Class Dismissed? Explaining the Absence of Economic Injustice in the NLD’s Governing Agenda

Market Reform Shaped Political and Moral Economy

Marketisation of the post-socialist economy distributed commercial power and resources in ways that shaped the possibilities of democratic political action. Provincial military officers mediated the emergence of a private business class by informally regulating the terms of capital accumulation in their territories. Regional Tatmadaw commanders were empowered with the authority to issue licences for various business activities in their regions, including permits to operate rice mills or heavy machinery essential to extracting gemstones (Kudo, 2001: 12). Most of these licenses needed to be renewed annually. Junta officials also approved who received tenders to supply or perform functions for state economic enterprises and used powers of oversight and influence over commercial elites and assets, either to ensure the local implementation of junta objectives or for personal gain (Ford et al., 2016; Jones, 2014). ⁷ In addition to their licensing powers, to ensure compliance with their demands on business people junta officials would issue fines, seize merchandise or machinery and in some cases give jail terms to business people who did not hold appropriate permits (Cook, 1994: 132; Kyaw Yin Hlaing, 2007b: 222).

The junta’s approach to market reform facilitated the rapid emergence of ostensibly “apolitical” civil society during the 1990s and 2000s. Military officials used their influence over business people to encourage them to perform essential social functions within their zones of operation. A widely referenced 2006 study found an estimated 214,000 community-based organisations including neighbourhood organisations, native place, and ethnic organisations and welfare groups operating in every corner of the country (Heidel, 2006: 60). ⁸ As the authors’ research in provincial Myanmar highlights, provincial military commanders encouraged business people to establish and manage social organisations in an attempt to respond to the dire economic inequities and social problems created by marketisation and the dissembling of Ne Win’s dysfunctional dictatorship. Records of founding donations from provincial Myanmar highlights that military commanders and businessmen frequently co-funded the establishment of funeral associations, aged care homes, and other religiously imbued welfare groups at a township, ward, and village level during the 1990s and 2000s. Monastic and other religious authorities helped to house and partly finance many of their activities, though most of these groups were managed on a day-to-day basis by lay business people and civil servants. A prominent rice merchant in provincial Myanmar described why assuming partial responsibility for local social affairs – at either the explicit or implicit urging of military patrons – was essential to accruing and maintaining capital during this period:

If you wanted to get permission to run a rice-mill or another business then you needed to be involved in the community…If you had a good name/reputation then the military would be more likely to cooperate with you…Why? Because wealthier people in the community must provide for those who are suffering. If you did this kind of work [welfare/religious groups] then you and the government would have a good reputation. (Interview with Trader, 6 May 2016).

Selective Suppression of Civil Society

While ostensibly “apolitical” civil society, especially groups linked to religious institutions, were permitted to flourish during junta rule, more critical and independent civil society was severely repressed. Mobilisation of labour, especially through protests, strikes, and collective bargaining, was tightly restricted and often violently suppressed (Arnold and Campbell, 2017: 87–88; Campbell, 2019a: 7–8; Kyaw Soe Lwin, 2014: 296). The NLD at a local level was the subject of intense persecution. Junta officials eviscerated NLD party structures through the concerted destruction of ties between local branches, the central executive committee, and Suu Kyi, who was placed under house arrest for much of the 1990s and 2000s. Activists labelled as democracy “agitators” by SLORC/SPDC representatives were regularly jailed, and local party branches were violently disbanded. Even volunteers coordinating disaster response work in the wake of Nargis were harassed and in some cases arrested by authorities if they were viewed as politically motivated (Seekins, 2009: 730–731). As a result, many reformists were deterred from formal affiliation with the democracy movement or the NLD in particular.

Social Consequences of Junta Rule

Despite the constraints on the democracy movement, the junta’s approach to militarisation and state-building left a significant social gap to be filled by welfare groups and the emergent business elites who patronised them. The junta spent the least of any country in the region on social development during the 1990s and 2000s. Military officials instead outsourced social expenditures to commercial elites and emergent welfare groups while doubling the size of the state army or Tatmadaw (Selth, 2002: 253). ¹⁰

Rather than rely on state aid the only way to achieve a relatively stable livelihood – at least for periods of time – was to personally cultivate ties of patronage with military commanders and officers who held positions of decision-making power or with business people who accrued capital during junta rule. Research from SLORC/SPDC rule highlights that military-linked patrons helped a select few to access commercial rackets or monopoly arrangements, mediated access to state or non-state sources of welfare, and provided reciprocal forms of aid with clients (Brac de la Perriere, 2014). However, there was an inherent instability to these ties of patronage as “careers of patrons [were] highly unpredictable, and the fall of a prominent person (a ‘great tree’) [could] bring down many ‘small trees’” (Seekins, 2009: 733).

