong emphasis on the munificence, security and benevolence of the authority figure. This political outlook contributed to a placid community characterized by gentleness, affability, and politeness in most face to-face relationships. Writing about the 1957 national election, Phillips argued that those who voted for the prime minister did so because he is our Master. He has been very good and kind to us. He is like our father, and we are like his children. A similar study in the remote northeast of Thailand by Stephen B. Young described a non-participatory democracy based on peasant expectations that their involvement with government should be minimal, powerful people should be obeyed, and duties were unquestioned obligations imposed by the conditions of life.

Given the apparent passivity and disengagement of the peasantry, the search was on for local luminaries who could provide political leadership and form a vanguard for rural advancement. Likely candidates included village headmen, monks, teachers, health workers, irrigation group leaders, crop traders, rich landowners, and merchants. Based on research in three northern Thai villages, the political scientist Clark D. Neher proposed that village leaders operated as a bridge between the great masses of villagers and the minority group of authorities. These leaders comprised a narrow political stratum that was actively involved in dealings with government officials and in implementing development projects. They stood in contrast to the apoliticals who comprised the vast majority of rural households for whom the political system bears no meaningful relationship to daily activities. These apolitical villagers expressed their needs not on the basis of their own livelihood challenges but according to the specific development agenda of the village leadership. In another important study from northern Thailand, Michael Moerman suggested that village headmen were synaptic leaders who managed transactions between villagers and the national bureaucracy and, perhaps even more important, prevented state officials from meddling in village affairs. Although the role of local leaders has continued to be a core preoccupation of studies of rural politics in Thailand, in the 1980s and 1990s the reputation of such leaders shifted sharply. In a national economy experiencing extraordinarily rapid economic growth, accounts of benevolent patrons and village notables pursuing rural improvement were pushed aside by more confronting profiles of godfathers (jaw pho) who used charisma, money, and strongarm tactics to create local and provincial fiefdoms. These godfathers embodied an unpleasant combination of business and politics. They used money from provincial enterprises, many of them illegal, to mobilize electoral support, and they used the power of political office to convert public resources into private wealth. In this context, a new paradigm emerged to explain the political behavior of the peasantry: vote buying. The exchange of votes for money was said to be coordinated by provincial power brokers and implemented by teams of cashedup canvassers who operated at the district and village levels. In studies of political behavior this electoral corruption was described as a typically rural phenomenon, arising out of poverty, parochialism, low levels of education, and a lack of civic morality. Whereas members of the urban middle class made political decisions on the basis of policies and public interest, gullible and grateful voters in the countryside were readily persuaded to exchange their votes for cash, development projects, or protection. This division in political culture was famously described by the political scientist Anek Laothamatas as a tale of two democracies that could only be united when rural development transformed patronageridden villages into small towns of middle-class farmers or well-paid workers. Most studies of modern patronage and vote buying describe the political influence of local leaders in morally negative terms, although some have pointed out that provincial godfathers emerged out of a quite specific cultural milieu and often derived legitimacy from old-style idioms of patronage, generosity, and local identity. Some accounts pointed out that vote buying itself was embedded in local systems of evaluation and exchange, belatedly granting the beleaguered peasant a modicum of agency within the overarching patron-client framework.