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The 5Rs in Myanmar: Towards a future federal democratic system where working people can flourish
A Primer
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Introduction
This primer is about ‘the 5Rs’ and land and natural resource politics. The 5Rs is a set of five principles: Recognition, Restitution, Redistribution, Regeneration, and Representation/Resistance. The primer briefly explores the idea of a working people’s program on land and natural resources in Myanmar based on these five principles in the context of a future federal democratic system. Each of these principles alone is supported by international human rights law (links to the most relevant UN documents can be found in Annex 1). But here we outline a working people’s land and natural resource program for deep soci based on the 5Rs taken together.
By 'working people' we mean ordinary people who have to work in order to ‘make ends meet’. The work that many people do to survive nowadays involves both waged labor and unwaged labor. A lot of unwaged work that is essential to survival is done at home, such as cooking and cleaning, child raising, health care, and elderly care. It is the kind of work that makes it possible for some members of the household to oside the home and undertake waged work. In rural villages a lot of household work is related to producing goods for own consumption and for selling -- such as farming, artisanal fishing, animal keeping, and other artisanal and ‘cottage industry’ (like handicraft making). This work often relies on the unwaged labour of household members (including children). Sometimes, and if there is money, a household may hire other villagers or someone from outside the village to help them with some of these labors.
Over the past four decades, many important structural changes in the way the economy and governance are organized have occurred all over the world. These processes have not been smooth nor have they unfolded in exactly the same manner everywhere. They have been marked by profound disagree- ment and conflict over the most basic matters in society -- such as who owns what, who does what, who gets what, what should happen to the wealth that is created in a society, and, who gets to decide. Ordinary people have been hugely affected in fundamental ways. There has been an explosion in the number of people who are neither full-time farmer nor full-time waged worker. They struggle to survive and ‘make ends meet’ by piecing together whatever low-paying, part-time jobs they can find wherever it may be.
This is a common situation in many countries today: households reducing or minimizing their own consumption and foregoing formal schooling and health care, with some family members coming and going, piecing together different bits of low-waged labor in nearby towns or distant cities or abroad. Those who stay home tend to farms and gardens if they have land, raise animals or make handicrafts to sell, and raise the children and care for the sick and infirm or the elderly who can no longer work. In using the term 'working people' in this primer, we hope to capture this kind of situation and the dynamics that propel so many people into it.
In the context of Myanmar and its long history of ethnic conflict, this stress on working people may seem to be missing the mark or leaving out a lot. But bringing into focus working people is not intended to deny or ignore ethnic and other social differences. Rather, it is also and at the same time to make visible what so many people despite other differences have in common -- the struggle to live a life filled with social and economic precarity and hardship and bereft of social insurance or social protections.
Ultimately, at the heart of a truly federal democratic system is a difficult balancing act -- a strategic balancing of socioeconomic class issues and social-political identity issues. Both sets of concerns are complex on their own. Yet both are important. All over the world today (not just in Myanmar), there is deep injustice and rightful struggle around both. Staggering economic inequalities are fueling working people’s struggles for egalitarian distribution of wealth. Non-recognition or mis-recognition of certain ethnic, religious and sexual groups and of racial and gender differences is fueling ‘identity’-framed struggles for recognition.
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