Class Conflict in Myanmar’s 2021 Uprising From Reformist Illusions to Socialist Struggle

This paper argues that Myanmar’s 2021 uprising is best understood as a fundamentally class-based confrontation, rather than a struggle solely between authoritarianism and democracy. While the military junta embodies entrenched elite dominance, opposition elites. National League for Democracy (NLD) also represent vested interests within Myanmar’s evolving capitalist order. Drawing from Marxist and Gramscian frameworks, the paper critiques the reformist limitations of elite-led opposition politics and highlights the emergence of a grassroots resistance. Centered on the Civil Disobedience Movement (CDM), independent labor unions, and community-based struggles, this study articulates a more radical critique of both political repression and economic exploitation. The analysis foregrounds the symbolic and material contestations between elite liberal-democratic narratives and popular mobilizations that demand structural transformation. It contends that both military and opposition elites remain embedded in global circuits of capital, with international sanctions serving more to reconfigure elite power than to dismantle the capitalist foundations enabling repression. Rather than a linear transition to democracy, the revolution unfolds through a dialectic of class antagonism, where the working class, informal laborers, and dispossessed rural populations increasingly assert alternative political visions grounded in socialist ideals.