For more by the author, see his article “Putting-Out’s Return: Informalization and Differential Subsumption in Thailand’s Garment Sector” in Focaal, freely available to all readers until 22 May 2019.
Opening his 1990 political history, The Rise and Fall of the Communist Party of Burma, the Bangkok-based journalist Bertil Lintner summarized the then recent end to the party’s 40-year insurrection: “It’s cessation was not the outcome of a successful government offensive or of a generous amnesty policy, but of an all-out mutiny within the rank-and-file” (1990: 1). The party, by then deeply invested in the Golden Triangle’s heroin economy, had long since lost the level of popular support it had once achieved for advocating the interests of workers and peasants, and for its role in fighting Japan’s World War II fascist occupation and Britain’s postwar efforts to reassert colonial rule. Meanwhile, the military-backed Burma Socialist Programme Party, which since the 1962 military coup had ruled the country as sole legal political party, itself imploded in the face of mass anti-government protests in 1988. In any case, the party had long ago eviscerated its meager socialist credentials, as when it dispatched soldiers to massacre workers participating in the 1974 general strike. To this day, discussion of leftist politics in Myanmar is overdetermined by these inglorious historical facts, which mark the declining years of socialism and communism in the country.