Editor’s note: The original version of this article, by Ko Leik Pya, is being restored from our archive. In the meantime, this editorial overview sets out the questions the piece raised about the coup of 1 February 2021.
In the early hours of 1 February 2021 (1/2/21, hence “1221”) the Tatmadaw detained State Counsellor Aung San Suu Kyi, President Win Myint and dozens of National League for Democracy (NLD) MPs. They were due to take their seats in the new parliament that same morning. By breakfast, the military-owned Myawaddy TV had announced a one-year state of emergency. Vice-President Myint Swe, a former general, had been made acting president, and he handed power straight to Commander-in-Chief Senior General Min Aung Hlaing. The justification was alleged fraud in the November 2020 election, which the NLD had won in a landslide and the military’s proxy, the Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP), had lost badly.
Most of the international coverage told a simple story: democracy has been overthrown and the generals are back. That story isn’t wrong, but it hides more than it explains. The question for the left is not whether the coup is a crime (it obviously is). The question is what exactly it has broken. Was there something worth calling a democracy that the generals destroyed? Or is this just the latest round in a long fight among Myanmar’s ruling classes over who manages the state and who profits from it?
A decade of “discipline-flourishing democracy”
Gramsci used the term historic bloc for an alliance of class forces that rules through a mix of coercion and consent. It combines economic interests, political institutions and a shared common sense about what is normal and possible. The 2008 Constitution was the legal blueprint for such a bloc in Myanmar. The generals wrote it, and it was ratified in a referendum held days after Cyclone Nargis. The military called the result a “discipline-flourishing democracy”. Behind that phrase was a carefully managed transition.
The settlement was simple. Civilians could win elections and form a government. The military kept a quarter of parliamentary seats, which gave it a veto over constitutional change. It also kept control of the Home Affairs, Defence and Border Affairs ministries, and with them the General Administration Department, the bureaucracy that reaches into every township and village tract. Its conglomerates, Myanma Economic Holdings Limited and Myanmar Economic Corporation, kept their stakes in jade, gems, beer, telecoms, banking, ports and real estate. Alongside them stood the crony capitalists who had grown rich under the junta through timber concessions, import licences and land.
From 2016 the NLD government did not challenge this arrangement. It managed it. Foreign direct investment poured into special economic zones, garment factories and infrastructure projects. Western sanctions were lifted, the Chinese Belt and Road corridor advanced, and Japanese, Singaporean and Thai capital moved in. Liberalisation brought a new urban middle class, a booming mobile phone market and a sense, in Yangon and Mandalay at least, that the country was finally “opening up”.
The NLD also supplied what the military could never produce alone: consent. Aung San Suu Kyi’s moral authority among the Bamar Buddhist majority legitimised the whole arrangement. The clearest example came in December 2019, when she travelled to The Hague and defended the Tatmadaw at the International Court of Justice against charges of genocide against the Rohingya. That was the bloc working as designed. The civilian face covered for the military’s violence, and the military guaranteed an order in which civilian politics could proceed.
Who was left out
Any hegemonic bloc is defined as much by who it excludes as by who it includes. The people left out of Myanmar’s transition were the people who had always been left out. The Rohingya were stripped of citizenship and driven into Bangladesh in their hundreds of thousands. In Kachin, Shan, Karen, Karenni and Rakhine states, fighting continued throughout the “democratic” decade, alongside land confiscations, dams and extraction. In 2020 the Union Election Commission cancelled voting across large parts of Rakhine and Shan states, disenfranchising more than a million people. The NLD government raised few objections.
Workers were excluded too. The garment sector, Myanmar’s flagship export industry, was built on some of the lowest wages in Asia. When workers organised, factory owners responded with mass dismissals of union leaders, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. The labour law reforms of the period were cautious at best. Farmers who had lost land to military-linked companies found that the new civilian government was in no hurry to give it back.
For the ethnic peoples, the workers and the rural poor, then, the bloc was never a democracy in any substantive sense. What has broken is a façade. The structure behind it was there all along.
Why break it now?
If the arrangement served the military so well, why tear it up? The answer seems to lie less in any threat to the system as a whole than in tensions within the bloc itself.
First, the election result. The NLD won an even bigger majority in 2020 than in 2015, and the USDP collapsed. The military had expected to rule through a combination of its guaranteed seats and a viable civilian proxy. The result showed it could not win at the ballot box, even with the help of nationalist monks and a tightly controlled media environment. The share of power the 2008 Constitution guaranteed was secure, but it was not growing.
Second, personal and institutional interests. Min Aung Hlaing was due to retire as Commander-in-Chief in mid-2021. Without the protection of high office, he faced exposure to international prosecution and the loss of the networks of patronage that the commander-in-chief controls. A presidency was the obvious route to safety, and the NLD majority closed it off.
Third, the military’s economic empire. As foreign capital arrived and the civilian government built its own relationships with investors, the Tatmadaw’s conglomerates faced competition and greater scrutiny. A coup lets the generals renegotiate the terms of Myanmar’s integration into global capital from a position of direct control, rather than as a junior partner to an elected government.
Seen this way, the coup is not a rupture with the system. It is a correction within it: an attempt by the coercive wing of the bloc to restore its dominance over the consensual wing. In that sense, it is business as usual.
Why it may not be business as usual
Every hegemonic bloc relies on consent, and consent cannot be ordered. The generals have miscalculated badly here. They assumed that the population would accept the coup with the same weary resignation as in 1962 or 1988. They forgot that a decade of opening up has produced a generation of young people who have grown up with Facebook, cheap mobile data and some experience of political participation, and who have no intention of returning to the darkness of the old junta.
Within a day, the first signs of resistance appeared. In Yangon, people banged pots and pans from their windows at night, an old custom for driving out evil spirits. Doctors and nurses at government hospitals announced that they would not work for the military regime, launching what has become known as the Civil Disobedience Movement. Calls are spreading for teachers, railway workers, civil servants and bank staff to join them. Garment unions, already battle-hardened by years of struggle against factory owners, are talking about a general strike.
This is significant. The 2008 settlement relied on a bureaucracy that would carry out orders whatever the government. If the civil service, the hospitals, the railways and the banks stop working, the state is a shell, no matter how many soldiers stand on the streets. A coup that breaks the bloc’s consensual wing may find that the coercive wing alone cannot run the country.
A warning and a hope
There is a danger in all of this. The resistance is currently gathering under the NLD flag and Aung San Suu Kyi’s portrait. The demand to “restore the elected government” is understandable, but it amounts to restoring the very bloc that excluded the Rohingya, abandoned the ethnic states and left workers at the mercy of factory owners. Western governments and investors will be very happy with a return to the status quo ante: civilian legitimacy, military stability and an open economy.
The question is whether the movement against the coup can grow beyond that. Can the Bamar majority, now on the receiving end of the violence that ethnic minorities have endured for seventy years, recognise that their struggle is the same struggle? Can the strikes of health workers and garment workers become the basis for an organised labour movement with its own demands? Can the resistance call for the abolition of the 2008 Constitution rather than its restoration?
If so, the coup could mark the beginning of the end of the hegemonic bloc, not because the generals broke it, but because the people they excluded refused to put it back together. If not, we can expect business as usual under new management: another round of elite bargaining, another façade, and more of the same displacement, land grabs and militarisation in the border regions.
The generals have opened a crisis. Who resolves it, and for whom, remains to be seen.
