The violence and bloodshed on Myanmar are getting worse. Even though the spontaneous resistance is becoming more potent, the international governments have not given the popular revolution significant aid. The Myanmar Tatmadaw has terrorised the populace for decades while also committing crimes against humanity and acts of genocide. People are revolting against the military regime to defend democracy, their rights to life, and progressive principles.
Critical assessment on National Unity Government and its leadership
The National Unity Government (NUG), the exiled parallel government comprised of ousted lawmakers, activists, and politicians from ethnic minority groups, is often perceived as the vanguard of the revolutionary movement by the mass population.
The fact that the National League for Democracy makes up the majority of NUG’s membership is a major point of contention. Additionally, the NLD’s performance over the previous five years has been dubious, particularly when it comes to dealing with ethnic minorities. The NLD attempted to engage with the military and crony capitalists, but this ultimately backfired and led to the coup, resulting in the loss of support from several progressive activists and ethnic minorities. Additionally, NUG has come under fire for being bureaucratic, cumbersome, opaque, and for having questionable leadership.
Thus, to oversee the NUG, the National Unity Consultative Council, a political alliance with collective leadership where ousted lawmakers, political parties, general strike committees, labour committees, student unions, certain ethnic revolutionary organisations (EROs), and activist groups are actively working together, is formed. Although NUCC is far from perfect and still has numerous shortcomings, it is undoubtedly the most inclusive political platform we have seen in Burma recently. However, the NUCC is as slow and inefficient as NUG and has become a platform for political discussion forums where privileged elite politicians, celebrities, and NGO’s as well as CSO’s have dominated.
Imperialism
So far, China has played a neutral role. China has financial interests in Myanmar and is demanding their economic zones be secured from the military conflict. In this way, China had to maintain diplomatic relations with the current military junta. On the other hand, China is still supplying weapons to the ethnic armed groups that are fighting against the military junta. Besides, China is demanding to meet with Aung San Suu Kyi for political discussion as well. So, it can be concluded that China hasn’t chosen a side so far. However, since China is only interested in its imperial power and economic advantage, the conclusion can be drawn that it will bet on the winning horse in the future. Nevertheless, Russia has chosen its side. Long before the coup, Russia had been a steady supplier of weapons and maintained a stable relationship with the Myanmar military. Moreover, Russia still exists as the sole steady weapons supplier for the military junta even during the coup and revolution era. Furthermore, the Moscow leadership also welcomed Min Aung Hlaing, the military junta leader, and some ultranationalist monks to Russia even after the coup. Recently, General Min Aung Hlaing and Putin confirmed their strategic alliance at the Moscow-organized Eastern Economic Forum. Since Russia’s imperialism has chosen to support the reactionary military regime, the anti-imperialist idiot Stalinists who are only opposed to western imperialism are currently facing backlashes from the working class and the public.
Left-wing militias
Even though most spontaneous military struggles are led by proletariats and peasants, some left-wing militias have been resurrected in Myanmar in the aftermath of the coup. The People’s Liberation Army, the military cells of the Communist Party of Burma, managed to radicalise some inexperienced youths with their Maoist theories. There are also some leftist ethnic militias who publicly follow Marxism-Leninism-Maoism as their revolutionary doctrine. Such examples include the Progressive Karenni People Force, People’s Liberation Army, and Bamar People’s Liberation Army(BPLA). The Progressive Karenni People Force is mainly funded by the Progressive Karenni people.
There’s another leftist militia group called the Bamar People’s Liberation Army, which claims to represent the Bamar people, the majority ethnic group in Myanmar. They claim that they’re against Myanmar’s chauvinism, yet they still proudly represent the Bamar people. Even though the Bamar People’s Liberation Army claims to be political left-leaning, most of the financial aid they receive is mainly from neoliberal CSOs, progressive reformists, human rights activists, international NGOs, and western-trained academia. Here, it’s important to note that the fundraisers behind them are the main defenders of the world’s neoliberal status quo. Nevertheless, it’s reported that these three left-leaning militias are planning to form a proper alliance with each other, according to the Facebook statement published by the Progressive Karenni People Force on the 13th of January 2022.
Left Opportunism
Theoretically, the young Mao Zedong was for federalism, according to his article in Ta Kung Pao. However, hypocritically, the authoritarian Mao Zedong when in power rejected the self-determination of Tibet, Mongolia, and some other provinces. The hostility to federalism by Myanmar’s military junta is in fact rooted in the anti-federal arguments of Stalin in the first place. Therefore, advocating for federalism while maintaining ‘Marxism-Leninism-Maoism’ as a revolutionary tactic is irrational at its core and opportunistic. Such opportunism can be found in the Communist Party of Burma and its military wing, the PLA.
Debunking the national bourgeoisie
Since the Communist Party of Burma is mainly influenced by Mao Zedong’s thoughts, they still buy into the idea of a revolutionary national bourgeoisie. In an article Mao Zedong wrote the following:
“The national bourgeoisie is a class which is politically very weak and vacillating. But the majority of its members may either join the people’s democratic revolution or take a neutral stand, because they too are persecuted and fettered by imperialism, feudalism and bureaucrat-capitalism.”
