What role can workers play in advancing democracy?
I want to distinguish between two concepts: democratisation from above and democratisation from below.
Let us return to 2020. In November 2020, the ruling National League for Democracy (NLD) was re-elected to serve as the government of Myanmar for a second term. The NLD won 315 out of the 440 seats in Myanmar’s House of Representatives, and the NLD was therefore scheduled to start its second term as government in February 2021. However, on February 1, 2021, the Myanmar military seized power in a coup and detained Aung San Suu Kyi and other senior members of the NLD.
As news of the coup spread, factory workers in the industrial zones around Yangon became apprehensive. One young woman garment factory worker said, “Now that the military has taken power, I’m worried the situation will go back to the way it was under military rule before Myanmar’s return to electoral democracy in 2011”, “the workers won’t have any rights anymore”, and “with the military taking power, it’ll be like it was before, and employers will oppress the workers and reduce their wages. That’s what I expect.”
These factory workers viewed the coup not only as ending electoral rule but also as having a profoundly negative material impact on their lives and livelihoods. Factory workers recognised that a return to direct military rule posed a threat not only to their lives but also to their ability to organise. They mobilised for collective action, went on strike, and led mass anti-coup protests in downtown Yangon. In doing so, these workers, most of whom were young women from rural areas in their late teens and early 20s, catalysed further strikes in other sectors and inspired a nationwide protest movement.
The protest movement was obviously demanding an end to military rule, but there were also divergent currents in the movement. Some people were simply calling for a restoration of the NLD rule. However, other people understood democracy as involving a more radical transfer of power to ordinary people, not just to elected elites. This more radical demand, I suggest, was evident in the slogan “Power to the People”, which suggests more than simply elections.
The military response to this mass country-wide protest movement was merciless. Soldiers and police fired live ammunition at protesters and bystanders on the street and even into nearby vehicles and homes, killing children and adults alike. In nighttime raids, police seized activists and protest organisers from their homes, taking them away to undisclosed locations.
Recognising the critical role of industrial workers in igniting the protests and in mobilising the general strike, the military leadership declared 16 unions and labour rights organisations illegal. Then, on March 14, 2021, police and military forces shot and killed at least 65 protesters in the working-class township of Hlaingtharyar. The next day, the military declared martial law across several industrial townships around Yangon. On April 15, around 40 soldiers raided the office of the Solidarity Trade Union of Myanmar and arrested its director for organising anti-coup protests. Other union leaders and labour activists went underground or fled abroad to avoid arrest.
Meanwhile, the ILO reported that within a year of the military seizing power, 1.6 million jobs had been lost in the country due to fallout from the coup and the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Within several months of the coup, opposition momentum had shifted from street protests to a dispersed armed militia movement.
The armed struggle continues to this day. The post-coup junta, meanwhile, has overseen the killing of around 6,500 civilians since taking power in 2021, along with the arrest of over 29,000 others. At the same time, various People’s Defense Forces, along with pre-existing ethnic resistance organisations, contest or outright control much of the country. This is the situation as it currently stands.
We can ask, “How have workers in the country responded?” First, there has been large-scale out-migration. Primarily, people have migrated to Thailand in search of security and alternative livelihoods. However, many people have been unable or unwilling to leave Myanmar. In other words, many people continue to live and work within the country. Under these post-coup conditions, debates have arisen about the most effective way to advance workers’ interests.
One prominent position expressed is that comprehensive economic sanctions must be imposed on Myanmar with the aim of regime change. This position is advocated by the Myanmar Labour Alliance, an alliance of various unions and labour groups in Myanmar, which is also active abroad, most prominently alongside the Confederation of Trade Unions of Myanmar, or CTUM. The CTUM is the only Trade Union Confederation registered in Myanmar. It’s also the most prominent trade union voice in international advocacy regarding Myanmar. The organisation’s position is that workers’ lives will not improve until we remove this regime; the international community must isolate the regime and end diplomatic and business relationships.
However, not all workers, unionists and labour activists in or from Myanmar agree with this position. Specifically, Action Labour Rights and the Yaung Chi Oo Workers’ Association do not advocate for comprehensive economic sanctions, and they continue to be active in supporting workplace organising inside Myanmar since the coup.
We can ask, “Under these conditions, can workers make gains through collective workplace struggles under an undemocratic military-ruled political system? Should workers pursue their struggles through institutional mechanisms that are controlled by an undemocratic junta that they reject? Are multi-party elections a prerequisite for democracy? And, under authoritarian rule, who is best placed to advance workers’ interests?”
Now, we turn to a couple of cases of workers’ struggles in Myanmar since the coup. The first is a strike conducted by more than 300 Grab food delivery workers in Yangon in 2022. This article argues that “despite these challenges, workers in Myanmar, especially in the industrial zones around Yangon, have continued to organise and strike for improved wages and working conditions and an end to labour rights violations. These actions are significant.”
