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As the coup proceeds: one of the sort of interesting, even promising, things I've seen is that we're hearing some different voices than usual - @the_ayeminthant @ThawWinnie @Aung_Kaung_Myat @yanoak e.g. - less of the old ex-diplomats, "experts," and a certain historian.
In part this is just a question of Twitter visibility – with respect to a country where Twitter is largely irrelevant, barely used. So it’s not something to over-estimate.
In any case, there might be a couple of points where I disagree (respectfully) with some of the discussions I’ve seen. First, I don’t see rationality/irrationality – namely the Tatmadaw’s – as a helpful analytical lens.
This kind of guesswork psychologizing sidesteps the more in-depth, structural analysis we need.
The point is not that the generals are actually rational, even though it might seem otherwise – the point is that rational/irrational is itself a flawed analytic, excluding far too much of the analytical work that’s necessary (imo).
I also don’t think foreign observers tend too often to see “cunning, rational” actors in Myanmar – if anything it’s surely the exoticizing attribution of irrationality that’s far more common.
Hence all the claims chalking up the military’s actions to (e.g.) “senseless personalized grievance,” as I saw it put at one point.
I’d argue, in fact, that the speculative psychologizing I’ve seen is only far too typical of many Myanmar watchers’ liberal presuppositions, advancing a palace-watching, top-down, individualizing mode of analysis to the exclusion of structural factors.
(Friends and family in Myanmar are hardly immune from this mode of analysis, of course.)
And second: have we returned to the bad old days, to the “old, isolated” past? It’s understandable enough. When I called my parents after the news broke, my dad’s voice shook with anger – they’re dragging us back in time, he said.
He talked about his memories of the coup in 1962 – tanks rolling through the streets, a climate of anger and fear – the Rangoon University Student Union building dynamited later. (He could hear the blast, he said, living nearby.) He felt it’s all happening again.
Again, it’s understandable enough – but it’s not all happening again. Military coups don’t belong to some desperate ahistorical past, in Myanmar or elsewhere (see: Thailand, e.g.). Always historicize: the conditions of the early 60s are not the conditions of the early 2020s.
What we see is not some generals stuck in the past, but a response to strikingly contemporary conditions: a disputed election (if baselessly), a military grappling with its lack of a social base, shifting dynamics around conflict and capital, even perhaps the global pandemic.
It’s essential, it seems to me, that we move away from dismissing this coup as some vestige of an irrational past. Not least because doing so affords little at best in terms of political insights moving forward. And resistance is in the air.
Forgive me: I’ll be airing my own take on recent events shortly. Meanwhile, *do* read at least these pieces – and feel free to disagree with my read. Regardless, I’m genuinely excited to see a shift away from the usual voices. Onwards.
Here are a couple more pieces that, for me (again respectfully), do a little too much to reduce the coup to a kind of palace intrigue, to personalized grievances at the top.
(Fin)
Oh: and here is one piece, at least, that begins to approach some of the more structural terrain that I think is necessary for understanding recent events, and developing political strategies (and struggles) in response. https://newmultitude.org/the-1221-coup-in-myanmar-the-breaking-of-a-hegemonic-bloc-or-business-as-usual/?fbclid=IwAR0q0o3l_c7BNQZ0c59SMLN215n0ho7GaDyqckgajIGOoC9w5OScZveHxzQ
One more: Stephen Campbell’s typically excellent account for @FocaalBlog centering the positions and politics of workers in Yangon. It pushes past, too, the very simplistic theme of liberal democracy in peril, which has dominated analysis thus far. https://www.focaalblog.com/2021/02/03/stephen-campbell-what-can-workers-expect-in-post-coup-myanmar/
There’s this now too: Mike Haack’s interview with the labor organizer Ma Moe Sandar Myint - the interview preceded the coup but has plenty to offer as we think about relations of power going forward. https://jacobinmag.com/2021/02/myanmar-labor-movement-authoritarianism-coup?fbclid=IwAR13GNNyvCNRdUKOYojlD37bL7M3a1IeiRKV6AmVNWlePGCsdAgeqyaXpgk
