Etymologies

As José Ortega y Gasset remarked on the challenges of philology or comparative linguistics, ‘translation is a matter of saying in a language precisely what that language tends to pass over in silence.’Footnote ¹ Language simultaneously bestows and destabilises meaning. The complicated task of locating counterparts across Thai and English has long been further vexed by questions of Siam's ambiguous relationship with the West. Peter Jackson writes of the need to combine ‘culturally nuanced reinterpretations of post-structuralism with the empirical findings of Thai area studies’ in order to reach a ‘genealogical understanding of Thai modernity’ that allows for comparison while simultaneously highlighting specificities.Footnote ² Jackson raises the example of prominent scholar Kasian Tejapira, who saw the primary question in the history of Thai leftist thought as ‘the relationship and interaction between national culture and foreign-derived discourse’.Footnote ³ Kasian's task was not the study of Thai politics per se, but the politics of translation.Footnote ⁴ As he concluded:

The interaction amongst Thai and non-Thai scholarship has produced a small but critical set of word pairings that has furthered much of this genealogical understanding. From Kasian, we get communist/khommiunit (คอมมิวนิสต์). Craig Reynolds artfully traced the evolution of feudalism/sakdina/saktina (ศักดินา).Footnote ⁶ From Thak's classic work on Sarit Thanarat, we get revolution/patiwat (การปฏิวัติ).Footnote ⁷ Also, Michael Connors has written at length about the apparent contradictions of perhaps the most problematic pairing of all — democracy/prachatipatai (ประชาธิปไตย).Footnote ⁸

This article does not attempt to say anything about the theory or philosophy of ideology itself. The term has been described as pointing to a black box, peripatetic, semantically promiscuous, and much abused. Efforts to define it run the gamut of the epistemological, cognitive, behaviouralist, sociological and semiotic.Footnote ⁹ There is no general theory which can ‘specify the functions and content of ideology for different societies’;Footnote ¹⁰ the abstraction and complexity of the concept is such that ‘ideology is always, by definition, “ideology of ideology”’.Footnote ¹¹ Kathleen Knight traces the conceptualisation of ideology in American political science over the twentieth century,Footnote ¹² while John Gerring argues for mapping the meanings of ideology on a single, semantic grid for the social sciences more generally.Footnote ¹³ Both conclude that there is a pragmatic consensus on a core definition of ideology as one of coherence, the notion of ideology as a relatively stable set of interrelated ideas. Gerring argues, ‘Ideology, at the very least, refers to a set of idea-elements that are bound together, that belong to one another in a non-random fashion.’Footnote ¹⁴

In Chai-anan Samudavanija's 1973 textbook (reprinted in 1980) Political ideology [udomkān thang kanmūang], he admits to the confusion and complexity of translation. He defines the term ‘ideology’ as a foreign import, but attaches it to the Thai term udomkān Footnote ¹⁵ (อุดมการณ์ or อุดมการ):

Udomkān is a very new term — the Royal Institute's 1950 and 1962 dictionaries do not include it. It is listed in a 1958 Thai–English lexicon, but spelled without the karan indicating a silent letter and listed alongside udomkhatī.Footnote ¹⁷ Moreover, the meaning given is ‘cause, ideal, idealism, idealistic’.

Many of the neologisms corresponding to foreign political terms, particularly those used in international relations, were coined by Prince Wan Waithayakon. His word list, which he began compiling in the 1930s, translates ideology as udomkhatīwitthayā (อุดมคติวิทยา), which suggests ‘study of the ideal/ideals’.Footnote ¹⁸ This was mostly likely the beginning of the confusion, as its root, the Pali udom, means to ‘to abound’ or ‘to be plentiful’, and the Pali kathī refers to ‘principle’ or ‘model’, in contrast to the idea-based root of ideology. It seems that Prince Wan mistakenly seized upon the ‘ideal’ in ideology, taking it to be the most important sememe, when its core sememe is actually ‘idea’. M.R. Nimitmongkol Navarat's 1939 novel Khwāmfan kh ng nakudomkhatī (ความฝันของนักอุดมคติ) is properly translated as The dreams of an idealist.Footnote ¹⁹ A 1947 short story by S Asonchinonda, a writer who would later become a film director, uses the word nakudomkhatī in the title to refer to an idealistic son who wishes to pursue journalism while the practical father prefers law.Footnote ²⁰

In November 1949, Supha Sirimanond, editor of Aks nsān magazine (1949–52) and the first Thai-educated student to thoroughly study Marx's Capital, used the term udomkān in his ‘Letters from the Editor’ in ways suggestive of ‘mission’ or ‘ideals’.Footnote ²¹ Another early instance of the term's usage occurs in 1952 in the most important radical Thammasat University student publication of the time, Thammačhak. The word appeared in the sentence: ‘Under these conditions, we must join together and persevere in our struggle, according to our udomkān.’Footnote ²² However, by the early 1950s, with the appearance of some key communist intellectuals who knew Chinese, such as Udom Sisuwan and Sanan Woraphreuk, ideology was still being translated into Thai as udomkhatī, not udomkān. Udom, in Life and dreams, writes, ‘Yao (the character at issue) begins to dream and construct his own udomkhatī.’Footnote ²³ The distinction between the English terms ideology and ideals is unclear.

