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The rise of the Nangbaek (นางแบก) movement perhaps marks an entirely new political ideology and approach to Left politics. Domestically, it is the end of political innocence and the key to unlocking a materialist understanding of 21st century politics in the global south.
Emerging from shadow of the Red Shirt movement & the Pheu Thai Party in Thailand, this new iteration of quasi-left politics has rejected the costly moral crusades of the past, choosing instead a strategy of absolutist material realism, woven in with hardline social positions which champion queerness, radical-intersectional feminism and local trans (กะเทย) culture- making up the hardline wing of the Red coalition.
We previously wrote that the Pheu Thai party is an “impossible party on paper”, a coalition of green-cap communists and elite capitalists, “breaking all the rules of political science”. The party is riddled with contradictions, Nangbaek are the only supporters cynical enough to embrace and negate these contradictions, turning them instead into a substantiation, a new political vision. A vision informed by decades of oppression, bloodshed and open class-war, one which recognises that the political game is an entirely rigged one and that the revolution isn’t going to happen tomorrow, so we need to figure out how to live for today.
Water Carriers
The term Nangbaek, which can be loosely translated into an English idiom as “water carriers”- usually referring to women, was originally coined by their liberal opposition (the Orange movement) as a layered slur, often targeting women, one which insinuates that younger supporters of Pheu Thai “carry” (support) the party blindly without critique, and also hints at a class component, referencing the mass-base of the party who lack higher-education. Instead of fighting the slur however, the Nangbaek have embraced it, developing it into a distinct ideology- even a distinct movement independent of Phue Thai.
Throughout the history of Thailand, and much of the global south, politics has been negotiated through backroom deals and political violence in the streets. A far cry from the polite EU style- albeit hypocritical- calls for a politics of “transparency and rule of law”. Speaking frankly, this kind of politics has been proven ineffectual time and time again, most starkly in U.S aligned militarised states like Thailand. On the other hand, for the left, street mobilisation has proven effective, yet severely costly. Political massacres leap out of the Kingdom’s history; 1951, 1973/76, 1992, 2004, 2010, all of these backed by long-term campaigns of extrajudicial disappearances, killings and mass-arrests. Fighting for change is an extremely dangerous business, which often delivers small victories at tremendous cost.
For the majority of Thailand’s people, the most significant improvement in quality of life was delivered not directly through mass-organising, but through the success of the Pheu Thai Party. 30฿ universal healthcare, billions in village development funds, rural infrastructure projects, the list could go on. As we previously wrote, Pheu Thai broke the political science models to achieve these gains, as an unprecedented class collaboration between elite-nationalist-capitalists and the rural poor- a far cry from the socialist model of change, which nonetheless, provided socialist style results.
This is why we cannot frame Pheu Thai nor Nangbaek as reformist or revolutionary, they are both accurate, yet inappropriate terms all at once. Again, they break the rules of political science text books. Perhaps a more appropriate way to term this relationship to political change is that the movement demands and creates paradigm shifts, it opens up new horizons of possibilities, some reformist, some revolutionary, some even reactionary.
Radical Pragmatism
Imagine a family living under Thailand’s roof. The parents (the military and capitalists), the surviving grandparents (the monarchy), ultimately hold the power to dictate the rules of the house, the distribution of labour, the chores, the social values etc. And crucially, they have a monopoly of violence. One son (the Orange movement) stubbornly protests this arrangement, refusing to participate, boycotting the system entirely, upholding the absolute moral highground, but achieving no real change. One daughter (the Nangbaek) after years of punishment and degradation, recognises that she has nowhere else to turn, and so, understanding that we all have to live in this house together, she leverages her position as best she can, abandoning the moral high-ground in favour of a better quality of life for the time being- until the day where perhaps the grandparent dies and the parents are weak enough to be seriously challenged.
After generations of political massacres, the death of movements, economic and social degradation for the poor, Nangbaek prioritises the need to put food on the table and live to fight another day, not to survive to fight another day, but actually live and to enjoy that life. This is how they differ from a morality based conception of politics, they recognise that the moral high ground can not be traded as political currency, it doesn’t put food on the table, seeds in the ground, or money in the bank.
