This has been quite surprising. It all began on 15 August when the regime quintupled the price of petrol overnight. I did think then it was a spectacularly stupid thing to do, given the history of protest in Burma, which tend to be sparked first by economic grievances before taking on a political tenor. The 1988 uprisings, which are called ‘democracy protests’ by Western media and activists, actually began as protests against the demonetisation of the Burmese currency. The long back-drop to this story is the way declining commodity prices forced Burma to go to the World Bank for loans, transforming it from one of the least indebted to one of the heaviest indebted poor countries in the world by the mid-1980s. Japan, the Burma Socialist Programme Party regime’s major backer, refused in 1987 to grant further aid to the government unless it embarked on neoliberal economic reforms. This precipitated the demonetisation (the voiding of particular denominations of kyat notes), which was disastrously planned right before students were due to pay their fees. Their resultant inability to do so prompted protests against the government, which then, because the demonetisation had also led to inflation and food hoarding, prompting a massive increase in the price of rice, escalated into a general sense that the regime should go. At this point the government collapsed, the military stepped in and suppressed the demonstrations, promising elections – and has remained in power since.

After the 1990 elections, we’ve never seen protests on the scale of 1988. Although isolated groups of students (know as the generation of ’88), monks, National League for Democracy activists and others have staged small-scale demonstrations, these generally fizzle out and involve only a few hundred people at a time. The most serious disturbances have remained those related to basic subsistence issues: when the government allows inflation to get out of hand, and particularly when the price of rice (the basic staple) escalates, that’s when we’ve seen large groups of people come onto the streets. The correlation is clear enough that one would have thought it obvious enough for the regime to avoid such massive increases in basic commodity prices for fear of precipitating revolt. But it flags up a basic fact about Burma: despite all the talk of a ‘totalitarian’ or ‘Orwellian’ state, the Burmese state is an extremely ramshackle entity often staffed by completely inept, underpaid individuals, and led by people who have little sense of what they are doing. The military in particular, who dominate the upper echelons of government, have very little political awareness of how to consolidate their rule, and are notoriously bad at running the economy.

This is a reminder that regimes that fail to reflect the popular will find it intrinsically difficult to govern society. You cannot just boost a regime with vast amounts of cash and arms and expect it to rule effectively if it has few roots in its own society. The military itself is virtually indistinguishable from the state and regime, and the military does have social roots: in a context of poverty, it often provides the only route of employment for rural folk, and soldiers are often able to access resources that normal people cannot. But the distrust of Burma’s small middle class and of intellectuals in general means that the regime’s base is very slim, and talented individuals are generally excluded. There are no representative institutions to give even a semblance of popular participation (the National Convention, convened in agonisingly slow fashion since the early 1990s to draw up a new constitution, is so tightly controlled as to make it impossible to convey any bottom-up perspective). The regime inculcates such a sense of pervasive fear that it is virtually impossible for it to understand the grievances of ordinary people. You can contrast all this with countries like Indonesia under Suharto: the New Order was extremely brutal and despicable in all sorts of ways, but it brought in technocrats, built a national ideology and effectively demobilised the masses via economic development and channeling residual demands through managed representative structures, while building power blocs among the emergent capitalist class. The point about the regime is not its strength, but its intrinsic weakness because of its abstraction from the society it governs.

All that said, Burmese ‘civil society’ (I hate that term, but it’ll do for now) is extremely weak, divided and disorganised. The 1988 protests were successful in that monks, students and ordinary people seized control of local government structures and began ruling themselves as the BSPP government collapsed. But just at the moment that unity was required, fragmentation kicked in. The Burmese Communist Party, which had been holding together a fragile alliance of ethnic rebel groups fighting along the Chinese and Thai borders and whose official aim was a multi-party democracy, collapsed in 1989, dissolving into rival ethnic factions which apparently preferred to farm opium and seize the opportunities of cross-border trading that were opening up as the Cold War staggered towards its grave. Most of these groups subsequently signed ceasefire agreements with the new military government which left them in de facto control of their territory to pursue economic development and illicit activities, in exchange for peace – by 1996 there was only one real hold-out (the Karen National Union, much weakened by repeated military defeats).