Karl Marx, in contrast to Mao Zedong and his revisionism, introduced the principles of perpetual revolution in his 1850 letter ‘Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League,’ written in the course of the abortive German bourgeois-democratic revolution:
“While the democratic petty bourgeois want to bring the revolution to an end as quickly as possible, achieving at most the aims already mentioned, it is our interest and our task to make the revolution permanent until all the more or less propertied classes have been driven from their ruling positions, until the proletariat has conquered state power and until the association of the proletarians has progressed sufficiently far – not only in one country but in all the leading countries of the world – that competition between the proletarians of these countries ceases and at least the decisive forces of production are concentrated in the hands of the workers.”
In other words, Marx was advocating a revolutionary method in which the working class maintain and defend the democratic revolution as much as they can until state power has been seized. In contrast, Mao Zedong substituted the class-struggle with his ‘new democracy’ concept, which is revisionist at its core. Mao Zedong’s new democracy states that the political revolutionary alliance between the working class, the peasants, the intellectuals, and the national bourgeoise should be accomplished and protected at all cost. Here, Mao Zedong even distinguished the national bourgeoise into two camps. According to his article ‘On the Question of the National Bourgeois and the Enlightened Gentry’:
‘The few right-wingers among the national bourgeoisie who attach themselves to imperialism, feudalism and bureaucrat-capitalism and oppose the people’s democratic revolution are also enemies of the revolution, while the left-wingers among the national bourgeoisie who attach themselves to the working people and oppose the reactionaries are also revolutionaries.’
Nevertheless, Karl Marx had warned that kind of political sabotage that could be potentially done by petty bourgeoisie in his letter ‘Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League’. They, Marx wrote,
“seek to ensnare the workers in a party organization in which general social-democratic phrases prevail while their interests are kept hidden behind, and in which, for the sake of preserving the peace, the specific demands of the proletariat may not be presented. Such a unity would be to their advantage alone and to the complete disadvantage of the proletariat.”
Instead of maintaining this socialist tradition of class-struggle, a revisionist party, the Communist Party of Burma, betrays the class war by forming an alliance with the national bourgeoisie.
Today in Myanmar the liberal bourgeoisie, in its historical role in avoiding the death-trap of revolution, comes out honourably, with the aid of the “national bourgeoisie” thesis! Here, the role of the liberal left, who are hegemonically influenced by the western liberal left, is important to be acknowledged. Instead of advocating for class struggle, self-described middle-class progressive leftists are concentrating far too much of their organising power on issues of political correctness. Instead of organising the working classes from different ethnicities, they’re fuelling the hatred between each community by provoking the race and culture war. Instead of focusing on building revolutionary organisations that focus on solidarity between different communities, NGOs, CSOs, and neoliberal academics are narrating the western liberal left politics that is based on identities such as race, gender, sex, and religion. It’s also reported that these fractions of the liberal left have managed to penetrate into NUCC and NUG as well. For example, Thinzar Shunlei Yi, a daughter of a military officer who has all the privileges of a top-rated education and an elegant living standard, is cosplaying as a democracy activist with the help of western mainstream liberal media. Even though Thinzar Shunlei Yi is cosplaying herself as a progressive leftist who normally argues about political correctness rhetoric, she still fails to acknowledge the exploitation done by her father and her family against the population of Myanmar. Despite blaming the politically backwards poor working class and middle class for their political incorrectness, she fails to hold her father and family accountable for all the exploitations and bribery they’ve committed. Such kinds of hypocrisy deserve to be exposed. The over-privileged, rich, western-trained academia and their fellow neoliberal opportunists, cosplaying themselves as leftists, are driving the pathway to defend the neoliberal status quo, which in turn protects their families’ wealth that was accumulated by exploiting the workers’ surplus value and labour.
According to Slavoj Zizek, “Western political correctness, also known as wokeness, has replaced class conflict, giving rise to a liberal elite that poses as the protector of racial and sexual minorities in order to deflect attention from the economic and political dominance of its own members.” Unfortunately, such hypocritical privileged elites are favoured and nurtured by western imperialist agencies and have received several activist awards. So, it’s apparent that the progressive national bourgeoisie are useful for a liberal democratic revolution where all the exploitations against the millions of average workers, working class and middle-class people persist. They will welcome the reforms that will not affect them but seems catchy to the working class. However, they will not support or advocate for a class struggle and a revolution that will liberate the proletariats, the poor peasants, and the non-economic labouring people. They won’t even show their revolutionary spirit but correcting all the mistakes, exploitations and bribery done by their families. All the wealth accumulated by their military officer fathers and family members are done by exploiting the common people of the country who have been criticised by them for being politically incorrect. Such kind of progressive national bourgeoisie should show their true revolutionary spirit by making their own family members to be accountable for all the crimes and exploitation they’ve committed onto the community.
To sum up, these occurrences demonstrate that for workers to be liberated, they should no longer be constrained by liberal democracy. They must also free themselves from wage slavery in capitalism as well as from the military junta. The working class in Burma is unfortunate in that it lacks a vision that is prepared to go beyond the requirements of liberal democracy. The authentic Marxist tendencies should be resurrected, and the fundamental inheritance of the left should be reclaimed from the reactionary liberal left.
HEIN HTET KYAW