People adversely incorporated into networks of commercial or social patronage or excluded from them entirely were forced to turn to diversified coping strategies to survive the 1990s and 2000s. Most households accrued considerable debt, often to cover the costs of healthcare which increased by 300–400 per cent in the years after 1988 (Kyaw Yin Hlaing, 2007b: 162). ¹¹ Many sent relatives elsewhere in Myanmar or internationally to work and remit their wages, placing tremendous strain on family units, yet providing a source of stable income during this difficult period (Thawnghmung, 2011, 2019). Perverse attempts to encourage military units to self-finance during a period of rapid expansion also encouraged the unjust seizure of land from farmers by military officials, with an estimated 5.3 million acres of agricultural land changing hands by 2013 (McCarthy, 2019b: 14–15). Much of this land was later resold to business interests, often at concessionary rates, creating the land grab crisis which as will be discussed in Section Three remains a central source of poverty and precarity for many in contemporary Myanmar.

Organisational and Ideational Possibilities of Democratic Politics

The junta’s strategy of market reform, selective suppression of civil society, and indirect direct social expenditure created wide disparities between the poor and the small number of military-linked tycoons and business elites. Wealth inequality shaped the political possibilities of the democracy movement and the NLD in particular. Due to the constraints faced by the broader democracy movement during junta rule, the NLD was not able to develop an organisational apparatus through which to distribute resources to voters or via which it could aggregate voter needs into a detailed policy programme.

The NLD instead responded to the constraints and opportunities of junta rule by attempting to define abstract ideals to bind the broad democracy movement. Suu Kyi’s writings and occasional speeches during this period appealed to business people who held capital and influence, as well as the electorate at large, via an oppositional discourse that built on post-socialist Buddhist social thought. She was often critical of the socio-economic consequences of junta rule. Yet, she eschewed class-based ideology or policy programmes in her speeches. She instead enlisted Buddhist concepts to symbolically highlight the suffering ordinary people were experiencing under the SLORC/SPDC, accusing officials of possessing power without myitta (loving-kindness). ¹² Given overt demonstrations of discontent with the regime were often met with brutal violence by the military, Suu Kyi encouraged supporters of “democracy” to engage in charitable social action as a way to “cultivat[e] loving kindness and compassion”, educate citizens about “democracy” and delegitimise the government (Suu Kyi quoted in Houtman, 1999: 314, 322). Actions of selfless moral conduct, she argued, would bring about the “revolution of the spirit” necessary for the attainment of democracy in the collective sense as they led to “the emergence of feelings of solidarity and the formation of a society” (Walton, 2012: 197).

In the absence of formal party structures, diffusing an ideology of morality, charity, and political liberation across society in this manner helped maintain the broader democracy movement during junta rule. Religious and social organisations which flourished after 1988, often under the patronage of business people and at the implicit encouragement of military officials, played an essential role in popularising a moralised, “selfless” conception of democracy (see McCarthy, 2018a: 172–174). Public figures who engaged in charitable works such as movie star turned funeral director Kyaw Thu, who founded the Free Funeral Service in 2001 with film director Thukha, became paragons of democratic and moral virtue that other celebrities and ordinary people sought to emulate (San San Oo, 2018). At a local level, many volunteers with ward and village welfare associations interviewed by the author described social work during the 1990s inspiring them to take small actions aimed at transforming society and the political system at large. In a context where state social expenditures were minimal, industrial or agricultural mobilisation was impossible, overt demonstrations for “democracy” were suppressed and local party structures severely repressed, the democracy movement and the NLD, in particular, urged everyday charitable groups and their commercial patrons to view their social work as contributing to the objective of political liberation.

In the context of these constraints, the main linkage between voters and the NLD was the charisma of its leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, and her ideal of democracy as selfless, disciplined moral conduct in a capitalist society. To the extent that NLD ideology during the 1990s was “programmatic”, it broadly focused on encouraging commercial elites and ordinary people to engage in social work as a subtle form of solidarity with the poor and protest against military rule. These organisational and programmatic constraints on the democracy movement and party–voter ties of the NLD had a significant impact on the evolution of linkages with voters after liberalisation in 2011. The next section examines party development since 2011 in an effort to explain the absence of class and inequality from the NLD’s contemporary governing agenda.

