Capitalism and What Traditional Muay Thai is Not - the concept of labor and wages misapplied to what fighters do

[Kevin von Duuglas-Ittu]

There can be no doubt that Thailand's culture is a hybriding culture, a synthesizing culture that has grown from the root weaving diversity from influences around the world, reaching well back to when the Ayuthaya Kingdom was the commercial hub for the entire mercantile region, major influences stretching in trade all the way to China and all the way to Europe, if not further, while - and this is important - still maintaining its own Siamese (then Thai) character, a character that was both in great sympathy towards these integrative powers, but also in tension or contest with them. This being said, I think there is a rather profound misunderstanding of the nature of Thailand's traditional Muay Thai and the meaning and value of its underpinnings in the culture, when seen from the West, and this is the (at times) assumed majority of thinking of fighting as "labor", and the rewards or marking of that labor as some kind of "wage". This is often the conceptual starting place from which Westerners think about the value and possible injustices of Thailand's Muay Thai, often boiled down to the question: Is the fighter getting a "fair wage"? 

I do think there are strong and important wage oriented justice scales that can be applied, but mostly these are best done in the contemporary circumstances of Thailand's new commodification of Muay Thai itself...that is to say, to turn traditional commitments and performances INTO labor, that is to say, to capitalize it. It is then that the question of labor and wage holds the best ground. But, the question of wage or payment fairness really is doing another operation, often without intent, which is by reframing traditional Muay Thai in terms of labor and wage, along with the strong normative, Capitalist sense that such labor should exist freely in a labor market of some kind, one is already deforming traditional Muay Thai itself, and in a certain sense perhaps...adding to its colonization, or at least its transmutation into a globalized, commodified humanity, something I would suggest the core values of traditional Muay Thai (values that actually draw so many Western adventure-tourists to its homeland), stand in anchored opposition to.

To be sure, Capitalism is deeply interwoven into the fabric of Thai culture, and has been for much of the 20th century, but this weave is perhaps best understood terms of how Siam/Thailand's traditional Muay Thai is of the threads of greatest resistance to Capitalism itself (along with its atomizing, individualizing, labor/wage concept of human beings). When we think of the values that not only motivate fighters, but also structure and give meaning to their fighting, at least across the board of the Muay Thai subculture, we really are not in the realm of individualizied workers who sell their labor within a labor market. (This mischaracterization is perhaps most egregious when discussing Child and Youth fighting from a Western perspective, where it is very commonly repictured as "child labor" (ignoring the degree to which such terminology completely recasts the entire question of the meaning and value of fighting itself, within Thai culture). We are instead within a realm of traditional pre-Capitalist values (which themselves have morphed with tension with Capitalizing forces), a world of craft (not "work"), composed of strong social hierarchies that are in constant agonism with each other, where fighting is probably best understood as struggle over Symbolic Capital (with some modification to Bourdieu's concept). The traditional Muay Thai world is primarily not a world of labor and wage - anymore than, to use an even more traditional example, novice monks should be considered to be doing "labor" in wats and monestariess, for the (some would regard as false) "wage" of spiritual merit. Instead, the meaning and value of such commitments and performances are embedded within the traditional frame itself (a frame which can be examined or challenged for ethical failures, to be sure), and to extract them from that embedded value system and its attendant, inculcating motivations, is to subvert the very nature of Thailand's traditional Muay Thai. 

It doesn't mean that Thai Muay Thai fighters don't fight "for" money, or that money's paid or won do not matter, in fact in a gambling-driven sport - gambling driven at its very first roots, both in terms of history and in terms of apprenticeship - money amounted indeed matter a great deal. It's just that the labor / wage framework is a significantly inadequate, and in fact destructively transformative in its inaccuracy (even when well-motivated). 

This conceptual misunderstanding from the West is even made more complicated in that today's traditional Muay Thai is fast adapting to new "labor" style economic pressures, in the sense that fighters are increasingly working more - in a hybrid sense - in the tourism economy, both in gyms were they have to train and partner Westerners, and in the ring where they have to fight in a transformed way in Entertainment tourism vs Western tourists (tourist who may be viewed as both customers purchasing Thai services and also as discounted laborers), all with the economic view that the Western visitor holds a certain degree of economic priority. Traditional Thais are pressed now in towards becoming something more like laborers, while still maintaining many if not most of the customary motivations and the embedded values of Muay Thai, kaimuay subculture, leaving analysis perhaps best to a case by case basis. 

 

 

[Kevin von Duuglas-Ittu]

The question definitely remains: What is it that Thais fight for if they don't fight for wages? 

As far as I can tell, and speculatively suggest, what Thai's fight for, and also what they train for is better understood under the idea of a Prestige Economy, which is to say, the social capital of respect and attention in hierarchy which governs a lot of traditional social systems. I've argued before that Muay Thai is governed by an underwritten Spirituality of power relations (see below), and despite deep Capitalist veins within the country, the business of Muay Thai is probably itself best understood within these older frameworks of overlapping mandalas of power.

Within such power relations money indeed plays a very serious role, as even might greed, as it becomes signature of power and social place. The kadua that one receives, the winning bonuses and injections, these are signatures of social standing, on a ladder against which one checks oneself. These are closely related to one's identity and esteem. 

Within the Prestige Economy motivation, in Thailand's traditional Muay Thai, is what I have experimentally called the Gaze Economy. I discuss some of this in this comment here: 

 

Far more than wages for labor, it is within the Gaze Economy that the fighter works, under the cultural and customary form of the kaimuay. And not simply the fighter, but the padmen and krus of the gym. This is not a Capitalist, labor/wage agonism. It is a performed social struggle for standing, within which money plays a signature role. 

 

*Some of this is quite Thai, but I also believe that these traditional "prize & gaze" dynamics underpin a lot of Western Capitalist behavior as well, and may even be particular to prize fighting in general. The "prize" in its very notion is always in surplus of the value of the work put in achieving it, carrying an aura beyond any axiomatic, which makes an interesting tension with Capitalist labor/wage structuring dynamics. What Thailand's traditional Muay Thai poses, in how it struggles within Capitalist, commodifying pressures, is a sort of critique of labor and wage itself. Attempting to reframe traditional fighting as labor and wage undercuts and hides this critique. In a certain, perhaps even ideal, primordeal sense, one should never be paid wages for fighting, turning fighting into "labor".