Many of those involved in the ‘democracy’ uprisings in 1988 and the elections of 1990 – most of whom were ethnic Bama, the country’s majority, against the dominance of whom the rebel groups have been fighting virtually since the country’s independence in 1948 – have since fled the country. About a dozen MPs elected in 1990 fled to Karen areas to declare a National Coalition Government of the Union of Burma – recognised by no-one and now occupying the role of Western-dependent lobby group at the UN. Other dissidents fled to Thailand, setting up toothless NGOs to supply invective against the regime for the West to use in its annual resolutions. When such groups call for action, their own lack of roots in Burmese society, as exiles, is manifest. They called, for instance, for mass uprisings on 9 September 1999, and the only result was a few hit-and-run protests in Rangoon, with most people just hoarding food, fuelling inflation.

The NLD has been steadily decimated by resignations, deaths, incarcerations and suppression, but in fairness its ideology, such that it has one, has always been feeble: Aung San Suu Kyi, a devoted Buddhist, steered the more radical student groups towards non-violence in 1989-90, and her speeches (collected in Freedom from Fear) make it clear how dependent this approach was on the goodwill of the military. The NLD, far from being a liberation movement, rapidly degenerated into a peaceful protest group, effectively politely asking the regime to dismantle itself
, then calling on external forces to intervene when, unsurprisingly, the military declined to accept this proposal. Dissidence has been increasingly externalised since the late 1990s, when Burma joined ASEAN (Suu Kyi asked ASEAN to “nudge Burma towards democracy”), by which time Western states had lost most of their limited leverage over Burma by exhausting their options with sanctions. Rebel groups increasingly turned to Thailand, especially under the government of Chuan Leekpai (1997-2000), capturing the Burmese embassy and Ratchaburi hospital, attacking buses and so on in an attempt to get help from the ‘international community’. The externalisation of Burma’s dissidence is a manifestation of its weakness within Burma itself. The most organised element of Burmese ‘civil society’ is the Union Solidarity and Development Association, a government-backed group of 11m members.

I mention all this because it’s important to re-insert the latest protests into some sort of context. First, if I’m right that it tends to be economic hardship that prompts protests, some might argue that sanctions are therefore the way to go: Suu Kyi herself called for sanctions in the mid-1990s and is regularly invoked to stop tourists visiting and so on. There might be some basic connection between sanctions, economic hardship and protests, but it’s certainly not linear. Burma is not economically isolated: it trades heavily with its ASEAN neighbours, particularly Thailand and Singapore, and with China, India and Bangladesh, and it gets investment from these quarters, too. However, it is denied the usual poor-country access to international financial institutions like the World Bank and organisations like the UNDP, which means that its capacity to run development projects is correspondingly limited (compare this with Laos, whose governance is probably no better, but gets 19 times as much overseas development assistance per capita than Burma). Sanctions have bitten to some degree: tens of thousands of jobs were lost in textiles as a result of US sanctions.

It might be possible to punish poor people enough that they feel the need to rise up, which seems to be the basic logic of US sanctions (EU sanctions try to target the regime instead). But the problems with this are twofold. First, sanctions cut both ways: by emiserating the people, they might help drive them towards protest, but they will equally, and perhaps more so, encourage them to remain acquiescent. Media reports have frequently quoted people too afraid to join the protests because they may, as a result of government reprisals, lose what little income they do have: they simply cannot afford to protest.