Udomkān is thus an inaccurate or misinterpreted coinage for ‘ideology’, rather than an old term that has been invested with new meaning(s).Footnote ²⁴ Its novelty is reflected in the fact that there is no agreement as to its proper spelling.Footnote ²⁵ The 1999 Royal Institute Dictionary lists its definition as the ‘principles that establish an order or approach to action in order to achieve the determined goal’,Footnote ²⁶ which is closer in meaning to ideals than ideas, concepts or viewpoints.

What, therefore, was Prince Wan's Thai term for what in English is connoted as ideology, particularly political ideology? In an essay titled ‘Political science vocabulary project’ (undated, republished in a 1965 volume of collected essays) he employs the term latī kanmūang (political doctrine) to describe the following terms he itemises in English: ‘LAISSER FAIRE, SOCIALIST, COMMUNIST, FASCIST’.Footnote ²⁷ Earlier in the essay, he had cautioned:

On the term latī, Prince Wan explains that it is a preferable equivalent for the English term ‘doctrine’ because the more direct translation, anusāsanī (อนุศาสนี), he finds too long a word.Footnote ²⁹Latī may be interpreted as a closer approximation of ‘ideology’, but it carries both connotations of religious groupings as well as those of ‘-isms’. In Bradley's 1873 dictionary, latī is listed as ‘to hold in one's mind for a reason’ while in McFarland's 1944 lexicon, latī had evolved into ‘religious beliefs, tenets, practices, faith’. Latī may be attached to a variety of -isms from imperialism to Hinduism. Latī also implies some sort of group membership. In the late 1940s, Mahāchon, the primary communist publication, translated ideology as latī. In Aks nsān as well, latī was the most common translation of ideology. In 1950, poet Atsanī Phonlačhan, who later became a Communist Party of Thailand (CPT) central committee member, published a translation of Mao Tse-tung's lectures in which he translated the Chinese word for ‘ideology’ as latī.Footnote ³⁰ In the following issue, Kulab Saipradit has a piece entitled ‘Political theory: The period of socialist ideology’ (thrisadī kanmūang: ton latī sochlīt)’.Footnote ³¹ Historian Somsak Jeamtheerasakul, in discussing the 1933 Anti-Communist Act, translates latī as ‘theory’.Footnote ³²

During the post-war period, udomkān as a shortened version of Prince Wan's udomkhatīwitthayā began to signify — however inaccurately and confusingly — the ‘ideology’ that was then commonly understood abroad in Marxist terms, as opposed to those of Destutt de Tracy, although Marx was known to use the expressions ‘ideas’, ‘ideology’, ‘consciousness’ and ‘superstructure’ confusingly. Ideology was false consciousness or the system of the ideas and representations which dominated the mind of an individual or social group.Footnote ³³ According to Sulak Sivaraksa, founding editor of the Social Science Review from 1963 to 1969,Footnote ³⁴ in which the term appeared frequently, udomkān is still ‘anything that captures you, and you cannot rebel against it’.Footnote ³⁵

Thai Marxist intellectuals may have been the first to introduce udomkān as a translation for ideology, but sometime in the late 1960s to 1970s, the term lost its moorings. It was around this period that it became fashionable in Thai urban public discourse, with students often writing about the need to have udomkān or udomkhatī;Footnote ³⁶ importantly, some arguments ensued as to which of the two was the proper term to use. This reflected the continuing conflation of ideology and ideal. Used frequently in public discourse, udomkān has become a cliché, to the point where a closer approximation in English of the way the term is used presently would be principles or fealty to ideals, as in ‘politicians lack udomkān’. It is a trope of distinct moral overtones. An ‘ideological base’ of a political party, social movement or persona is better passed over in favour of other expressions such as ‘trend of thought or ideas’ (แนวความคิด) or ‘stance’ (จุดยืน), or even tatsanakati (ทัศนคติ), which is roughly translated as ‘attitude’ or ‘opinion’, but may also refer to a stance or position. Sociologist Nalinee Tantuvanit, who wrote a dissertation (1994) at the University of Wisconsin entitled ‘Ideology and ideological practices of the Thai peasantry’, explains that she translates udomkān more properly as ‘worldview’ (โลกทัศน์), as the response she initially received when doing research was that peasants had no udomkān.Footnote ³⁷ It is better to avoid ideology altogether.

How is the confused spectrum of Thai politics reflected in the fact that there has been no direct transference of ideology? Ideas seem to have failed to form into groupings or labels, to coalesce into policies, and interests have failed to aggregate into platforms or agendas because — it seems — of misinterpretation, misrecognition, or the ideologisation of ideology itself. This is the hypothetical of going beyond nation, religion and king. Perhaps beneath the tripartite shibboleth, layers have been lost and re-found, or hidden and resurfacing in mutated, variegated forms. In his 1988 article, ‘The origin of modern official state ideology in Thailand’, Eiji Murashima does not explain how the modern official state ‘ideology’ is referred to in the Thai idiom.Footnote ³⁸ The trinity are referred to as ‘institutions’ (สถาบัน, another of Prince Wan's neologisms), or ‘most revered institutions’. If it is not ‘national udomkān’ but the ‘udomkān of Thai nationalism’, are nation, religion, king collectively considered transcendent or not needing of a double referent? Ideology seems more a term that ‘outsiders’ have themselves imposed upon the trinity.