This pragmatism is rooted in generational oppression and decades of political introspection. Nangbaek are acutely aware of their own image. When critics accuse them of defending the indefensible, they do not lash out defensively; they knowingly lean into the role. This is a political subculture that uses humour as a means to negotiate with power. They know that siding with the elite Shinawatra dynasty is already a compromised position, but they see no reason to provide ammunition to the Ultra-right or liberals by criticising their own.
“Cunty”
Their key weapon is enjoying themselves, as we said earlier, living rather than just surviving. This is often expressed through specifically queer, camp, absurdist humour- “cunty” humour. For example, when Pheu Thai PM Yingluck Shinawatra infamously wore designer boots to visit flood victims, the mainstream opposition called it a scandal. The Nangbaek response is that “actually she looks amazing, she’s serving cunt and you can’t handle all that” or “she’s the most persecuted woman in Thailand, she deserves nice things.” This semi-serious, semi-humorous defence often leaves critics baffled. By taking the sincerity of the moralistic Orange movement and turning it upside down, Nangbaek created a shield that deflects all incoming fire. This aligns with the broader Thai queer online subculture that uses parody to reflect and critique the nation’s sociopolitical landscape, turning what is supposed to be a mark of shame into a badge of honour.
One of the key contradictions that the morality purists cannot digest is the relationship between Nangbaeks and the elites of Pheu Thai, particularly the Shinawatra family. They know that Thaksin cut a dubious deal after his exile to avoid jail time. They know the family dynasty’s wealth is staggering, its connections to capital deeply entangled. They do not care. Not because they have been fooled as their critics would make it seem, but because they have learnt that no one serves the material interests of the poor at scale other than the political machine that the Shinawatras built.
The 30฿ universal healthcare program, the village funds, the rice subsidies, etc. were not delivered by moral crusaders or jailed student monarchy critics. They were delivered by a family of telecom billionaires who made a cold calculation that earning loyalty through wealth redistribution was more effective than fighting a forever war against the military. The Nangbaek see this clearly. They vocally defend Yingluck’s designer wardrobe not because they identify with her wealth, but because they identify her as their wealthy woman- the one the royals and the generals have persecuted. If they identify with her, it is with her enjoyment of her life (serving cunt). In the Nangbaek lexicon, loyalty is not about shared class interests per-se; it is about shared enemies and proven deliverables. The Shinawatras are bastards, yes. But they are our bastards.
To speak in somewhat mathematical Marxist terms, Nangbaek negate the negation and use it as a substantiation:
The negation: “Pheu Thai politicians are corrupt and morally bankrupt.”
The negation negated: “No, they’re perfect, and even if they want to be corrupt that’s fine, they deserve to get paid too, and at least we get a cut of it.”
Post-Revolution – Post-Reform
The aforementioned liberal movement, Orange politics, the EU style of politics, is reformist to its core: they want to amend the constitution, abolish the lese-majeste law, clean the electoral system, and ultimately reshape the rules of the house. They believe in institutions, in transparency, in the possibility of a better, fairer Thailand if only the right laws are passed and the right people are put in charge. The Nangbaek, however, have abandoned this fantasy entirely. They do not seek reform because they no longer believe the house can be renovated. They seek only compromise; a series of tactical, temporary, and utterly unheroic accommodations with power that secure immediate material gains.
When the liberal says “we will not rest until the monarchy is held accountable,” the Nangbaek say “the monarchy is untouchable, so give us cheap rice and rural buses.” When the liberal says “end military influence in parliament,” Nangbaek say “fuck the generals, but they’re dug in deep, so let’s make them pay for our trans-healthcare.” When the liberal says “our older generation of uncles and aunties are reactionary,” Nangbaek say “of course they are, but at least they still do karaoke with us.”
Reform requires a shared belief in rules; whereas compromise requires only a clear-eyed assessment of who holds the guns. The Nangbaek are not failed reformists. They are post-reformists, people who watched the 2020 youth movement burn itself out against the walls of the parliament, who saw every moral crusade turn into a criminal conviction, who concluded that the only rational politics left, in this particular moment, is to make a deal today, no matter how ugly that deal may be.
