In 1931 did people talk about Late-stage Siam? Given a cursory Google search people seem to be increasingly talking about Late-stage Capitalism (ทุนนิยมขั้นปลาย). Recently, when making plans with friends in Bangkok, we had to factor bridge collapses into our dinner plans. It’s not just bridges that collapse, cranes fall on trains, buses explode, buildings crumble into the ground, warehouses explode. This has become quite routine.
It creates the bizarre situation where in Bangkok, the middle-class build coffee shops to look like warehouses, while the real warehouses are blowing up. People travel cross country by train because the bus drivers are on meth and the buses keep blowing up, but then a crane falls on the train anyway. Vast areas of city fall into the ground, sinkholes just… appear. The future is hazy to say the least, in part due to the increasing toxic pollution and in part due to the acceleration of frequent political crisis’, wars and questions of royal succession. There are half-built motorways to nowhere, ghost-cities so unwanted they don’t even become slums and recently a vast, perfectly manicured, private sky garden built for over 1 billion USD where you can take in views of one of the only genuine public parks in the city. It’s on this moodboard that we’re compiling the vibe & economic theory that is late-stage Thailand.
In short, this very noticeable vibe is becoming increasingly apparent as more and more retail consumption is taking place among the top financial bracket of consumers- Thailand’s luxury goods market is booming. In contrast, general private spending is falling at Covid levels. Businesses are reporting that shoppers are becoming increasingly value-conscious, prioritising basic essentials rather than small luxuries. What this means is that we’re seeing a massive increase in wealth in very niche areas- the gentrification coffee shop warehouses. At the same time as plummeting wealth in the majority of the country among everyday people- the actual fertiliser warehouses which occasionally explode.
The Logic
This system is very obviously not coherent and unsustainable, but by the logic of the profit-motive it is inevitably going to continue, at least for the time being. Bridges collapse, cranes fall on trains, buses explode because, in the short term, its the most straight forward way for capital to make line-go-up on the growth charts. Cost-cutting, prioritising short-term/quarterly growth and the extraction of value from physical assets without reinvesting in their upkeep. Capital has decided it is more profitable to let a warehouse explode (collect insurance, write off losses, rebuild it with cheaper labour) than to maintain it safely. Again, it’s more cost effective to use substandard cranes in construction- even if one might fall over once in a while.
But a system that routinely destroys its own infrastructure and the bodies of its operators (workers on meth driving exploding buses) is not a stable system. Rather its a regime in permanent crisis. Which can’t maintain the physical infrastructure (the bridges, trains, bus routes warehouses) and the biological/social health of the workforce (people who can afford to live, travel, and work).
Here we arrive at everyones favourite theory from Marx; the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. Marx argued that over time, the average rate of profit tends to fall as mechanisation/ machines replace living labour/ human workers, which becomes the sole source of new value. To fight this fall, capital does two things.
1. Intensified Exploitation: Capital drives down the cost of wages/ labour-power to near-zero. When wages are so low that the only way a bus driver can complete a 18-hour shift is on meth and still pay their rent. The bus company maintains its value, but the costs of the driver’s physical and mental destruction are borne by the public (crashes, deaths, drug addiction).
2. Disproportionate Investment in Luxury Good/ Fictitious Capital: When investments give increasingly low returns, like factories, farming, transport, big money flees to two places: Luxury products for the elite: This isn’t “wealth” exactly, as a designer handbag doesn’t really do anything for the economy other than employ a very small number of workers at boutique shops. The exclusivity of these products, by definition, creates no new wealth for the wider society.
As for fictitious capital, this is speculative investments that never go anywhere; half-built motorways to nowhere, the ghost-cities so unwanted they don’t even become slums (Muangthong). These are investments made not to produce useful things like housing or transport, rather they’re built purely in anticipation of future value that never arrives. Take then, the building projects that do get finished; the $1 billion private sky garden, which produces nothing, consumes resources and exists only to gaze down at a single, genuine public park.
Eerie
This is how we can explain the eeriness of late stage Thailand. The contradiction where the symbolic is eating the real. Again, capital can no longer generate profit from production (factories & warehouses making things), so it generates profit from the simulation of production’s ruins (coffee shops that look like refurbished warehouses). How weird? How eerie? How long can it go on? How long can a system where people go into debt to pay rent continue?
The crisis of late-stage Thailand is a crisis of realisation. Late last year, The Nation wrote: “Thai retailers say shoppers are becoming more value-conscious as household debt, energy volatility and geopolitical risks weigh heavily on consumption.” This is a realisation or recognition of the inevitability of a system in which the market produces commodities, but the people (workers) lack the wages to buy them.
Middling
While we seem to be the first to use the term Late-Stage Thailand, the above conditions and contradictions have, of course, been analysed and assessed. The consensus among academics, particularly economists, has been that Thailand is a perfect example of a country that got stuck in the “middle-income trap”. In brief, the theory is: poorer countries grow their economies quickly by making cheap good and copying technologies. Then they grow out of it, into the “middle-income”; not poor, but not rich either. To get richer, they need to start innovating and making high-tech products. According to most analysts, Thailand tried and failed. So it’s trapped.