Ideological politics and the politics of ideology

In November 1971, the Social Science Association of Thailand held a seminar at Chulalongkorn University, funded by The Asia Foundation. The papers and proceedings were published as a book edited by Chatthip Nartsupha, Ideology and Thai society (อุดมการกับสังคมไทย, sans karan) (1972).Footnote ³⁹ In its preface, it is already clear that udomkān is a foreign import, something that could be imposed or foisted from above or the outside. It is framed as a pre-existing, artificial set of attitudes that could be packaged and deployed:

Moreover, the preface describes a conflict at the seminar in which the participants could not decide on whether an udomkān had to be for one specific community. One side found that an udomkān should aid the disadvantaged, but it ‘represent[ed] the interests of the classes, especially that class that has power’.Footnote ⁴¹ The other side argued that udomkān was constructed as a national ideology, in order to ‘combine the power of society so that they all get along’.Footnote ⁴² The participants continue to discuss the specificities of Thai politics, including the lack of an anti-colonial struggle as an impediment to the formation of udomkān;Footnote ⁴³ Chai-anan's view that Pridi Banomyong's economic plan led to the end of the solidarity of the 1932 coup group;Footnote ⁴⁴ and that political udomkān arose with difficulty because it was an abstraction.Footnote ⁴⁵ Thai society needed ‘concrete goals’ rather than something abstract. However, by pages 89 to 90 of the meeting transcript, it is clear that the participants are still arguing over the definition of udomkān. At one point, Sermsak Thephakham, advisor to the head of the Songkhla administrative court, interjects to request clarification:

Sermsak is in turn criticised by Kramol Thongthammachart for consulting with these linguistic experts, as they are ignorant of ideology's definition. The seminar ends inconclusively, apart from agreement that udomkān is something that Thailand urgently needs.

Of the elite intellectualsFootnote ⁴⁷ of the late twentieth century, Chai-anan Samudvanija has had the most influence on how udomkān has been assimilated and interpreted. He is exemplar of a class that has long been parodied for introducing English or other foreign terms.Footnote ⁴⁸ In Chai-anan's above-mentioned 1973 textbook, Political ideology, he describes the beginnings of the common use of ‘ideology’ in France as a type of method in the study of philosophy in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. He posits the second meaning as one in line with Karl Mannheim's ‘particular conception’, in which ideology is a mask obscuring the real interests of the ideology's proponents. Ideology is a tool of those seeking power to pressure opposing groups.Footnote ⁴⁹ Chai-anan continues to portray udomkān as monopolistic in nature, as a set of irrational beliefs or propaganda that does not admit to alternatives.

Chai-anan had iterated this position on ideological politics during the 1971 seminar, adding that things like ‘love of family’ should not be political, as in Mao's Cultural Revolution.Footnote ⁵¹ ‘We must separate politics from society’, he asserts.Footnote ⁵² For Chai-anan, liberalism (อุดมการเสรีนิยม) is ‘not used as a political tool in controlling political behaviour as much as communism (อุดมการคอมมิวนิสต์)’.Footnote ⁵³ For these reasons, the only ideologies that can be considered udomkān thāng kānm ang are: absolutism, constitutionalism, individualism, socialism, nationalism and elitism.Footnote ⁵⁴ Communism is omitted from this list.

Moreover, under the section, ‘The abrupt end of udomkān in Thai society’,Footnote ⁵⁵ Chai-anan attempts to address class consciousness and political economy while maintaining that udomkān is monopolistic in nature. He contends:

The primary ‘culprit’ behind the absence of udomkān is traditional beliefs, including short-term interests, dyadic relationships and Bhramanic principles. Because Thai society was still traditional, according to Chai-anan, ‘it is not surprising that we have udomkān, ideas (แนวความคิด), and beliefs (ความเชื่อ) that have more to do with religion than udomkān thang kanmūang or economics.’Footnote ⁵⁷ Contrast this to Supha Sirimanond's explicit Thai–English translation:

One root of the trend perpetuated by Chai-anan may have been the 1927 law banning the teaching of economic thought, or, rather, the royal court's association of economics with socialism.Footnote ⁵⁹ The first modern economics text in Thai, Sapphasat (Science of wealth, 1911, 1934) was banned by the government.Footnote ⁶⁰ Criticism of Pridi Banomyong's economic plan could not be divorced from attacks against the anti-democratic nature of the People's Party.Footnote ⁶¹ When the Journal of Political Economy was launched in 1981, the scholars associated with it estranged themselves from those in the disciplines. As described by Lysa Hong, ‘They read a different literature, used a different vocabulary, and published in different journals, so distinct and uncompromising were their theories.’Footnote ⁶²

