ABSTRACT
There can be little doubt that conservative elements associated with the political Right have been the dominant political influence in Southeast Asia since the end of colonial rule in the 1950s and 1960s. It is true that the Left and related progressive forces have exerted important influences at particular times. However, it is apparent that their agendas of radical social, economic and political transformation have been subordinated to those promoting capitalist economic development, essentially conservative politics and hierarchical social structures as specified in various other chapters of this volume. In this chapter we seek to outline the significance of the Left as well as its political demise
following a period from about the 1930s to the early 1980s when socialist and communist parties were most active and significant. For the more recent period we outline how the political space occupied by these movements has come to be occupied by broad social democratic movements. In this category we include a range of liberal social movements, civil society organizations (CSOs), community-based organizations (CBOs) and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that have promoted a politics associated with human rights, environment, media freedom, rural livelihoods and other causes directly or indirectly championing citizenship rights of one sort or another. In other words, from a period where Left and progressive politics was associated with radical
socio-economic and political transformation, this has been replaced with activism that is supportive of enhanced protection for civil and individual rights and collective goods such as the environment. Whereas progressive politics was once opposed to conservative or reactionary ideologies and sought to oust conservative and military governments, in contemporary Southeast Asia, the NGOs noted above are more likely to operate without seeking to fundamentally transform the established political order. In Southeast Asia, over most of the period we discuss, progressive politics opposed colonialism, held generalized notions about egalitarianism and social solidarity, and worked against authoritarian and military-based regimes. While socialists and communists generally adopted class analysis when analysing society and sought to oppose capitalism, bourgeois activists were more interested in reforms that brought classes together within the capitalist economic system in a way that guaranteed certain rights. These basic definitions underpin the following discussion. Socialist and communist movements had their greatest influence during the nationalist
struggles from the 1930s and following the Second World War. In these struggles coalitions of workers, peasants and nationalists became indispensable elements of the anti-colonial movements.
In particular, the communists often provided organizational strength to the independence movements. While there were both links and divisions between the Left and other nationalist parties with, for example, the largest communist party in Asia in Indonesia, for a time the prospects for socialism in Southeast Asia seemed promising. However, as will be shown, despite taking power in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos in 1974-5, the political influence of communist and socialist movements and ideas of egalitarianism have declined across the region. To a degree, the political gap left by this decline has been filled by a bourgeois, often liberal, opposition seen in the social democratic forces noted above. Self-proclaimed Leftist political movements continue to exist as legal or underground groups
or parties in the region, and some have even been revitalized in recent times, as in Thailand in 2009-10 (see below). However, as capitalist development deepens – even in Vietnam and Laos where communist parties remain in power – the Left has substantially declined. In this chapter it is argued that the momentum for the expansion of a non-state political
space was established through the activism of the organized Left.2 This political space, and the influence of the Left, has ebbed and flowed as first colonial and then authoritarian states repressed political expression. The chapter examines this process through a broad historical account, focusing on the Left and a range of other non-state groups that have sought to extend the space available for political activity. This discussion follows a brief account of the theoretical underpinnings of the emergence of a ‘politicized’ civil society, not as any natural outcome or as an end point in a process of economic and political development, but as the product of a constantly evolving contest over the extent and nature of political space. Integral to this contest are competing preferences for who should be represented in the political process and how.