In many ways this recognition is reflective of a developing trend in global south politics, going as far back as Dengism in China, a hard pragmatism when confronted by a fundamental unequal and unjust world order that requires compromise rather than reform. The likes of which many socialist states have had to come to terms with over the decades since the fall of the Soviet Union. As far as we know however, this mode of thought on the Left has yet to find a classification and globally, such pragmatism usually finds itself capitulating to unsavory socially reactionary elements, this is quite the opposite for Nangbaeks, who are well defined, self identified, collectively on message and totally unwilling to compromise on social stances.
Domestically, Nangbaek developed out of the Red Shirt movement that was initially formed to defend Phue Thai in the streets. The Red Shirts were left-populist, at times revolutionary socialist, at times socially reactionary, while many young people were involved, the bulk of the movement was made up by older uncles and aunties. Combined with their eagerness to fight in the streets, the Red Shirts also leant heavily into the lexicon of idealism “democracy” & “freedom”. Over the past decade however, many Red Shirts have drifted politically following intense state repression. During the height of the Red Shirt movement, all Phue Thai supporters were automatically Red Shirts, however, due to generation shifts, many Nangbaek do not feel entirely comfortable adopting the term Red Shirt. This isn’t because they harbour any grudge against the older gen, rather they feel they haven’t earnt the badge. Red Shirts were highly active street fighters, who faced down tanks and gunfire in the street during a time when the current Nangbaek were still infants. For many in this younger generation, they feel the shirt is earned rather than claimed.
Kam Phaka, the Godmother
If the Nangbaek have an ideological north star, it is undoubtedly Kam Phaka, the acid-tongued red-shirt activist, writer, academic, social media agitator and lifestyle influencer. To understand the movement’s raw materials, its absolutist material realism, its rejection of liberal moralising, and its weaponisation of campness, one must trace their lineage back to her.
For over a decade, Kam Phaka has done what no formal Pheu Thai party organ could do: she articulated the submerged logic of the Shinawatra project in its most unfiltered, often uncomfortable terms. Her politics are less of a programme but more of a posture. A posture that holds a relentless, unsentimental insistence that the poor are owed material gain rather than revolutionary romance.
Nobody is safe from Kam Phaka. Her critiques of the monarchy’s wealth, the military’s impunity, and the performative purity of liberal activists have resulted in legal persecution, loss of employment, and physical threats. She also makes up half of the power couple that is her and her wife Wasana Wongsurawat, a highly respected history professor at Chulalongkorn University. Often supporting one another publicly they form a tight intellectual and political unit. While Kam Phaka articulates the Nangbaek ideology of materialist realism, Wasana provides the academic rigor of a scholar who has analysed the deeper foundations of power, nationalism, and capital in the kingdom, such as in her seminal book The Crown and the Capitalists (2019). In 2025, after yet another controversial media storm around Kam Phaka, Wasana wrote that her partner had helped her “learn to accept and find happiness in being a social pariah”.
In many ways it is Kam Phaka’s practice, more than her politics, that serves as the movement’s unintentional blueprint. She thrives in the contradictions that Nangbaek have since elevated into a principle: unapologetic enjoyment in the face of structural violence. She infamously dismisses liberal critics with vulgar, ridicule and efficiency, she does not seek to persuade; she seeks to win, to leave opponents shocked while her audience laughs.
Kam Phaka taught Nangbaeks that piety and shame is a resource the powerful use against the powerless, and that the only rational response is to refuse it entirely. She is a woman who has been called every slur in the Thai political lexicon; communist, traitor, whore, etc. and has answered each by doubling down on her own pleasure: her love of luxury goods, her wit, her refusal to perform austerity or martyrdom as she puts it “subverting the politics of respectability”. Kam Phaka embraces and thrives in the contradictions. Again, negating the negation, turning it to a substantiation.