By 1976, it was clear that Chai-anan was employing udomkān to imply an ‘ideal’ or ‘motivational goal’. In his Democracy, socialism, and communism, he writes, ‘The change from absolute monarchy to democracy has not created lasting political institutions …. The administration [of the country] has had no udomkān thāng kānmang as a goal.’Footnote ⁶³ He denigrates previous rebellions and social movements as lacking udomkān to lead them.Footnote ⁶⁴ Nevertheless, the problem for Chai-anan was that udomkān thāng kānm ang had been used to divide society into two groups of left and right.Footnote ⁶⁵ The solution therefore lay in a single udomkān called DEMOCRATIC SOCIALISM.Footnote ⁶⁶ Again, in the zeitgeist of 1976, Chai-anan concludes that Thai society had only three options: liberal democracy, social democracy or civil war.Footnote ⁶⁷ Contrast this to Kasian's extensive list of competing individuals and groups during the period 1948 to 1957, during which the binary ideologies could be encapsulated as: ‘royalism versus democracy’; ‘military dictatorship versus civilian democracy’; ‘bourgeois democracy versus new democracy’; ‘patriotism versus imperialism’; ‘nation, religion, and monarchy versus communism’; and ‘communism versus capitalism’.Footnote ⁶⁸

Even more bewildering are the contributions by Surapong Jayanama in the March 1973 Social Science Review, the National Ideology issue.Footnote ⁶⁹ Surapong, schooled thoroughly in non-Thai political theory and who later became an ambassador to five countries, was the first to refer to the work of Antonio Gramsci in Thailand.Footnote ⁷⁰ In the article, ‘Who is a Leftist?’ Surapong attempts to flesh out the distinction between latī and udomkatī [although the title of his other entry in the issue is ‘On the problem of udomkān’, not udomkhatī (ว่าดด้วยปัญหาอุดมการ)]. His view is that ideology is best translated as latī:

Furthermore, translating ideology as latī, Surapong explains, means that udomkhatī is still nonetheless similar to Chai-anan's formulation in that it searches for the ultimate reality:

While Surapong may have had a more nuanced concern than Chai-anan for how the term ‘ideology’ was understood in Thai, he equally misconstrues it by concluding that latī or udomkhatī have no meaning for the right.Footnote ⁷³ Meanwhile, the nature of the left is that it ‘denies reality’, tends towards utopia and is irrational.Footnote ⁷⁴ Moreover, the new left has failed to produce concrete results and lacks practical ideas.Footnote ⁷⁵ The new left was a coterie to which Surapong belonged, so his critique was either a clarion call or an ironic remark on the weakness of or divisions within the intellectual circle. Surapong on the whole sees contingency within non-Thai ideological formation, but he does not make parallels or situate this within Thai politics. Reading these arguably arcane, obscurantist academic tracts (and attempting to do so without the bias of hindsight) may ultimately not shed much light on the lost spectrum. Thirty-five years later, Kasian Tejapira remarked that Surapong was still referring to ‘leftist socialist/communists’ (including Gramsci) to explain his support of the movement to overthrow, via military coup, the ‘Thaksin system’.Footnote ⁷⁶

Left and right

Nonetheless, the 1970s were a period of extreme polarisation between what were considered ‘left’ and ‘right’, although how these terms came to be defined and understood is part of a longer history of permutation. In the Social Science Review's 1973 National Ideology issue, the editor, under an entry titled ‘Reactions’, explains that the term ‘left’ is a product of the French Revolution, where the side that was battling the existing system (RADICALS) sat to the left of the podium, while the conservatives sat on the right. More importantly, the editor explains that this seating arrangement ‘allowed them to see the basic social differences on the issue of udomkān (อุดมการณ์, with karan) and their policy stance’.Footnote ⁷⁷ Even more critically, the editor attempts to account for the source of variation in characterisations of left and right:

By 1981, Chatthip Nartsupha and Montri Chenvidyakarn were able to describe the ‘left’ as divided into two camps: liberalism and socialism.Footnote ⁷⁹ These two camps formed a pragmatic alliance in order to fight sakdinā.Footnote ⁸⁰ Furthermore, socialism split into two camps: liberal socialism and communism. The debate among the participants of the 1971 seminar thus had a mirror image in that there was an equally complex ideological fracture among the so-called leftists on Maoism and socialism without Stalin. As described by Hong, while the military had come up with a new ideology beyond ‘development authoritarianism’ to justify its rule, the Thai left was ‘undergoing its most ideological crisis in the aftermath of its renunciation of the CPT (Communist Party of Thailand)’.Footnote ⁸¹ Hong describes the intellectuals (particularly Kasian Tejapira and Pichit Likhitsomboon, writing under pseudonyms at times) as having to ‘return to the drawing board — the library — for a more educated, well-grounded comprehension of historical materialism that would inform praxis ….’Footnote ⁸² For Kasian, many of the October generation never had a crisis of udomkān because they never held the CPT's udomkān in the first place.Footnote ⁸³ Kanchana Kaeothep's entry in the same volume succinctly lays out a post-Marxist conception of ideology, grasping that since the inception of it use, udomkān has always had an ambiguous definition.Footnote ⁸⁴ Kanchana is the translator of Althusser's Ideology and ideological state apparatuses.Footnote ⁸⁵ She pairs udomkān with ‘ideology’, defining it as ‘the product that is constructed from one's mental state (สภาวะทางจิต) (in the political sense)’.Footnote ⁸⁶ This product consists of sets of ideas (ชุดของความคิด), feelings, and readiness to act (SET OF IDEA, SENTIMENT, ACTION).Footnote ⁸⁷ Worldviews, visions of life, and attitudes, for example, are subsets of udomkān. Ultimately, however, the ‘traumatic memory of the failure of Thai communism’ would mean that ‘ideology’ would be passed over in favour of the new analytical commodity, ‘discourse’.Footnote ⁸⁸

