Rethinking Myanmar's Left Intellectual History: The Subaltern Politics of Banmaw Tin Aung and Thakin Po Hla Gyi

Dialectical Anthropology, 2024

This article historicizes and conceptualizes the Myanmar radical tradition: a tradition of thought and practice that has animated radical politics across Myanmar's twentieth and twenty-first centuries. From anti-colonial struggle to decolonization, and from communist insurgency to left feminism, ethnic rebellion, and today's revolutionary upsurge following the 2021 coup d'état, this radical tradition is best understood not as something bounded or solitary. Rather, it names a productive conjoining of radical thought and practice from within Myanmar, as well as from other times and places, beginning in the imperial world order of the early twentieth century. Revisiting scholarship on transatlantic and transpacific radicalisms, we argue that attention to imperialism offers important insights into Myanmar's modern history and contemporary dynamics, including the Myanmar radical tradition. Yet, the Myanmar radical tradition-heterogeneous and internally conflictual, a site of historical dispute-also sheds light on the changing imperial world order, which we show has a fundamentally reactive, counter-revolutionary quality. Today's late imperialism, we argue, can be seen as a retaliatory response to the long arc of decolonization, a story within which Myanmar's contemporary revolutionary struggle renders the Myanmar radical tradition very much a living tradition.

Politics and Constitutions in Southeast Asia, 2017

All three constitutional texts Myanmar adopted in 1947, 1974 and 2008 were quite different in content and spirit. They were framed in different political contexts, and under the supervision of different leaderships with diverse backgrounds and often divergent political agendas. Above all, they made very different references (if at all) to the role of the Tatmadaw as a major state institution, and a potential policymaker. The texts adopted in 1947 and 1974 did neither aim to entrench military rule nor institutionalize the political intervention of the armed forces. This chapter thus seeks to understand how and why the Tatmadaw has chosen in the early 1990s to formulate – and make legal with the 2008 Constitution – its own constitutional vision and establish for the post-junta political it envisioned for the 2010s, what I define as a “constitutional praetorianism”.

2008

Critical Asian Studies, 2018

This commentary examines how futurity has been imagined across politics and political economy in Burma/Myanmar. Three areas are discussed: the revolutionary horizons of anti-colonialists, who combined Buddhist and Marxist ideas of historical progress; the developmental socialism of the early independence area, with its industrial telos and modernist commitments; and a contemporary development project in southern Myanmar, where processes of dispossession are troubling earlier temporal imaginaries. I suggest that a vision of postcolonial transformation coheres across anti- colonial and early independence claims to futurity. This temporal imaginary, which I call postcolonial futurism, promises transitions from farm to factory, peasant to the proletariat, and precapital to capital. This imaginary resonated widely. Today, however, scholars of South and Southeast Asia argue that modernist promises of transition now lack empirical and political purchase amid ongoing dispossession and trends towards low-wage, informal labour. Yet in the wake of postcolonial futurism, responses to dispossession are creating novel political possibilities. Responding to Kuan-Hsing Chen’s call to rework Bandung internationalism in the present, I consider how struggles over dispossession today indicate both openings and limits for the making of new political futures. Integrating Glen Coulthard’s work on colonialism and dispossession, I argue that decolonizing subjectivity is central to this process.

Critical Asian Studies, 2021

The 1989 collapse of the Communist Party of Burma through rank-and-file mutiny, and its splintering into manifold ethnic armed organizations, presaged a weakening of prospects for any leftist project across ethnic lines in Myanmar. These developments coincided with the flourishing of so-called new wars, in Myanmar and elsewhere, organized around identity politics rather than ideology. For liberal critics, such developments confirmed a belief that leftist projects could only ever be an authoritarian imposition over ascriptive ethnic difference. Considering such critiques, this article presents an alternative approach to leftist politics in Myanmar, as advanced by author and journalist Bhamo Tin Aung in his 1963 novel, Yoma Taikbwe, which narrates the emergence of antifascist struggle under wartime Japanese occupation. The book articulates a leftist politics that attends to ethnic difference as an experience grounded in uneven political economy, thus paralleling arguments from the Black radical tradition. In this way, Bhamo Tin Aung pointed to a leftist politics realized through negotiation across difference. It is a politics that remains as pertinent as ever, given worsening class inequality and enduring ethnic chauvinism, in Myanmar and elsewhere, and given the importance of cross-ethnic solidarity in the struggle against military rule following Myanmar’s February 2021 coup.