The second objection is more fundamental. Where exactly can the protests go? So far, the unprecedented scale of the protests currently underway have been possible because of the leadership of Burma’s Buddhist monks. The reason for this is not simply, as the Western media patronisingly put it, that the monks are ‘revered’ and ‘powerful’, as if the simplistic Burmese are in awe of monkish authority, but because the regime itself has sought to drape itself in the legitimacy of Buddhism: the Buddhist sangha was effectively nationalised under the old government and the military has sought to portray itself as the guardian of Buddhism, repairing and rennovating Buddhist pagodas and stipas, becoming patrons of major temples and reviving some of the symbolism and rhetoric of Burma’s pre-colonial monarchy. (Likewise, Aung San Suu Kyi is portrayed as a Buddhist ‘angel’ (nat), emphasing a ‘quest for purity’ over the ‘mundane’ affair of politics.) This is why the military finds it particularly difficult to move against the monks: though it has threatened to disperse protests by force, it is not clear whether it will now intervene militarily. It is not immediately obvious whether the Burmese military would accept orders to mow down monks with machine guns, and if the rank and file revolt, the regime really will collapse. More likely is an attempt to round up or arrest monks, but this could easily degenerate into combat if ordinary people seek to intervene. The whole country is balanced on a knife-edge at this point.

But to return to the original point – where do the protests go from here? Let’s say that the protests continue to escalate. If the regime collapses, who takes over? The monks? The NLD? The ’88 Students? The problem is that since 1988 there has been no state worthy of the name: the military is the only structure in Burma capable of governing. There is no state to seize from the grasp of the generals. Unless the Burmese can organise themselves politically in short order, and show themselves willing and able to govern themselves, it’s difficult to see how this ends. Burmese society is so weak and politically disorganised that there isn’t even a small, organised group which could take power in the regime’s stead. Even if, somehow, the generals saw no choice but to relinquish power to some sort of interim government composed of NLDers, monks and whoever else, the likelihood of rebel groups submitting to a new central authority, which they have resisted for nearly 60 years, is very low – indeed, their reluctance to accept Bama domination under the Bama-led NLD in 1988-90 was a key reason why the military was able to divide and rule Burmese society.

This is not to say that some sort of progressive outcome is impossible: in revolutionary situations a relatively small group of organised individuals can potentially lead society against overwhelming state opposition and overthrow the existing order, installing their own government. There are numerous instances of this, most obviously the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. The difference is that in all of these circumstances the revolutionaries were highly organised, disciplined and dedicated to a particular ideal: although the mass revolt against the Czarist regime, for instance, was relatively spontaneous, it was ultimately guided by a vanguard of people who were clearly oriented towards a particular goal and had been preparing for it for some time. Even in 1917, opinion was divided as to whether revolution could be successful or not.

Can Burma’s monks lead a democratic revolution? Their courage is inspirational, as is that of the ordinary people who have gradually joined their protests. But they do not seem to be a political force: they know what they want to get rid of, but do they have a clear vision of what they wish to replace it with? Multi-party democracy is a fine aspiration, but are people prepared to fight and strive for it? In 1988, the uprising was put down with a loss of about 3,000 lives, and after the 1990 elections (which were technically for the election of a Constituent Assembly, not a new government; Western encouragement after the results prompted Suu Kyi to demand the immediate transfer of power) Burmese society has effectively been demobilised both by military suppression and the tactics of Burma’s democratic leadership. Foreign powers instinctively recognise this problem when they call for ‘restraint’ from the government and progress towards democracy, and even Burmese exile groups call for a UN resolution to demand a political transition. They seem to have little confidence themselves in the capacity of Burmese people to seize power themselves, and of course the EU and US have no interest in a radical popular democracy sweeping to power in Burma in any case.

Will new, more dynamic and forceful leaders emerge in the
heat of political confrontation, or will people continue to defer to ‘the Lady’? It is almost impossible to predict, since in the absence of a well-organised, strong opposition the answer relies on the capacity of individuals to organise themselves spontaneously. We must simply watch as this process unfolds, hour by hour. What is clear is that whatever the outcome, things won’t just return to the status quo ante: things have gone too far for that. Watch this space.