Kanchana's work on the Frankfurt School, however, stands dislocated from a book published just a year earlier by the National Ideology Subcommittee of the National Identity Board. As Connors argues, ‘As with Order 66/1980 [encouraging Communist Party of Thailand cadres to defect by offering amnesty], this development had its roots in the conflict with communism and the desperate need to re-hegemonise the social field, as well as restore state influence in the cultural field’.Footnote ⁸⁹ As members of this subcommittee, Kramol Thongthammachart and Sippanondha Ketudat define ‘political ideology’ (อุดมการณ์, spelled with the karan) as follows:

Interestingly, Kramol, in a section titled ‘The meaning of Udomkān’ lists his translations of the definitions of ideology by Marx, Engels, Parsons, Friedrich and Brzezinski. He emphasises their alien character by immediately concluding, ‘As for Thai theorists and academics, they have given the definition of udomkān as follows ….’Footnote ⁹¹ He lists Anuch Aphaphirom, Kamol Somvichien and Chai-anan Samudavanija as having the final word. Udomkān must be the ‘system of thought or belief that a group sees as right and good’.Footnote ⁹² Thus, even as a post-Marxist conception of ideology was being advanced, udomkān was being channelled into a completely different direction. Kramol and others desired to cast udomkān with positive, benign connotations. While the political economy school tried to unravel the ‘ideology of ideology’, udomkān as a concept was becoming ever more ‘Thaified’. Udomkān in this second sense, suggesting ‘ideals’, thus declines in relevance to political parties. The first meaning — a system of ideas and representations that dominate the mind of an individual or group — led to a debate over the very system itself, and hence Thai elites never agreed upon a democratic or broadly liberal system in which political parties have meaning.

Thai intellectual history has been considered the domain of the middle class and the descendants of the villagers who entered its ranks. According to Gramsci, under ‘passive revolution’, the bourgeoisie simply follows the leadership of the state, and ‘transformism’ leads to a larger and larger ruling class resulting from the absorption of elements from other social groups. As a result, left and right tend to converge. Reflecting this convergence, by the late 1970s, udomkān had been thoroughly transformed back into Prince Wan's Pali root of ‘ideal’ or ‘perfection’. Even if the term in the early 1980s was still perceived as strange as a ‘late-season mango’, udomkān, according to the National Ideology Subcommittee, had the potential to unite people and make them loyal, which arose from the awareness of being born on the same soil, sharing the same history, and accepting the legitimacy of the same rule.Footnote ⁹³ As Turton noted (translating udomkān as ideology):

The fate of udomkān appeared to be similar to that of khommiunit. Both terms — modifier and referent — in the phrase ‘communist ideology’ were distorted and jumbled. As ‘communist’ was being transformed to khommiunit, it lost the capacity to signify a distinctive, particular ideology. Udomkān, however, was allowed to remain amorphous enough to avoid the stigma of khommiunit. As Chai-anan explains nearly 40 years after the 1971 seminar: ‘There are many words like muanchon (the people) which was a Marxist concept and had a bad connotation or bad meaning. Udomkān, after it had been used for a while, became a neutral term so now udomkān means that you have principles.’Footnote ⁹⁵Udomkān was transformed from an ominous agent of thought control to the positive, inspirational banner of ideals. It never had the potential to indicate spatial location, a continuum along left and right, or a coherent, internally consistent set of ideas, beliefs, or symbols. One could not reject both the official royalist national ideology and the CPT. This led to a kind of warped, illiberal spectrum. In its abstractness, udomkān became flexible, almost practical, but in the process, articulations of ideas were lost.

Money politics reconsidered

The advent of money politics — the cycle of the use of patronage-based networks of vote canvassers and bureaucratic corruption to recoup electoral investment — began in 1969, after a decade of political parties being explicitly banned under military rule. The period 1978 to the present saw the exacerbation of non-ideological money politics. Many who had joined the maquis in the 1970s ceased to use the terms left and right in describing Thai politics, as these labels had lost all descriptive content. Whereas before Sarit's 1958 declaration of martial law, one could speak of a ‘left-wing MP’, the post-Sarit frame saw the rise to parliamentary politics of so-called right-wing representatives who entered politics to have greater control over state resources.Footnote ⁹⁶ In 1974 the Chart Thai Party was founded by a group of retired generals and backed by a number of prominent industrialists. Aggressively anti-communist, Chart Thai's slogan was ‘Right Destroy Left’. It was led by Chatichai Choonhavan, whose son Kraisak considered himself a leftist.Footnote ⁹⁷ Somchai Phatharathananunth most aptly states the significance of this post-Sarit period for contemporary Thai politics: ‘the current domination of the region [the Northeast] by corrupt money politics is not a result of long-standing traditions of patron–client relationships, but more a result of the destruction of the left.’Footnote ⁹⁸ The leftists had no choice but to support the rightists they thought were the most progressive; failing that, they had to start exiling themselves from Thai society.

