The growing industrialization of Thailand due to the introduction of capitalist processes has had a revolutionary impact on the organization and structure of the society. New classes, groups and interests have arisen including a new urban-based industrial working class who are essential to the new capitalist procedures. This book examines how industrial workers have come to occupy a strategic place in the contemporary political economy and charts their long-term activism in seeking redress for a range of individual, social and political problems. This text focuses on how the state has become entangled in the processes through which workers have been organized, reorganized and disorganized as social and political actors in different historical periods. By examining the themes of labour weakness, political exclusion and insignificance of class factors, this book brings back workers from the margins by demonstrating that both in the present and past the state has been involved in processes that determine the forms of their struggles. By utilizing new empirical data and historical material, Brown highlights how the working class have emerged as an enduring facet of Thai society.

This book focuses on how the state has become entangled in the processes through which workers have been organized, reorganized and disorganized as social and political actors in different historical periods.

In this book Brown argues that workers in East and Southeast Asia are significant actors in political change. Critically examining the themes of labour weakness, political exclusion and insignificance of 'class factors' he aims to bring workers back from the margins, demonstrating that both in the present and past the state has been entangled in processes that determine the forms of their struggles. This book presents new empirical data, important historical material and an innovative approach to workers and politics.

Jim Glassman addresses the role of the state in the industrial transformation of what was, before the economic crisis of 1997-98, one of Southeast Asia's fastest growing economies. Approaching this issue from a different angle to those dominating 1980s and 1990s debates about the role of states in East Asian growth, Glassman argues that the Thai state has been both proactive and interventionist in encouraging industrial transformation - contrary to what neo-liberals have asserted -but at the same time has not been a 'developmental' state of the sort championed by neo-Weberian analysts of East Asia.Analyzing the Cold War period, the period of the economic boom, as well as the economic crisis and its political aftershock, Thailand at the Margins recasts the story of the Thai state's post-World War II development performance by focusing on uneven industrialization and the interaction between internationalization and the transformation of Thai labour.

Providing a full account of the role of women in union activism in Asia, covering all the major economies of the region, this book successfully challenges the prevailing conception of women workers in Asia as passive and uninterested in industrial issues.

Border Capitalism, Disrupted -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Abbreviations -- Map -- Introduction -- 1. Producing the Border -- 2. Capitalist Recuperation -- 3. Mobility Struggles -- 4. Coercive Policing -- 5. Class Recomposition -- 6. Organizing under Flexibilization -- Conclusion -- Postscript -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index -- A -- B -- C -- D -- E -- F -- G -- H -- I -- J -- K -- L -- M -- N -- O -- P -- Q -- R -- S -- T -- U -- V -- W -- Y -- Z

Why have Taiwan, rich parts of China, and Thailand boomed famously, while the Philippines has long remained stagnant both economically and politically? Do booms abet democracy? Does the rise of middle "classes" promise future liberalization? Why has Philippine democracy brought no boom and barely served the Filipino people? This book, unlike previous books, shows that both the roots and results of growth are largely political, not just economic. Specifically, it pays attention to local, not just national, power networks that caused or prevented growth in the aforementioned countries. Violence has been common in these politics, along with money. Elections have contributed to socio-political problems that are also obvious in Leninist or junta regimes, because elections are surprisingly easy to buy with corrupt money from government contracts. Liberals should pay more serious theoretical attention to the effects of money on justice, and Western political science should focus more clearly on the ways non-state local power affects elections. By considering the role of local money and power (above all, from small- and medium-sized firms that emerged after agrarian reforms) on elections and justice, this book asks democrats squarely to face the extent to which electoral procedures have failed to help ordinary citizens. Students and scholars of Asia will all need this book - as will students of the West whose methods have become parochial.

Why have Taiwan, rich parts of China, and Thailand boomed famously, while the Philippines has long remained stagnant both economically and politically? Do booms abet democracy? Does the rise of middle “classes” promise future liberalization? Why has Philippine democracy brought no boom and barely served the Filipino people?This book, unlike most previous studies, shows that both the roots and results of growth are largely political rather than economic. Specifically, it pays attention to local, not just national, power networks that caused or prevented growth in the four places under consideration. Violence has been common in these polities, along with money. Elections have contributed to socio-political problems that are also obvious in Leninist or junta regimes, because elections are surprisingly easy to buy with corrupt money from government contracts. Liberals should pay more serious theoretical attention to the effects of money on justice, and Western political science should focus more clearly on the ways non-state local power affects elections. By considering the effects on fair justice of local money and power (largely from small- and medium-sized firms that emerge after agrarian reforms), this book asks democrats to face squarely the extent to which electoral procedures fail to help ordinary citizens. Students and scholars of Asia will all need this book — as will students of the West whose methods have become parochial.

A quarter of a century has now passed since the historic popular uprising that led to the overthrow of the Ferdinand Marcos dictatorship in the Philippines. The mass movement known as the "People Power Revolution" was not only pivotal to the democratic transition within the Philippines, but it also became an inspiration for subsequent mass movements leading to further democratic transitions throughout the Third World and in the former Communist bloc in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. However, the neoliberal economic policies subsequently pursued by newly democratic governments throughout the Third World led all but the most celebratory observers to note the constrained and limited nature of these formal political transitions. This volume poses the question of the extent to which ‘people power’ has been able to play an active role resisting neoliberalism and deepen substantive democracy and social justice. Through a series of case studies of the regions and individual countries of Asia, Africa, Latin America and Eastern Europe, the contributions in the volume provide a new set of original and in-depth critical assessments of the nature of the longer-term impact of the democratic transitions commencing in the 1980s and continuing until the present, and questioning their impact and potential influence on human dignity, freedom, justice, and self-determination, and thus opening new avenues of enquiry into the future of democracy. This book was originally published as a special issue of Third World Quarterly.

Catch-Up Industrialization is an innovative examination of how the political ideology of 'developmentalism' has driven East Asian economic growth. The author considers innovative production and management techniques, the patterns of industrial relations, and the way education shapes the workforce, using this information to assess late 20th century East Asian economic development based on economic liberalization and the rapid diffusion of information technology.The term 'catch-up' links developing and developed countries, and defines the socioeconomic mindset common to high-growth societies of Asia. The author's argument differs from neoclassical approaches emphasizing the workings of the market, statist ones emphasizing policy rather than private initiatives, business studies lacking macroeconomic and global perspectives, work by development economists based on agriculture, and World BankIMF studies that lack socio-cultural and historical understanding.