Party Organisation and Collective Action Problems Post-2011

Despite the economic inequality and social precarity bequeathed by decades of military dictatorship and mismanagement, the NLD’s approach to these issues after 2011 has been shaped by the legacies of junta rule. In late 2010, the NLD quickly re-established local branch offices at a township-level across the country, often in the home of candidates who contested the earlier 1988 election. The party subsequently won 43 of the 44 seats it contested at the 2012 by-election. Developing clientelistic linkages with voters through the provision of targeted social assistance or jobs was difficult given the party’s limited access to state resources. However, ties of patronage with business people were quickly formalised at the national and provincial level. Suu Kyi began accepting financial support from commercial elites to support the NLD’s education network, the construction of a new party headquarters in Naypyitaw and the 2015 election campaign, defending her receipt of donations by saying: “Let them donate if they donate for good things.” ¹⁴ Such donations were seen by party operatives interviewed as necessary in a context where no public funding is provided to political parties and foreign income is prohibited (Pyae Sone, 2018). Development of the party at provincial level followed a similar pattern, with business elites becoming a major source of resourcing for the party’s 2015 election campaign. In lowland townships of provincial Myanmar followed closely by the author throughout 2015, the NLD campaign received significant financial support and manpower from local and nationally prominent business people who had been favoured by military officials during junta rule.

As with many who had accrued wealth through close ties to regional military commanders, the most affluent and prominent donors to the NLD had previously patronised various government organised and informal social and religious associations during the 1990s and 2000s, including the junta’s mass mobilisation patronage group, the USDA. When the USDA converted into a party and claimed the majority of seats at the 2010 elections, most of these business people helped bankroll both national and provincial-level campaign and, in some cases, even ran for office at the urging of junta officials. After restrictions on the NLD were lifted in late 2010, however, many commercial elites shifted their allegiances and more explicitly supported Suu Kyi and the NLD. Some did so subtly by making contributions to both the USDP and NLD. Others ceased their support for the USDP entirely and began to publicly claim they always had a deep and abiding commitment to “democracy” despite their earlier and, in some cases, ongoing collaboration with military officials. USDP operatives interviewed in 2015 felt particularly aggrieved by one nationally prominent tycoon who shifted his allegiances to the NLD in 2012 – describing him as a “chameleon” changing his colours. The tycoon made sizable contributions to the NLD at the later 2015 election, including seconding staff to township-level campaigns and providing trucks and funds to help candidates visit constituents in rural parts of electorates. Other local business people made significant contributions to the NLD as well as other parties such as the National Development Party, a USDP proxy party led by a close associate of Thein Sein.

It would be inaccurate to characterise the NLD as entirely reliant on commercial elites to resource the party’s organisational development after 2011 (see Roewer, 2020). ¹⁵ However, in analysing the NLD’s post-2011 political development, it is certainly true that business people have played and continue to perform a far more essential role in helping party officials solve collective action problems than more weakly mobilised urban or rural working-class interests. ¹⁶ These resourcing dynamics have been reflected in the limited priority inequality has received in the party’s policy and programmatic platform both prior to the 2015 election and since the party took power in early 2016. Indeed, despite the liberalisation of political contestation and the transfer of power to a partial civilian government, the precarity and inequality bequeathed by junta rule have been peripheral to the NLD’s policy programme since 2011 and governing strategy since taking power in early 2016.

Party Programme and Social Choice Problems Post-2011

The NLD’s programmatic agenda since 2011 has emphasised moral revival far more than economic justice. The absence of class is partly explained by the centrality of moral conduct in Burmese political thought. Various scholars have noted the convergence of individual moral conduct and societal liberation in the political ideology of Suu Kyi and other prominent democracy activists (see Walton, 2016, 2020; Wells, 2016, 2018). Political scientist Tamas Wells conducted interviews with fifty democracy and civil society activists between 2012 and 2014. Many framed moral discipline as an essential attribute not just for democratic leaders but for society more broadly. Echoing the notions of moral democracy espoused by Suu Kyi during the 1990s and 2000s, Wells (2018: 4) notes that “freedom” was often interpreted and deployed by ethnic Bamar democracy activists in ways which emphasised “freedom for moral conduct, freedom to bear moral responsibilities, rather than freedom for the exercise of individual entitlements.” Identifying what he terms a “benevolence narrative” of democratisation, numerous activists emphasised that democracy requires “the public, community, and all parties” to “set aside obsessions and stand together” (Wells, 2016: 152). In order to achieve true liberation, prominent democracy activists argued that citizens needed to set aside their “own desires” and cultivate moral “discipline” (B: si kan) (quoted in Wells, 2016: 153). ¹⁷ As Walton (2016: 129) notes in his study of Burmese political thought, the emphasis placed on elite and religious discourses upon moral conduct as a necessary component of democracy has allowed a wide range of actions – from “electoral politics to civil society activities to proper moral conduct in daily social interactions” – to be considered forms of political participation by both elites and many ordinary people. The proliferation of Suu Kyi’s moral conception of “democracy” during the 1990s and 2000s provided a degree of normative coherence within the NLD that was central to its re-emergence as a political force at the 2012 by-elections (Stokke et al., 2015: 25–27).