This post-Sarit period could be interpreted as the ‘end of ideology’ and a new beginning for Thai political parties, but udomkān had already been appropriated to serve new purposes. In 1974 the Chulalongkorn University Political Science Student Committee had published a manual on political parties.Footnote ⁹⁹ In its analysis, the textbook finds that there are few authentic interest groups in Thai society. Interest groups set up on behalf of merchants, rice-mill owners, bankers and factory owners ‘enter politics for udomkān thāng kānm ang; we see that these groups can get close to whoever has political power’.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ The character of Thai political parties is that they lack popular support bases and udomkān thāng kānm ang that are clear and therefore are easily set up and disbanded.Footnote ¹⁰¹ At the same time, the ‘opposition parties oppose the government beyond their writ’ and are in a state of ‘vehement opposition’.Footnote ¹⁰² It is unclear whether there can be a multiplicity of udomkān or not. What would it mean for members of a political party to be held together by a common stance?

It becomes clear that udomkān is ultimately something which should provoke suspicion and is something distinct from economic policy stance in Preecha Hongkrailert's 1980 The political party system and problems of Thai political parties.Footnote ¹⁰³ He lists nine different ways to categorise political parties. The first is to divide them ‘by the type of udomkān of the party’ and the seventh is by ‘ideas according to their economic and social latī’ (แนวความคิดในลัทธิเศรษฐกิจแล้วสังคม).Footnote ¹⁰⁴ The latter is in a sense a closer approximation to the English ‘ideological base’ or the behaviouralist interpretation of ideology. Tellingly, Preecha describes the Republican and Democrat American political parties as devoid of udomkān, as the only political parties that do seem to have udomkān are communist ones.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ The Labour and Conservative Parties in Britain ‘uphold certain types of udomkān but not very strictly’.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Countries where the same ‘udomkān hæng chāt (NATIONAL IDEOLOGY)’ prevails have political parties that only focus on ‘pradēn khng panhā (ISSUES)’.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Preecha acknowledges the problem of party discipline, but seems to offer a contradictory solution. Stating the obvious without reconciling the issue of udomkān, he remarks: ‘Apart from the problem of party organisation, there is the problem of party udomkān. Most Thai political parties lack a clear udomkān so they lack a unifying point in their operation. Thai political parties are only political parties in name.’Footnote ¹⁰⁸

At the same time, the Popular dictionary of politics [Phochananukromkanmuang chabap chao bān] by Supot Dantrakul (1985) attempts to clear away the aristocratic intellectuals' obfuscation in ‘plain’ terms.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Referring to udomkatī, not udomkān, Supot holds that latī kanmuāng follows from udomkatī. He reduces political parties into two types according to latī:

Indeed, every party into the late 1980s and 1990s wrote beautiful policies, but implemented very few of them. By the late 1990s, the official prescription, such as that listed in Chaowana Traimas' Policy framework for a new generation of political parties (1998) was to ‘uphold and honour the principles and udomkān principles (หลักอุดมการ) of politics and rule of the democratic system with the king as the head of state’.Footnote ¹¹¹ Specific policies are eschewed in favour of vague, anodyne principles upon which all parties can agree such as ‘stability’, ‘effectiveness’, ‘appropriateness’ and ‘competitiveness’.Footnote ¹¹² Unsurprisingly, it is Chai-anan who offers the book's back cover blurb, claiming that there is no better organisation or institution that can allow the people to participate in the political process better than political parties.Footnote ¹¹³ As for civil society, Kevin Hewison and Garry Rodan describe the position of post-Cold War non-governmental organisations as non-ideological by necessity.Footnote ¹¹⁴

In his study of the contemporary Democrat Party, Marc Askew touches on the ambiguous status of udomkān in Thai political language, noting that it is poorly translated into English as ideology.Footnote ¹¹⁵ It is something that the Democrat Party claims to possess, distinguishing the party from its rivals. However, under the evolution of electoral politics, udomkān, while still better approximated as ‘principles’, became a floating signifier of a curious sort. Askew provides an anecdote illustrating udomkān's lack of ‘formal analytical properties’:Footnote ¹¹⁶

Askew adds that udomkān has become relegated to a mere performative role, and not as the ultimate ground of party commitment.Footnote ¹¹⁸

Economist Adis Israngkul Na Ayutthaya faults ‘Thai voters’ for Thailand's ‘weak democracy’ and for the lack of clear policy prescriptions.Footnote ¹¹⁹ The lack of differentiation in political party platforms or policy packages can be attributed to the Thai people who are naive in seeking ‘good’ men and women instead of ‘insisting that the political candidates express their views on some controversial issues’.Footnote ¹²⁰ He adds, ‘Thai policy markets have also been weak. Thai voters do not realise that they have a say about controversial public choices; thus, politicians are not willing to take sides on controversial public policy issues.’Footnote ¹²¹ This conflation of cause and effect reflects the long domination of money politics and even longer estrangement of economics from politics. More fundamentally, the development of an ideological continuum along which single issues such as land reform, progressive taxation, free trade agreements and environmental protection coalesce around philosophical groupings assumes that a liberal system exists. For Adis, King Bhumipol best explained the reason for this policy vacuum when the King remarked, ‘Thai people are too poor to be involved in politics.’Footnote ¹²² In this view, the electorate are either ‘too poor to know’ and thus elect ‘good’ or ‘attractive’ representatives, or ‘too uneducated’ to know not to sell their votes to ‘bad’ people.

