The Red‐Shirt‐sided underground movements in Thai politics: resistant operations towards the Mysterious Land

This thesis studies the Red-Shirt-sided underground movement that began its political role in the Thai political scene beginning with the 2010 repression of the Red-Shirt movement by Thai state. This movement has three main characteristics. Firstly, this underground movement has more radical political ideas than the previous Red-Shirt movement. Secondly, besides Red Shirts supporters, there are other people join this subsequent movement, albeit never participated in Red-Shirt activities but ‘sided’ with its direction. Finally, this movement used underground methods to avoid being arrested and repressed by the Thai government. The study used the two Marxist ideas – historical materialism and the uneven and combined development (UCD) – and some social movement theories such as Charles Tilly’s work to create a conceptual framework. According to this framework and the main data obtained from interviewing activists and collecting online material, the results of this study show, firstly, the Red-Shirt-sided underground movement is one of the results of the development of the capitalist mode of production in Thai society under the conditions of UCD. The main groups in the Thai ruling class which led the transition from a pre-capitalist to a capitalist mode of production in Thai society had been able to retain their power continually, even while facing difficulties and challenges on both domestic and international level. Although this made the Thai ruling class very powerful, the intrinsic expansion of capitalist development and political conditions led to crucial social conflicts and the uprising of mass movements in the late 2000s. The brutal repression by the state caused some dissidents to adopt radical ideas and this eventually formed the underground movement. Second, although the early ideas and actions of the underground movement derived from the previous movements, the dialectic relationships both within the movement and between the movement and other social institutions led to the reproduction of ideas and actions but with differing qualities. Finally, this movement made changes both within the movement and to the impact on external social institutions. Some underground groups could expand their number of followers and arrange activities in Thailand. However, Thai authorities repressed underground groups in many ways including by arrest, and allegedly, by abduction and assassination