The NLD’s 2015 campaign at national and provincial level subsequently deployed these same ideals and narratives. Suu Kyi and local candidates often implicitly compared acts of “selflessness” with the self-dealing seen to be characteristic of junta decision-making. In so doing, they framed the election as a chance to simultaneously condemn authoritarian rule and endorse abstract ideals of “democracy” which Suu Kyi herself had come to epitomise since 1988. The abstract principles that formed the basis of the party’s appeal to voters were evident as NLD candidates bustled from village to village introducing themselves to trusted activists in the months prior to the polls. I attended dozens of NLD campaign events in provincial Myanmar and listened as candidates for office and local NLD sympathisers swapped stories about the egregious abuses they had experienced at the hands of state officials and police during the 1990s and 2000s. As candidates and local elders recounted these narratives, a hushed lull would often descend on the audience of loyalists, and the air of optimism would evaporate from the shrine rooms or living area in which we were all crammed.

Juxtaposed with the solemnity of these accounts of suffering, however, was another kind of personal story told by candidates and loyalists. In these narratives, well-intentioned people managed to circumvent authorities who had tried to suppress or disrupt small acts of kindness or works of local improvement, often as they were considered to be too “political.” One female NLD candidate, a former school teacher, recounted the callousness of being dispatched by her superiors to a rural school without notice, transportation, or accommodation – only to meet local villagers with “goodwill” (B: cedana) who offered her food and lodging. The story elicited knowing cheers from assembled supporters and ended with a comparison between the immorality of the military-affiliated USDP and the generosity of “the people” (B: pyithu ludu), of Suu Kyi, and the NLD as a party. “As Mother Suu says, working only for your own interest is not politics. Politics is working for the interests of all, with loving kindness (B: myitta),” she declared at the end of her story. Similar accounts recurred at other urban and rural campaign meetings, recounted both by candidates and party loyalists.

Viewed analytically, the linkage strategy deployed by the NLD through these events was “programmatic” in much the same way as the ideal of “democracy” espoused by Suu Kyi since 1988: it focused on the role of “selflessness” and “loving-kindness” in achieving social and political change but was not based on any attempt to aggregate voter preferences across constituencies into a carefully targeted platform of distributive policies. Rather than systematically addressing the socio-economic injustices bequeathed by junta rule, however, the party’s programmatic agenda relies implicitly and in some cases, explicitly, on business people and foreign investors enacting Suu Kyi’s ideal of “democracy.” Indeed, the NLD has largely sought to maintain the status quo and has avoided using formal or informal authority to address inequities created by junta rule – for example, by seizing and redistributing the assets of Myanmar’s military-linked business class. Prior to taking power, Suu Kyi urged voters not to oppose socio-environmentally destructive companies and industries in ways that might frighten foreign investors and instead encouraged them to “sacrifice for the country” (Prasse-Freeman and Latt, 2018: 409). Soon after taking office, she advocated successfully for the lifting of remaining US economic sanctions in an effort to encourage foreign investment into sectors largely dominated by military-linked cronies. ¹⁸ Her government’s emphasis on attracting capital to Myanmar has intensified in the wake of the international condemnation of the military’s expulsion of 730,000 Rohingya people since August 2017 amid alleged “clearance operations”. Both Suu Kyi and the Union Minister for Investment and Foreign Economic Relations, Thaung Tun, have repeatedly promised fast-tracked government approvals and tax incentives for investment in Myanmar, especially in “untapped” restive regions including Rakhine State and ceasefire areas (see McCarthy, 2019b: 28–36). ¹⁹

