In the 1930s, Thakin Soe became a member of the nationalist Dobama Asiayone (Our Burma Association). In 1939, he founded the Communist Party of Burma with some other left-wing activists. At that time, Myanmar had two major left-wing tendencies, Stalinist and social-democratic. Thakin Soe belonged to the Stalinist camp initially. He later split from that group and became a third camp in Myanmar’s politics. He denounced the CPB for using parliamentary means as the only mean for communist revolution. He correctly criticised the Browder parliamentary approach.

During the final years of Burma’s independence struggle, the colonial British government tried to persuade Burma to join the British Commonwealth. The CPB’s main theoretician, Hamendrnath Goshal, denounced that, and so did Thakin Soe. The Communist Party of Burma officially followed Maoism and a “popular front” of all progressive forces within the Anti-Fascist People’s Freedom League, the dominant political alliance of that time. Thakin Soe’s Red Flag Communist Party opposed working with non-communist groups and called for direct armed confrontation with the British to achieve independence.

Thakin Than Tun, a political leader of the Communist Party of Burma, described the positions of the Red Flag Communist Party as “left adventurism”.

But Thakin Soe’s political conclusion there doesn’t represent Trotskyism or Leninism at all. With the unilateral focus on armed struggle as the only tactic, he can be considered an ultra-leftist according to Trotskyist theory.

In his later books, Thakin Soe came over to the idea of a two-stage revolution. He suggested that in order for socialism to thrive, capitalism had to be matured first. Because the contradictions of capitalism would eventually cause the system to fail, he demanded that capitalism be advanced rather than a socialist revolution. That approach contrasted with the Permanent Revolution theory of Leon Trotsky and the April Theses of Lenin. His later writings suggest that Thakin Soe believed in peaceful transition from capitalism to socialism by means of parliamentary action alone. Thakin Soe never qualified as a Trotskyist during his life. Perhaps his only understanding of Trotskyism was that Leon Trotsky opposed Stalin’s “Marxism-Leninism”. However, Thakin Soe was one of those Marxists who was willing to stand out from the crowd by speaking out for what he believed to be true.

Hein Htet Kyaw

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