In sum, udomkān has undergone a convoluted evolution from Prince Wan's initial confused translation of ‘ideology’ to a Marxist interpretation, and on to a Gramscian slant, before taking on a popular connotation of ‘idealism’, thus transformed into an ideological resource itself to delineate the principled from the dissolute. In its present form, it is largely meaningless and incoherent, obscuring more than elucidating. Because udomkān never emerged from the menacing ‘something that captures you’, Thais were confronted with two false choices: authoritarianism of the right or the left. The system never offered a set of socioeconomic policies (along a liberal socialist–liberal conservative continuum, for example) under a broadly liberal political system. And because udomkān was something dangerous because of its association with communism, it had to be neutered and transformed to the positive but meaningless connotation of ‘idealism’, becoming hitched to nation, religion and king. Parliamentary politics, civil society and intellectual movements, and the military-bureaucracy long operated in separate, isolated spheres. When Thai Gramscians (whether under the guise of the New Left, the People's Alliance for Democracy [PAD], or Pridi-style socialism) rail against the system of patron–client relationships as represented by Thaksin Shinawatra, they are reacting to the effect rather than the cause of the destruction of the left.Footnote ¹²³

Pragmatists and ‘ideologues’

As mentioned above, the Octobrists returned to the drawing board in the late 1970s to early 1980s and have remained there ever since. In the 1986 election, the first in which some Octobrists decided to take part in electoral politics, several prominent activists joined the Democrat Party, including Chaturon Chaisaeng (who later switched to the New Aspiration and Thai Rak Thai [TRT] parties) and Phumtham Wechayachai (who later joined the TRT). In the late 1990s, Octobrists such as Prapat Panyachatrat and Prommin Lertsuridej began consulting with ‘right-wing capitalist’ Thaksin. By the late 1990s, therefore, the ‘October people’ were considered ‘dead’, as the title of a book compiling Nation Weekend profiles of prominent Octobrists suggested.Footnote ¹²⁴ By then, udomkān had come to mean ‘idealism’ or ‘principles’, but the fact that the author recognises some contradiction in the life histories of these various ‘democracy activists’ implies that some ideologies that once had a kind of coherence have been somehow betrayed. Kriengkamol Laohapairote, who became an advisor to the TRT, is able to impose a distinction upon those who joined the party for strategic reasons, a distinction between means and ends, remarking: ‘If some Octobrists have turned out bad, it's a pity. But others still do good; they still have udomkān.’Footnote ¹²⁵ In this case, udomkān thus signifies the ends, not the means. Phumtham went so far as to claim that Thaksin was influenced by and ‘received udomkān’ from this clique of Octobrists.Footnote ¹²⁶ The focus of the debate became the delineation between pragmatists and ideologues. The pro-Thaksin politicians were accused of losing their udomkān for allying themselves with a vulgar capitalist and the anti-Thaksinites were accused of losing their udomkān for condoning or implicitly acquiescing to the coup removing Thaksin from power.Footnote ¹²⁷ Thongchai Winichakul asserts, ‘It has been said for a long time amongst those who have taken an interest and studied Thailand that PRAGMATISM is a characteristic of Thais. Thai society therefore does not strictly adhere to laws and regulations or udomkān, concepts or moral principles.’Footnote ¹²⁸ A younger generation academic attempts to reinsert a liberal conception of udomkān, but it may be too late: ‘I want to emphasise that when we speak of udomkān thāng kanmūang, we don't mean the elevated, majestic udomkān but the set of ideas and beliefs that each party tries to advance as the things they hold in common as right or wrong and as the common goal.’Footnote ¹²⁹ In time, udomkān underwent a transformation from a dangerous tool in the battle for hearts and minds to a lofty, grandiose goal far from the messy, mundane but pluralistic world of policy debates.

Pivot points

Regardless of the analytical properties of udomkān, the Thai polity continues to fracture along various loyalties and biases, and these biases may not necessarily be characterised in terms of spatial location or symbolic grids. It is perhaps as the participants of the 1971 seminar feared: a war between competing udomkān has erupted. ‘Red shirt udomkān’ and ‘yellow shirt udomkān’ have entered the national lexicon, suggesting coherent and contrasting sets of ideas. Udomkān is used in opposition to strange bedfellows of the political arena, to demarcate protestors who turn out for ‘udomkān’ as opposed to money, to describe the ideals for which the martyrs of the crackdowns have died. What is the axis on which the divide between red and yellow and their variations turn?

Somsak Jeamsatheerakul suggests that the first and most important pivot point is ‘reconciliation with the monarchy’ and, by association, the military.Footnote ¹³⁰ For example, Niramit Mai, the pen name of a CPT ‘comrade’ who fought at Phu Hin Rongkla and is now a businessman in the lower North, in a column titled, ‘A critique of right-wing leftism: On non-feudal feudalism’, writes:

The feudalism trope, as elucidated by Reynolds, is still very much alive, and an additional layer of permutation has been added.Footnote ¹³² For Sondhi Limthongkul, the fact that many Sino-Thais were linked to the Chinese Communist Party did not mean that they were ‘evil’ people.Footnote ¹³³ The question is whether this monarch represents retrogressive or progressive sakdina.Footnote ¹³⁴ More cynically, however, Sondhi's PAD, lacking alternative ideological resources, used the ‘grease’ of the monarchy, even knowing that it would damage the institution (another abstraction) they claimed to respect.Footnote ¹³⁵