In doing so, she became the blueprint to embody what Nangbaek would later organise around: that a politics of survival must include joy, that critique without cynicism is naive, and that the most subversive act in a militarised austere society is to live well and argue plainly while doing it. She did not found the movement. But long before the term Nangbaek existed, Kam Phaka was already carrying it.
Who Are The Nangbaek?
Just as Pheu Thai’s support was made up of a broad tent, Nangbaeks can be hard to demographise. One could be a Bangkok corporate office drone, another a rural queer, another a court judge. Some vague commonalities can be found however: Not all Nangbaek’s are leftwing, but all good leftwingers are Nangbaek, not all queers are Nangbaek, but you’ll find a disproportionate number of queers in the mix. Like with Phue Thai’s support base, Thai’s originally from the outer provinces (not Bangkok) are overrepresented. The movement is also largely led by women, with relatively few straight-cis-men adopting the term for themselves.
Another key figure in the movement is undoubtedly Aum Neko- who sits at the cutting edge of baek. Aum Neko was a Red Shirt provocateur during her student years in Bangkok, she gained infamy (and a lot of fans) for her antics like posing sexually with a statue of Thammasat University founder Pridi Panomyong and her video tirade celebrating the death of King Bhumiphol in 2016. As a self-described communist and anti-fascist, her political refugee status in France has allowed her to speak even more openly than figures like Kam Phaka, publicly developing the Nangbaek label, using her sexuality, trans-identity, humour and ability to skirt judicial consequence. From her base in Paris, she embodies the movement’s central ideological turn- rejecting the moralistic posturing of the liberal opposition in favor of a materialist realpolitik that unapologetically backs the Pheu Thai machine.
The Opposition
Following the rise of the Orange movement around 2019; Future Forward Party, Peoples Party, et al. There was a surge in Orange aligned civil society groups; legal funds, civil rights NGOs, academic grants, publishers, thinktanks, and so on. Orange aligned media also quickly came to dominate the mainstream hegemonic culture out of Bangkok. It was in this moment that the Orange liberals were able to take the progressive or leftwing authority that the Red Shirts once held. Figures in academia suddenly began quoting Adorno, Harvey, Foucault and the other well controlled Western lite-Marxists (men) that have long policed contemporary Marxism from materialist analysis, instead adhering to blind idealism. In contrast, through Nangbaek’s scorn for such analysis, they can sometimes paint themselves as what may appear to be anti-intellectual. However, this is more of a radical materialist form of intellectualism, one which sees no use value in idealistic naval gazing. As such, the Oranges met the perfect clean, controllable, intellectual, polite (EU style) civil society criteria, as such, many Nangbaeks, before the term was even coined, held their politics undercover. The common refrain with individuals and politically organised groups alike was “we are baek, but undercover because we need our funding” or simply “we don’t want people to get mad at us”.
With increasing evidence of the ineffectualness of the Orange’s civility movement, however, more and more Nangbaeks are coming out of the closet: Recently, two relatively high profile friends of DinDeng, one a Thammasat University lecturer and one a well respected translator and literary critic, both of which had never publicly identified as Nangbaek outed one another on a livestream. While much of the movement originally grew online, it is slowly stepping out into real world spaces, as members develop the practice of baek. Karaoke nights, hot-pot nights, workshops, reading groups, women’s groups- the daughter begins to develop her own life despite the tether to the family home.
While much of Nangbaek’s public scorn is directed at the stubborn protests of her brother- the Orange liberals- there exists another child in the family dynamic. The tough bigger brother, the blue brother, Bhumjaithai, the enforcer of the parental order. As we’ve previously written, Bhumjaithai are open monarchical fascists. Like Phue Thai and the Nangbaeks, they hold a similarly cynical assessment of the current order. Their response however, is not to compromise with mum and dad, but to suck up to them, to do their bidding in return for special treatment. As despicable as this may be, for Phue Thai, despite all the bitterness the blue brother is still a family member that they can work with, that they can compromise with, that they can leverage; hence the recent parliamentary coalition between Bhumjaithai and Phue Thai.
