The King of Bangkok quickly adapted himself to gain from these opportunities and fought to centralize the state under his own power in the face of internal and external challenges. Thailand’s capitalist revolution was not carried out by the bourgeoisie in the same style as the English or French revolutions. In Thailand’s case, the ruler of Bangkok, King Rama the 5th or “King Chulalongkorn,” brought about a revolutionary transformation of the political and economic system in response to both pressure from an outside world which was already dominated by capitalism and class struggle within.
Rama the 5th‘s revolution was to create a centralized and unified nation-state under the rule of Thailand’s first absolute monarchy. This involved destroying the power of his Sakdina rivals, the Moon Nai, nobles, and local Jao Hua Muang. Politically this was done by appointing a civil service bureaucracy to rule outer regions and economically, by abolishing their power to control forced labor and hence surplus value.
Forced labor was also abolished in response to class struggle from below, since Prai had a habit of trying to escape corvée labor and both Prai and Taht would often deliberately work inefficiently. Forced labor was replaced by wage labor and private property rights in land ownership was introduced for the first time. Furthermore, investment in production of agricultural goods for the world market became more important than the simple use of surplus production for consumption and trade.
The shortage of labor for capitalist accumulation was initially solved by recruiting labor from China in the early part of the twentieth century. Much later, beginning in the early 1960s, a large surge in “indigenous” wage labor occurred as a result of poor peasants being pulled off the land, often from the north-east, into more productive workshops and factories in urban areas, especially around Bangkok. Later still, Thai capitalism started to depend on migrant labor from Burma and other neighboring countries.
The capitalist transformation and the construction of the first Thai nation state, a product of continuous change, occurred at a time when similar transformations were taking place throughout colonized Southeast Asia. In the neighboring colonies belonging to Britain, France, and the Netherlands, state centralization and the development of a capitalist economy, based upon wage labor was also taking place.
In fact, we should view the process of Thai state formation as the “internal colonization” of the north, south, and northeast by the Chakri rulers of Bangkok. Certainly, the various northern and northeastern revolts against Bangkok indicate this to be true. The civil war today in the Muslim south also has its roots in this process. The main point to bear in mind is that the changes taking place in “un-colonized” Thailand were not very different from the rest of colonized Southeast Asia.
The So-Called Power of the King Today
Many activists in Thailand believe that they live under an absolute monarchy, but nothing could be further from the truth. Since the 1932 Revolution the monarchy has had little power in itself. Instead, it acts as a willing tool of the military and conservatives. Although criticism of the monarchy can weaken the junta and hasten the long overdue day that Thailand becomes a republic, the military dictatorship remains the main enemy.
Elites have ruled Thailand for decades through a conservative-royalist network that cultivates an image of the king as an all-powerful god. Yet the previous king, Pumipon, was always weak and characterless, and his power a fiction. Over the years, Pumipon was happy to play this role, benefitting from all regimes, whether military dictatorships or elected governments. Under the elected Thaksin Shinawatra government (2001-6), for instance, the king praised the government’s extra-judiciary killings in its “war on drugs”, in which many hundreds of people were murdered. Pumipon’s rambling speeches used obscure language and were reproduced by the elites like sacred texts, but the words contained little substance until they were interpreted in the media by the conservative members of the ruling class in order to suit their own interests.