Thousands of workers in Myanmar (also called Burma) have taken to the streets in defiance of the Tatmadaw, the thuggish military that has ruled the country for most of the last 60 years. In a February 1 coup, the Tatmadaw ousted the racist civilian misleader, Aung San Suu Kyi, and her NLD (National League for Democracy) Party. Protesters are demanding her release from prison and a return to democracy. But make no mistake about it, democracy will never liberate the working class from the horrors of capitalism.
Under class society, the ruling class dictates to everyone else. Under capitalism, a capitalist dictatorship rules for maximum profit and power for the few by exploiting the international working class. “Democratic” elections are a sham the liberal bosses use to hide the coercion and violence of their rule. We must fight for a workers’ dictatorship—for communism. Only then will workers have any control over society and their lives.
The current conflict in Myanmar, one of poorest countries in Asia, is between two enemies of the working class. It’s a fight over which group of bosses will rule the country and line their pockets with profits stolen from workers. It’s also a fight over which imperialist power Myanmar will align with—China or the U.S.? What’s happening in this small, impoverished country is part of a worldwide trend toward fascism and world war.
Workers should take no side in fights between bosses. Backing either side leads our class into the arms of the mass-murdering capitalist ruling class. We have a better alternative. Let’s channel the mass militancy workers have shown in the streets, defying curfew and dodging bullets and water cannons, to organize an international communist movement to smash this racist profit system once and for all!
Inter-imperialist rivalry and rising instability
Myanmar is an important puzzle piece in the sharpening rivalry between China and the U.S. The military’s takeover “pits the foreign-policy strategies of the two powers against each other. And it thrusts Myanmar on to the front lines of an increasingly tense geopolitical competition for global leadership” (WSJ, 2/2).
For China, Myanmar is a big part of its Belt and Road Initiative, a strategy to expand China’s influence throughout Asia, Africa, Europe, and Oceania, the continent dominated by Australia. The Bangladesh-China-India-Myanmar Corridor gives China an overland alternative to shipping oil and gas through the vulnerable Strait of Malacca. It also reflects the steep decline of U.S. power in Southeast Asia. “The Chinese government… sees the coup as ‘a moment of opportunity’ to undercut the inroads the United States and other Asian nations made during Myanmar’s halting democratic opening” (NYT, 2/5).
What with the Donald Trump disaster, massive unemployment, and a bungled response to the Covid-19 pandemic by Republicans and Democrats alike, the U.S. is in disarray. It has long since lost its claim to any “moral” superiority. The new Joseph Biden administration may escalate sanctions against the Myanmar generals to try to bring back Suu Kyi, who’d been somewhat friendly with the U.S. while keeping her options open with China.But according to the Wall Street Journal (2/2), “...additional U.S. sanctions will have only marginal impact on the Burmese military....” With China and other Asian trade partners in hand, the Tatmadaw has little to fear from U.S. threats.
In short, U.S. liberal democracy is rapidly losing ground. The January 6 Capitol riot exposed the bosses’ biggest immediate problem, the split within their own class. Before they take on China, where the rulers have the advantage of open fascism, they must get their house in order: a prescription for more open fascism in the U.S.
Ruling class disunity leads to coup
Workers in Myanmar have long lived under brutal military rule. British imperialism “...rearranged the nation’s ethnic and racial hierarchies in order to best extract profit...” (Foreign Affairs, May/June 2020). After achieving independence in 1948, Myanmar’s military held mostly unchallenged power until 2011, when they entered a power-sharing arrangement with Suu Kyi’s civilian party. Mimicking their colonizers’ racist brutality, they orchestrated the genocide against Rohingya Muslims.
Atrocities against the Rohingya included mass killings, “babies thrown to their deaths, mass rapes, whole villages burned to cinders….Thousands of Rohingya have been killed and three quarters of a million driven into a squalid exile in neighboring Bangladesh” (NYT, 12/11/19). To stay in power, Suu Kyi alternately denied the military’s racist atrocities and defended them as a campaign against “insurgents or terrorists” (NYT, 12/11/19). But the two sides fell out when the NLD won recent elections by a landslide, and the military felt their control could be in jeopardy.
Suu Kyi, racist liberal misleader
The open brutality of Myanmar’s military is obvious. But liberal rulers like genocide apologist Suu Kyi are even more dangerous for the working class. Lauded by the world’s liberal bosses for her commitment to “democracy,” Suu Kyi won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991.
Like Russia’s Alexei Navalny (see CHALLENGE editorial), Venezuela’s Juan Guaido, and Biden himself, Suu Kyi is part of a global dead-end misleadership. Putting our hopes in any of these liberal bosses will only lead us down the road to supporting the U.S. rulers’ inter-imperialist fight against China to dominate the world’s resources and labor.
Workers have no stake in this fight
The lesson of Myanmar is that there are no good bosses. “Ethnic and religious minority groups who have experienced repeated violence at the hands of the Tatmadaw for decades…saw little change under Aung San Suu Kyi’s NLD” (Foreign Policy, 2/10).
But these are not the only choices for the working class! Workers in Asia, from China to Vietnam to Myanmar, have a strong tradition of fighting imperialism under communist leadership. But when workers made the mistake of embracing nationalism, their tremendous sacrifices were squandered by a new group of local bosses. It is time to fight for the real alternative, an international communist party: Progressive Labor Party. PLP is organizing to turn the bosses’ imperialist fights into revolution to liberate the working class. Join us!