DEMOCRACY'S RULES
SORAVIS JAYANAMA
Today, we are facing an urgent and direct call to act, to choose Samak Sundaravej over the People's Alliance for Democracy or vice-versa. Or we are encouraged to reject both of them, often in the name of national reconciliation, consensual politics, nonviolence, etc. Are they real choices? What do these choices exclude?
A lot of thinking is however needed first, lest our decision unwittingly buttresses the hegemonic ideological coordinates and power constellations. To search for a meaningful or potent choice let's consider a number of things.
Is it simply that Thai politics is at an impasse (which no doubt it is) or is it also liberal and electoral democracy itself that is in a deadlock? Has liberal democracy itself reached or exceeded the limits of its emancipatory potential since it has by and large transmogrified into "formal legalism" (eg, we have to unconditionally and hence unthinkingly accept the "rules of the game" or the election results despite the fact that they are manipulated or manufactured by media, money, and power because "the people have spoken", etc.)? Elections can no longer create a rupture in what is. Rather, they are designed to generate and maintain the illusion of change while keeping things exactly as they are, leaving intact illegitimate exclusions, violent hierarchies and institutions, and gross inequalities and thereby making countless lives unlivable. Elections have been about the preservation of the powers-that-be and what they possess. There is thus no shortage of evidence suggesting that our society is not democratic enough, not universal enough. We can no longer continue playing this game of electoral nihilism. Must we rather think "beyond", as opposed to behind, liberal democracy such as councils - democracy, direct democracy, self-organising communities, etc? We should stop fetishising liberal democracy, which is the political form of late capitalism, and explore other's emancipatory sites.
Instead of rushing to condemn the PAD as reactionaries ranging from Samak to the United Front of Democracy Against Dictatorship, Thitinan Pongsudhirak ("The tyranny of a PAD-led minority", Bangkok Post, Sept 1) to Matthew Arnold ("The PAD has become Thailand's international embarrassment", Bangkok Post, Sept 3) have done, we should interpret it as a right move but in the wrong direction. Like it or hate it, the PAD movement must be commended for its proto-revolutionary enthusiasm (especially the idea that it's not useless to revolt), high discipline, mass mobilisation, affirmation of the irreducibility of social antagonism and the value of militancy for a cause, maintenance of a distance from the state, constant disclosure that Samak has no clothes on, and so on.
Reactionaries accused the PAD of illegally occupying Government House. They simply don't get it, do they? A proper political act seeks to redefine or re-coordinate the meaning of the possible, the legal, the democratic, the good life, etc. Politics is an art of the impossible. It is a rupture in the status quo - in what is. Too naive or utopian? The real utopian position today is rather that of someone who thinks that democracy means majority rule, constitutionalism, and parliamentarianism. Therefore, we should continue being governed by Samak and Co despite the costs.
Reactionaries ask, What right does the PAD have to occupy Government House or to overthrow an elected government? The only right the PAD has is the right of the governed who could no longer stand the way they are being governed and the things that are being done in their name. PAD protestors have no qualification to speak and act. However, when those who have no qualification speak out and act when they shouldn't, that is democracy, that is the materialisation of the demos. The idea that we must be obedient to the state or government, whatever the cost, is definitely fascist. Just because the government gives us gifts or benefits us through its populist policies does not mean that we have to be obedient to it. The state does not own us. The state belongs to the people, to the governed. Therefore, we are the master; the state is our servant. The seizure of Government House and the call for a new government attest to this fact. After all, democracy is ultimately about the capacity to make a change - not primarily about elections, majority-rule, etc. Freedom is a collective work.
The PAD is also a right move for the following reason. Given that Thai society is inclined to confuse a military coup with a revolution, the reigning political consensus in the wake of the Sept 19, 2006 coup is that a coup/revolution should no longer take place in the future. We tend to forget that revolutionary upheavals, including violent ones, have contributed to or brought about great democratic advances throughout world history. In so doing, we have deprived ourselves of an important political tool. On this view, the future should be post-revolutionary-read "uneventful" and thus reactionary. So we are left with mass movement as a possible vehicle for change. This is what the PAD is engaging in. It is possible that once the PAD is crushed, reactionaries will take it as a golden opportunity to condemn mass mobilisations and constituent power to a social death. Struggling for Big Causes will be seen as politically naive and irresponsible or depicted as merely a prelude to a military coup-paving the way for a post-revolutionary and post-political society.
Nevertheless, the PAD is a right move in the wrong direction. It is not radical or universal enough. It selectively confronts reactionary forces. It does not see that the primary contradiction in Thai society is between reactionary capitalist forces (old and new, high and low) and emancipatory politics. At best, it can only foment a change that is no change, a "revolution without a revolution". It is thus an active quietism par excellence.
Against the backdrop of the state of emergency, which entails the suspension of civil liberties and the enforcement of lawless law, is not "We are all rebels" a proper democratic declaration? It makes visible the violence of the state and resists the roguishness of state power. The state is no longer our protector. The state puts you in quite a state when it calls you a rebel. It means abandonment and abjection. It means that you are pushed outside the pale of civilisation - in essence, de-humanised and therefore unworthy, paving the way for actual physical violence. (Small wonder that a state of emergency is declared. By making the "rebels" absolutely vulnerable, Samak is able to hide or displace his own political vulnerability.) "We are all rebels" contends that the state should count everyone equally. It seeks to rupture the inegalitarian way that the state is dividing or counting people, in order to maximise the livability of non-normative minds and bodies and to re-coordinate the field of possibility.
An excluded choice in Thai politics is thus that of militant rebels collectively fighting for a major cause against non-universal and reactionary forces, for an emancipatory and egalitarian politics beyond liberal democracy.
Soravis Jayanama is a lecturer of Political Science at Chulalongkorn University.
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