Another example is a strike by 400 workers at the Pou Chen footwear factory in Yangon in 2022. It points out that “although the Pou Chen workers did not secure their demands, their incredible tenacity and courage in the face of immense intimidation and retaliation showed the possibility of resistance. Their fight and the fight of workers in Myanmar are far from over”. Both of these examples demonstrate that, despite military rule, workers’ struggles persist.
Now, aside from the fact that workers in Myanmar have continued to engage in collective struggles since the coup, I also want to argue here that in doing so, these workers have advanced what we can call a project of democratisation from below, even if that’s not the exact way that the workers themselves articulate it. The mainstream opposition movement, including the National Unity Government, has largely set their goal as replacing the military junta that seized power in 2021.
I agree that removing the military junta is important for advancing democracy in Myanmar. However, narrowly focusing on regime change demonstrates a very top-down understanding of democracy and democratisation. The idea in such an approach is that electoral rule equates to democracy and that replacing the military junta with an elected government equates to democratisation. This seems quite elitist to me. It is worth noting that even before the 2021 coup, the elected National League for Democracy government in Myanmar was quite restrictive, even repressive, towards workers’ struggles.
At the time, the government was pursuing a foreign-investment-driven, export-oriented development agenda. The elected government, the National League for Democracy, explicitly aimed to create a stable and welcoming environment for foreign investment. In other words, under the electoral rule, government restrictions on workers and workers’ struggles hindered the development of workplace democracy, which in turn hindered the attraction of foreign investment, as workplace democracy is often perceived as a threat to capitalist investors.
I would like to present an alternative conception of democratisation here. This conception is informed by Karl Marx, and it was more explicitly developed by CLR James and Martin Glaberman. The idea is that when workers engage in collective struggles in the workplace, they typically do not just seek higher wages and better working conditions; they also aim to improve their overall working environment. Instead, they seek to assert control over the production process. They seek to assert a form of workers’ self-management.
This is one way to understand socialism or democracy. Socialism or democracy cannot be reduced to what the government does. Socialism is, instead, a form of directly democratic workers’ self-management over the workplace and society as a whole. This is why CLR James endorsed Lenin’s statement that every cook can govern. The idea is that ordinary workers have the capacity to participate in self-management processes.
Martin Glaberman was a disciple of CLR James and a worker in auto factories in Detroit, United States, for 20 years. Martin Glaberman, discussing the rise of the militant Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), which was a large union federation in the United States, remarks,
“The spontaneous movement of masses of people in the rise of the CIO cannot be understood in any other way than as a revolt against the conditions of life in capitalist society. The workers… wanted to establish their control over production and to remove from the corporation the right to discipline. Their method was direct action—the carrying out of their own plans for the organisation of production to the extent possible”.
His argument here, which is very much connected to CLR James’s ideas, is that these collective struggles in the workplace manifest a process of democratisation from below that points towards a revolutionary horizon of workers’ self-management. Understood in this way, workers’ self-organisation is always revolutionary. This is why Marx wrote in the preface to the Communist Manifesto, “The emancipation of the working class is the task of the workers themselves”. In other words, it’s not the task of a political party that is separate from the workers. We can understand this, whether it’s in terms of a socialist party or in terms of an ostensible pro-democracy party like the National League for Democracy.
In an article I co-authored, we detailed two cases of factory workers’ self-organised collective struggles in post-coup Myanmar. We argued that these struggles were politically significant contributions to the broader revolution in Myanmar because they represented forms of democratisation from below. Insofar as the revolution aims at democracy, these struggles are, in fact, integral aspects of this larger revolutionary process.
They were both garment factories on the outskirts of Myanmar, and the struggles took place between 2021 and 2023. One of the factory workers we spoke with told us about the democratic process of self-organisation in the workplace during their struggle,
“We were going to demand a wage (increase). So we (the elected union delegates) went around asking other workers how much we should get. Then, as a group, we sat down, we decided that we’d negotiate, and if we didn’t get the (amount), then we’d strike. That’s how the seven of us decided. Then we went around to the workers and explained our plan. ‘We’d say, if you agree with this plan, are you willing to strike?’…We didn’t make them decide right away. We told them to take a day to think about it. We waited until the next day to get their answer. And (the next day) the workers were up for it. ‘We’re with you’, they said. And so we struck work.”
This form of democracy is far more participatory than the very top-down, elitist form of electoral rule that was in place in Myanmar before the military seized power. For this reason, it offers a quite promising and hopeful political horizon that extends far beyond a restoration of the pre-coup status quo.
I would like to conclude with a quote from Maurice Brinton, who adopts a similar approach to what I’ve called democratisation from below today: “Meaningful action for revolutionaries is whatever increases the confidence, the autonomy, the initiative, the participation, the solidarity, the equalitarian tendencies and the self-activity of the masses”.
The text is an edited transcript of a presentation delivered as part of a course on Myanmar labour history for the Asian Labour School in April 2025.