Among this ecosystem, amidst the joy, there is a lot of hurt, a lot of spite. Here we find Ma Nongmawor. Unlike the spectacle of Kam Phaka or Aum Neko, Ma Nongmawor- a poet, provides a more embattled end of the Nangbaek spectrum. While currently inactive, she was highly formative in developing the Nangbaek mindset, particularly the scorn for Orange liberals. She can be read as a hurt figure, one whose wider, more introspective analysis, is born also from bitter lived experiences. She initially came to prominence as a Red Shirt Poet, surviving all the crackdowns and admonishments. In 2018 she was briefly an early, hopeful supporter of the Orange Future Forward Party, seeing it as a potential alternative political avenue when it looked like Pheu Thai had been totally crushed by the military. However, she was quickly disillusioned. That same year she accused the party of being little aristocrats, run by cliques, obsessed with aesthetics, trends, youth support and ultimately alienating the grassroots it claimed to champion. While others in the Nangbaek movement prioritise joy, Ma Nongmawor carries the weight of past defeats and betrayals openly, as someone who has been in so many political vehicles that have crashed and burnt. Her lifestyle is also far more in keeping with the Red Shirts of old, she keeps her actual face out of the spotlight, she lives on a farm, she’s poor and she talks about it. She is also far more critical of Pheu Thai party than others, catching heat from other Nangbaeks. Thus, her analysis, her rhetoric and her spite, cuts deeper, comes through clearer, as it’s laced with decades of struggle.
Only Baek
The Nangbaek phenomenon has likely been a pleasant surprise for Phue Thai, although in many ways the party doesn’t seem to quite know how to respond to it. To embrace the term itself, explicitly a slur, is awkward. Earlier this year Pheu Thai chairperson wrote what was interpreted as a summation of the Nangbaek ideology without mentioning the movement by name.
Internally, the movement is still in a state of flux. There is no manifesto, nobody has claimed it, nothing has been institutionalised, its purpose, its focus and its push is still largely open to development. For example, among baeks, after Pheu Thai legalised same sex marriage, while the step was openly celebrated, it also led to introspection deep within the bowels of the nangbaek body. ‘This is a victory, but do we really want this? Do we want queerness to be institutionalised, if so how? And how can we push this further?’ etc.
While the movement itself was essentially founded on the basis of publicly stanning Pheu Thai unapologetically, most self-described baeks we spoke to insisted that the movement is not inextricably tied to the party; “I am not a socialist, not a feminist, not a Phue Thai supporter, I am simply nangbaek forever”. Again, nangbaek thrives in contradictions, you’re not supposed to only understand this on paper or through dialectical materialism, you need to understand it in your heart, in your emotions. This is the key strength and power of baek.
Carriers, Carers
Ultimately, for the time being, the Nangbaek movement has no intention of storming the barricades, to do so right now would be absolute suicide. Unlike our comrades in Burma, where the state is brutal yet comparatively weak, the Thai military is completely hegemonic, its strength unmatched. The goal then, for today, is to live and enjoy living. Nanbaek recognise the brutal reality of Thai capitalism and state oppression, but unlike the old Red Shirt generation who sacrificed their lives in lost street battles, or the Oranges who proudly get sent to prison for a tweet against the monarchy, Nangbaek are determined to choose life and how to live it.
They choose to recognise the potential of the Phue Thai party, despite all the contradictions, obstacles and oppression present in parliamentary politics, believing that they are the only party that can deliver actual, material change. They aim to secure as comfortable a life as possible within the existing exploitative capitalist-patriarchal-monarchic structure. They are not political saviours; they are political pragmatists, using cynicism to survive a house that has no room for idealism.
In the opening of this piece, we translated nangbaek (นางแบก) as water-carriers, however the direct translation would be something more like throne-bearers; those who would carry the arms on a throne (palanquin) of a monarch in ancient times. But another possible origin for the term is teh baek (เดอะแบก) meaning one who provides financial support or emotional labour for the family unit (often the sandwich generation). As we said earlier, for the nangbaek in the country home, this is her role. Be it the carer, the compromiser or the water carrier, all are jobs that, ultimately, someone has to do. So for now, we will find joy in carrying the water.
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