However, Pietro Masina, a political economist, writes that the entire “middle-income trap” idea is misleading. The term was invented by the World Bank around 2008 to explain why Southeast Asian countries didn’t bounce back well after the 1997 Asian financial crisis. Instead of admitting that the growth model itself was flawed, they blamed each country for not trying hard enough; for having poor education, non-innovative companies, or too much red tape. This allowed the economic planners at places like the World Bank to dodge questions about how the global economy really works.
If we imagine a ladder, the middle-income trap theory claims Thailand climbed up and hit a ceiling. But Masina says Thailand never actually climbed that high. Compare it to South Korea or Taiwan. Those countries got rich by building their own companies (Samsung, Hyundai, etc.) and learning to design and invent things. Thailand took a different path: it opened its doors to foreign factories, mostly from Japan, that came to assemble cars and electronics. Thai workers learned to follow instructions, but they never learned to design the products or run the show. They were also never allowed to climb so high, not to disturb their Japanese/ Korean / Taiwanese / Singaporean bosses and managers. So Thailand’s industry is wide but shallow, a lot of activity, but not much real control over that industry.
Thailand’s problem isn’t that it’s too advanced and can’t find new ideas. The problem is that its growth model was always about being a helper to richer countries. Foreign companies kept the design, research & branding at home. Thailand got the assembly line jobs. After the 1997 crisis, growth slowed down, but more importantly, Thailand stopped catching up to rich countries. It stayed in the same spot on the ladder.
Against a Red Brick Wall
For the economic governing class at the IMF and World Bank, in Thailand’s case, usually political stagnation is blamed for this stagnation; the constant coup-protest-election-coup cycle is consequently acting as the ceiling causing this stagnation. We, however, are of the opinion that this analysis needs to be reversed. Rather the coup-protest-election-coup cycle is the outcome of stagnation. The protest & election elements are attempts to break out of this cycle, while the coup is the ceiling. Pheu Thai repeatedly attempted to change the fundamental orientation and direction of the economy, developing Thailand from one thing to another, while the current governing/economic elites remain by the IMF’s market logic. A logic which built a country and economy for the great war on the Soviet Union & Red China.
As we wrote several years ago:
Come the 90s, with the threat of the workers (communism) subsided, Bangkok was largely left to its own devices, the (Western) slush funds had been cut and domestic imperial bloat began to set in. Today, the decay is evident throughout Bangkok; an absurdly overcrowded city, its boulevards of empty shop fronts which are quite literally sinking as the sea slowly reclaims the land on which sparkling new malls and condos are still being erected.
For the top end of the bourgeois class, however, nothing needed to change. Consent has been so thoroughly manufactured. However, in the race to the bottom for capital to find new frontiers of extracting as much surplus as possible. The brutal extraction of profit can be performed for cheaper in nearby places like Bangladesh and Burma. Today, pristine Teslas glide effortlessly over the cracked streets and past the crumbling slums- their drivers entirely unaware of the rot that surrounds them, blissfully ignorant to the truth that they’re running on fumes, capital is abandoning them, though the stench remains.
Politics is downstream of culture.
Associated with conservatives and far-right cultural theorists “Politics is downstream from culture” argues that beliefs, values, art, religion, and everyday habits shape what people demand from the state and the economy. If one can then change the culture—through stories, religion, family structures, or moral norms then political-economic outcomes will follow. Politics formalises what culture has already decided.
Culture (in this case Vibes) is downstream of politics.
Associated with Marxists and materialists “Vibes are downstream from politics” argues that political and economic power (laws, property relations, state violence, infrastructure spending, etc.) creates the material conditions that shape cultural expression. A collapsing bridge or an exploding warehouse produces a “vibe” of cartoonish-doom, not the other way around. In short, we argue that these vibes, this moodboard of late-stage Thailand is very real, very provable and very changeable. Change the mode of production, change the culture.
Vibes
When we move between these stark spaces; the spaces of opulence, spaces of decay, spaces of desacration, spaces of eerie limbo, it’s the fractures between the two worlds where the vibe of Late-Stage Thailand becomes most apparent. These schizms, where Thailand is falling apart, at this late stage before its collapse. The vibe is the vibration of that fracture. The instinctual uncanny feeling of tension we have before a lightning storm.
At the beginning of this piece we asked if people in 1931 talked about Late-Stage Siam. After some research, No, no one said “late-stage Siam” in 1931. But they could have. The Great Depression and crumbling rice exports led to peasants drowning in debt. An absolute monarchy gutted state spending while the court consumed Western luxuries. This terminal contradiction ruptured in the 1932 revolution- making it undeniably -late stage Siam (even if they didnt realise it). Today’s soaring household debt, evermore new luxury outlets, falling wages and collapsing infrastructure mirror that unsustainable logic. Vibes repeat when politics fails.
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