Since taking power, her government has sought to rebalance some hierarchies of power and influence. Strategies have been announced that seek to make Union and subnational planning and budgeting processes more environmentally and socially “sustainable” and “inclusive” of diverse constituencies, including women (see RoUM, 2018). However, reflecting the absence of class discourse from public debate, Suu Kyi and her government have notably eschewed class-based discourse nor sought to directly confront the immense inequalities generated during junta rule (see Prasse-Freeman and Latt, 2018: 408). Instead, she has espoused what political scientist Mary Callahan (2017: 1) terms a “socially conservative ideology of radical self-sufficiency and laissez-faire relations between the state and society.” Following the NLD’s landslide victory at the November 2015 election, Suu Kyi has repeatedly emphasised the importance of personal “courage” and “responsibility” to democracy, telling crowds gathered at multiple public events:

Think of what you can contribute for the development of your country, not what benefits you can have from your country…Only demanding rights without assuming responsibility and accountability, which are wholly left to the government, does not comply with democratic standards. (Suu Kyi in Callahan, 2017: 2).

Organisational and Programmatic Impediments to Progress: The Case of Land

Suu Kyi and senior ministers have committed the government to resolving land disputes across the country and set up a range of new investigative processes and committees. However, while a presidential decree to resolve all land disputes by the end of 2018 did compel some officials to reach resolutions, millions of acres of land remain contested.

At a provincial level, the integration of tycoons and commercial elites into the party organisation and the programmatic platform has created alliances that distort accountability and complicate resolution. For instance, in a context followed closely by the author since 2015, local NLD activists and supporters actively sought to suppress media coverage of an ongoing land dispute between a prominent businessman, who patronised the NLD since 2012, and local farmers who demanded return of land seized from them during junta rule. Rather than directly addressing grievances of the villagers or examining the amount of land they claimed had been seized, NLD activists organised a social media and protest campaign against the reporter who was attempting to cover the alleged land grabs. One Facebook post by a prominent NLD activist which received 1100 likes and over 180 shares in the days following the January 2016 protest accused the reporter of “attacking the (businessman) who provided a lot of support” to the town (Fieldnotes, 13 January 2016). The post listed “good things” that he had done for the development of the region by “working hand in hand with the NLD and USDP” and criticised the journalist for linking the protests to the businessman’s other commercial activities. Citing limits to “freedom of expression,” the post concluded with an indictment of the journalistic ethics of both the reporter and the outlet itself: “A few years ago prior to the entry of so-called journalists from [media outlet] we did not have this kind of problem” (Fieldnotes, 13 January 2016).

NLD activists previously involved in the 2015 campaign also circulated a provocative meme on Facebook in which the question “Is your goal to create a riot?” was superimposed over an image of the entrance to the city. The meme carried a potent subtext: allegations made by the farmers and journalist against a business person who was enacting Suu Kyi’s abstract ideal of “democracy” through local patronage of the NLD and various religious and social associations was an attack on the unity of the city as whole (Fieldnotes, 14 January 2016). In the days that followed local associates of the businessman, including activists seconded by the businessperson to the NLD township campaign during the 2015 election organised counter protests in which demonstrators carried signs explicitly criticising the journalist reporting on the land grab dispute. ²²

Rather than acknowledging the grievances of farmers and using the authority of the democratically accountable government to resolve the dispute, party activists instead mobilised against the reporter who was scrutinising the unjust land deals made during junta rule. Though the specificities of the case may be unique to the context, similar stalemates over land disputes are occurring at a provincial level across Myanmar, complicating fair and just outcomes for Myanmar’s landless people. NLD and other elected officials are reluctant to use their governmental power to compel tycoons or companies to return contested land. Nor are they seeking to aggregate the material needs of the rural poor into a programmatic policy agenda that addresses poverty and landlessness. Instead, many party officials and activists prefer to resolve disputes by business people – especially those linked to the party – returning land or redistributing their assets voluntarily in rituals that closely resemble the “donation ceremonies” Suu Kyi has personally hosted for tycoons in Naypyitaw.

Here we see how the political opportunities which shaped the democracy movement during junta rule continue to influence the way the NLD addresses problems of economic injustice and inequality in the contemporary period. Organisationally reliant on the resources and support of commercial elites and programmatically committed to an abstract ideal of “democracy” as “selfless” action in a market economy, a class-based agenda focused on restitution for economic injustices has so far found little traction within the party. The party’s primary linkages with voters instead rely on an ideal of moral discipline epitomised by the charismatic leadership of Suu Kyi along with an abstract agenda of neoliberal market reform shaped by clientelistic ties with junta-era business elites. Despite the dire poverty and precarity that have endured into partial civilian rule, the weakness of working-class interests and class ideology relative to business elites and moral ideals within the democracy movement of the 1990s and 2000s is stunting the NLD’s development as a cornerstone of Myanmar’s nascent democracy.