Postscriptum

This chapter takes a step back from Thailand and asks what the political experience of the motorcycle taxi drivers can offer to philosophy of praxis today. In particular, it focuses on three issues that the drivers’ life trajectories, their everyday life in the city, and their adoption of mobility, a characteristic and strength of post-Fordism capitalism, as a tool of political mobilization and a field of struggle raise. First, they invite us to a methodological reflection on the role of contradiction in political praxis; second, they urge us to reconsider where accumulation and the production of value is located in post-Fordist capitalism; and third, they call on us to use this analysis to locate points of least resistance and weak spots on which political pressure can be most effectively applied.

Epilogue

This epilogue follows the life of the motorcycle taxi drivers and the political situation in Thailand since the 2014 military coup. In particular, it explores how the government of Prayth Cha-o-cha is attempting to cement the cracks that the Red Shirts mobilization revealed in 2010. Once again, the chapter argues, these plans will not be completely successful and will create unintended consequences that will expose new fragility in the power of state forces.

Fighting over the State

This chapter explores Thaksin Shinawatra’s plan to bring the informal and illicit economy under his government’s control as an attempt to cut off from its profit state officials who used authority (amnāt) to exert influence (itthiphon). Aware that elected governments historically faced significant opposition and resistance from bureaucratic and military forces, Thaksin wanted to take away their financial resources. This, he hoped, would be a first step toward bringing them under his control and establishing his domination over the state. Much like the plans to restructure Bangkok, however, Thaksin’s vision encountered significant resistance, both on the streets and inside the corridors of state offices. His policies triggered a series of processes with spillover effects and unintended consequences. At the street level, the formalization of motorcycle taxis ended up pushing these atomized driver-entrepreneurs to mobilize into a significant collective force, one that initially unified to criticize Thaksin and question his leadership. In the halls of power, Thaksin’s attempt to bring other state forces under his control ended up unifying them in opposition to him, sowing the seeds of his demise. This chapter reconstructs both dynamics—the struggle that ensued during Thaksin’s time in office and the shifting alliances that they generated.

Prologue

This prologue is a description of a day in the life of motorcycle taxi drivers in Bangkok, from morning to evening. It follows a specific day in which, after delivering passengers and documents, the drivers ride to the Ratchaprasong intersection to take part in the Red Shirts protest. This narrative describes the drivers’ station, their experience when riding through the city, and their relations to colleagues and local residents. It concludes by showing how the whole city was reorganized during the protest and the role the drivers played in this transformation.

Introduction

This introduction reconstructs the author’s entrance into the field, the beginning of his research in Thailand, and the initial reason to conduct research on the motorcycle taxi drivers in Bangkok. It shows the ethnographic and theoretical value of this work. The chapter follows the author’s trajectory from wanting to study how mobility operates in a metropolis of fifteen million people to finding himself in the midst of the largest social movement in Thai history.

The Unresolved Tensions of Migration

This chapter analyzes the drivers’ circular migration between Bangkok and their villages. It focuses on the predicaments of this mobility. On the one hand, their experiences, stories, and trajectories contribute to reproducing narratives in which Bangkok and the villages sit at opposite ends of the spectrum of development and modernity. On the other, the drivers modulate between the two spaces, constantly attempting to pull them together, connect and mediate them, struggling to find a place for themselves in between the two. This chapter explores how the drivers navigate this complex position, torn between their participation in reproducing narratives of distance between the city and the village, which drove them to migrate in the first place and keeps them suspended between the two spaces, and attempts to reconcile it though their life trajectories. Whichever strategy they adopt to cope with these tensions, in their migration, the drivers take the same gamble that they accept while riding the city: a gamble that makes them both aware of and concerned with the fragility of their lives and the material effects of these unresolved tensions on their families and villages.

The Dangers of Mobility

This chapter explores the drivers’ role in knitting together Bangkok’s territory, its daily activities, and its dwellers. It analyzes their everyday life as urban infrastructure and as producers of the channels through which the city circulates. This position requires the drivers to adjust and synchronize to the multiple rhythms of nature, urban capitalism, and city life. Bangkok is the product not only of epochal processes of construction, destruction, and layering but also of continuous assembling and reassembling through the actions of a variety of networks and actors. The drivers are pivotal to this everyday production and, as they weave the city together, they strive to move their own lives along the channels they create. Sometimes they succeed and set their own futures in motion. At other times they do not, and they find themselves stuck and exhausted at the side of the road, ready for their last ride all the way back to small, cramped rooms in the urban periphery.

Unraveling the Thai Capital

This chapter focuses on the Red Shirts protest that took over Bangkok from March to May 2010. In particular, it explores how motorcycle taxi drivers transformed their mobility and invisibility as urban connectors into political tactics, posing a significant challenge to state forces and ridiculing the pretense of state control over the city and its flows. The drivers—to use the words of Oboto, the man who led the largest group of organized motortaxis in the protest—embodied their role as “owners of the map,” holders of an unmatched knowledge of the urban terrain and gatekeepers of its channels. During three months of protest, the drivers emerged as unrelenting and uncontrollable political actors: invaluable allies and dreaded enemies, able to chart the terrain of the protest better than anybody else and move through it, rendering it readable to their allies and opaque to their enemies. Moving through back roads and parking lots, collecting and circulating information and directives, appearing and disappearing in the urban landscape—skills they developed in years of moving through Bangkok’s impenetrable traffic—the drivers managed to raise a formidable challenge to apparently unbeatable state forces.

Combining Powers

This chapter follows the association of motorcycle taxis after the end of the Red Shirts protest. It explores the attempt by military forces to cut off the drivers from the social movement and include them into the state security apparatus. The chapter shows how the association was divided between two conceptions of power—barami and amnāt—and positions this tension at the core the Thai political conflict in the last decade. We are not facing a binary, but rather the unresolved tensions and the failed attempts to combine two conceptualizations of power that need to coexist, even with their contradicting features. To govern Thailand, one needs to needs to have both amnāt and barami, both to claim moral charisma and institutional power, juggling both of them. The conflict, this chapter argues, emerged because, since 2006, no political figure has been seen able to do so.

Transforming Desires into Demands

This chapter explores how, since the 1997 crisis, desires for commodities, access, and recognition emerged as a central focus of political struggle among the drivers, as well as among others. Under Thaksin, those desires were framed as legitimate forces that propelled people to participate in restarting of Thai economy after the 1997 crash. Since the 2006 coup, however, unelected governments dismissed them as the immoral effects of greed and Thaksin’s handouts. In between these two positions were the drivers who turned their unfulfilled desires for the commodities into requests for a more receptive leadership and for recognition of their status as citizens. In the period between 2009 and 2010, faced with a government unwilling to hear their voices, the drivers and millions of other citizens transformed those desires into political demands. The result was the largest protest in Thai history, a social mobilization that took to the streets to protest their political and economic oppression and exclusion.