For Ji Ungphakorn, the axis revolves around socialism. In Ji's view, because of the ‘Stalinist politics of the CPT’ that focused on nationalism and class alliance with ‘progressive capitalists’, the divide emerged:

Again, the vocabulary to describe Thai social formation and the various economic-isms is missing. For Amorn Amornrattanan, an Octobrist who joined the PAD, the essential problem of Thai society is that it is faced with ‘capitalism’ but there is no consensus on how to confront it. Echoing the jumbled anti-capitalist, anti-statist, and pro-self-reliance slogans of the community culture school that grew prominent after the demise of the left, Amorn is anti-IMF (International Monetary Fund), pro-land reform (land is still in the hands of a few capitalists), but there is no agreement on ‘revolt’ or ‘reform’, as the ‘old theories of revolution were not enough to give us a clear approach to put into practice’.Footnote ¹³⁷ Also typical of the paradox of left conservatism is the debate on privatisation. Using the standard of present-day conservatism in the United States to gauge the political philosophy of senator and former activist Rossana Tositrakul, television anchorman M.L. Nattakorn Devakula accused the senator of being against privatisation and therefore a leftist. Rossana replied that she was not anti-free market, only anti-‘bad governance and shady privatisation deals’, before praising the anchorman's blue-blooded ancestors for saving Siam from imperialism.Footnote ¹³⁸

Indeed, as historian and Octobrist Thongchai Winichakul summed up, ‘Debates over the nature of the Thai social formation faded away without a conclusion.’Footnote ¹³⁹ In explaining the phenomenon of what he terms ‘left nationalism’, Thongchai found, after interviewing many Octobrist intelligentsia, that the pivot points were nationalism and globalised capitalism. Nationalism has become a matter of ‘life and death’ and a type of ideology (identity as a subset of ideology). Again, there is fundamental disagreement over Thaksin's or TRT's version of capitalism — was it globalised capital, crony A domestic capital or crony B domestic capital? As Kasian remarked, even though there was ‘overlap and similarities between the crony-capitalist agenda's call for the reversal of globalist/neo-liberalist reform and the radical populist reformist agenda's call for restoration of economic sovereignty’, the two agendas desired two disparate visions for the country.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ These vociferous debates on old and new capital, progressive and regressive capital, and progressive and regressive sakdina were more characteristic of Chai-anan's ‘ideological politics’ than political ideology. Thongchai pronounces the Thai left, which he divides into ‘communist’ and ‘radical’, as dead altogether. Instead of Chatthip and Montri's 1981 classification of left into liberal and socialist left, with socialism splitting into two camps, it is the liberals who split into the two camps of left nationalism (never mind that the PAD have been labelled rightist or fascist) and right global capitalists.

For Kasian Tejapira, the Octobrist ideology boiled down to rights and freedoms and social justice. A major pivot point is the state, or, more specifically, the bureaucracy. At the 14 October commemoration in 2007, Kasian proposed in his lecture, ‘From the Thaksin system to the 19 September coup: Crisis of Thai democracy’, that Thai society, the so-called progressives in particular, chose to walk diverging paths by dismissing one of two forces. The first path was capitalism by ignoring the power of the conservative bureaucracy. The other path was fighting the power of the conservative bureaucracy by choosing to ignore the evils of capitalism. For the former communists, this was the ‘reconciliation with the state’, with one faction now relying on the state to protect rights and freedoms. For Kasian, this amounted to ‘convoluted double false consciousness in one and the same polity’.Footnote ¹⁴¹ But he places the blame on Thaksin, concluding that it was his premiership that drove the country's ‘bourgeois revolution’ back by ten years.Footnote ¹⁴² If Thaksin's red shirt supporters are neither on the left or the right, it is because they lack the ‘political ideological language’ (ภาษาทางอุดมการณ์ทางการเมือง) beyond the mere incantation of Thaksin Shinawatra to articulate their position.Footnote ¹⁴³ Meanwhile, the question of how Thais interpret the English term ‘ideology’ persisted, as evidenced by the Bangkok Post's translation of Democrat member of parliament Attaporn Ponlaboot's remark: ‘If Thaksin carries half the ideology of Mrs Suu Kyi, he might not be deposed but it is unfortunate that they are like heaven and hell.’Footnote ¹⁴⁴

It is no accident that Octobrist intelligentsia are both subjects and objects in this debate over Thai ideology; they have been intermediaries in the translation of this ‘irksome’ foreign-derived discourse. Kasian is still writing in his voice as Arkhom Chanangkul, seeking a post-1979 praxis of sorts. Thai society is stuck at Gramsci's third stage, waiting for both elite oligarchy and Thaksin to dissolve. However, the political crisis has moved beyond a question of false consciousness. The subaltern ‘reconstruction and subversion’ has splintered once again with the turn of the kaleidoscope. In the end, however, the 2006 coup was not the ‘triumph of the 14 October intellectuals’, but the second triumph of the 1976 rightists who had destroyed the left and 30 years later, indirectly divided the liberals who remained. Instead of praxis, Thai society was trapped in the stasis of a new version of its old catch-22: ‘Thailand can never have real democracy until it is safe from communism, and it can never be safe from communism until it has a real democracy.’Footnote ¹⁴⁵