Asian Journal of Law and Society, 2020

Freedom from Fear is probably Aung San Suu Kyi’s best-known statement in English on what people throughout Myanmar aspired to achieve by rising up against military dictator- ship. Written in acceptance of the 1990 Sakharov Prize, and published subsequently in a book of the same title, this short essay emphasizes that it was not only economic collapse that provoked nationwide protests against army-installed one-party rule in 1988, but also people’s disgust at being forced to live fearfully for so long.1 Its author points to the close relationship that fear has with corruption. She extolls the rule of law as a means to punish corrupt offenders and preserve human dignity. Though by the time Aung San Suu Kyi wrote Freedom from Fear, she was leading the National League for Democracy, hers is not so much a call for democracy as it is an appeal for liberalism. Read by the lights of one influential account, it is a quintessentially liberal appeal, inasmuch as liberalism aspires to do no more and no less than create conditions under which the members of a polity can enjoy personal freedom.2 That means, above all, that they have freedom from arbitrary interference and from unconstrained violence committed by state agents. A startlingly simple idea, it is also one that, as history has shown, is tremendously difficult to realize. Given Aung San Suu Kyi’s three-decades-long prominence in the politics of her birth- place, and the persistence of liberal thought in her public language, one might expect that students of Myanmar’s current affairs would have taken political liberalism seriously. But the tendency has been to overlook liberalism in favour of democracy as the overarching category for interpreting and assessing what has been going on since military dictatorship formally disestablished itself in 2011, opening the path for Aung San Suu Kyi to bring her party into government in 2016. Now a book by Roman David and Ian Holliday, simply entitled Liberalism and Democracy in Myanmar, has brought liberalism in...

Conflict in Myanmar: War, Politics, Religion, 2016

Concluding chapter of "Conflict in Myanmar: War, Politics, Religion", Nick Cheesman & Nicholas Farrelly, eds (Singapore: ISEAS, 2016), 353-366.

European Journal of East Asian Studies, 2018

This article examines the trajectory of struggles over land and resources in Dawei, a town in southern Myanmar. The site of a major special economic zone project, Dawei has seen sustained mobilisation around displacement, dispossession and environmental degradation, against the backdrop of national political and economic reforms. Recently, scholars have argued that earlier visions of postcolonial transition have lost their empirical and political purchase, as farmers dispossessed of land increasingly become excluded from formal capitalist production. What happens to politics and political form if dynamics of exclusion, rather than transition, organise political activity under today's conditions of accumulation? Repurposing Kalyan Sanyal's concept of postcolonial capitalism, this article describes and theorises the politics of disposses-sion in Dawei. Tracing the political activities of activist groups and villagers, it argues that two contrasting political trajectories—one secular–egalitarian, one situational– differential—constitute a heterogeneous political field, reflecting the complexity of postcolonial capitalism itself.

Journal of Current Southeast Asian Affairs, 2020

Economic justice was the catch-cry of Burma's independence struggle and a defining issue of postcolonial party politics. Yet, despite severe economic disparities and social vulnerability , class and inequality are now largely absent from the ideology and policy platform of Aung San Suu Kyi and her party, the National League for Democracy (NLD). What explains the absence of class inequality from contemporary Burmese politics? Drawing on historical research and extensive fieldwork in provincial Myanmar since 2013, this article focuses on how the junta's post-1988 strategy of state-building shaped the political development of the NLD. It focuses specifically on how the military junta's dissembling of Ne Win's dysfunctional welfare state, control over market reform, and selective suppression of civil society privileged economic elites and religious philanthropic networks within the democracy movement while undermining labour activists and more overtly partisan groups. The resulting weakness of class-based interests within the democracy movement prior to 2011 has enabled commercial elites and market solutions to steer the organisational and ideological direction of Myanmar's most prominent democratic political vehicle, the NLD, since liberalisation. Reflecting these social and institutional constraints, after taking office in 2016 the programmatic agenda of Suu Kyi's NLD has plotted market liberalisation, foreign investment, and individual moral revival as the primary paths to a more "democratic" Myanmar, largely ignoring the dire inequality and economic injustices bequeathed by military dictatorship. If Myanmar's democracy is to endure, the article concludes that structural reforms must be advanced, especially by the NLD, which encourage political representatives to address the precarity experienced by ordinary people.