U Ba Swe

⚠  Provisional Entry  ⚠ This article provides an overview compiled by the editorial team, but it is explicitly slated for future expansion and revision by a dedicated specialist. See discussion page for further information.

U Ba Swe (1915–1987) was a Burmese labor leader, chairman of the Socialist Party, and the country's second prime minister (1956–1957), best remembered within the history of radical Buddhism as the most consistent and uncompromising exponent of the compatibility of Marxism and Buddhism among Burma's ruling thakin-generation socialists. Rising through the anticolonial student and labor movements of the 1930s, Ba Swe helped found the All-Burma Trade Union Congress and became, after independence, one of the three central figures, alongside U Nu and U Kyaw Nyein, of the governing Anti-Fascist People's Freedom League (AFPFL). Unlike Nu, who ultimately declared Buddhism and Marxism philosophically irreconcilable, Ba Swe argued throughout his career, in both Burmese-language speeches and English-language pamphlets, that a rigorous study of Marxist theory could only deepen, rather than undermine, Buddhist conviction, framing revolutionary social liberation itself in explicitly Buddhist vocabulary. This disagreement helped precipitate the AFPFL's 1958 split, after which Ba Swe led the rival "Stable AFPFL" faction until the 1962 military coup ended his political career.

Biography

Ba Swe was born on 17 October 1915 in Tavoy (Dawei), in the Tenasserim region of British Burma. Eight years U Nu's junior, he was, like his contemporary Kyaw Nyein, a product of the University of Rangoon and its politicized student unions, though those who knew him described him as "a man of action rather than an intellectual or a planner." In the late 1930s he emerged as a leading agitator in the thakin movement, and in 1938 he and Thakin Ba Hein were arrested while leading a march of striking Yenangyaung oilfield workers on Rangoon, an episode that gave the young Ba Swe a national reputation as a labor organizer. He went on to become the "main moving force" behind the founding of the All-Burma Trade Union Congress in 1940.

After the wartime Japanese occupation, Ba Swe was, together with Kyaw Nyein, one of the chief founders in September 1945 of the Socialist Party, built on the nucleus of the prewar Burma Revolutionary Party; he served as the new party's Secretary-General under its first president, the veteran nationalist Thakin Mya. Following Thakin Mya's assassination alongside Aung San and most of the cabinet on 19 July 1947, Ba Swe assumed the presidency of the Socialist Party, a position from which he governed as one of the "Big Four" of the ruling AFPFL, alongside U Nu, U Kyaw Nyein, and Thakin Tin. He subsequently served as Minister of Defense (1948–1958) and Deputy Prime Minister (1952–1956); as leader of the Trade Union Congress (Burma), he was an outspoken advocate of comprehensive nationalization of industry.

When U Nu temporarily relinquished the premiership in June 1956 to devote himself to reorganizing the AFPFL after a disappointing election result, Ba Swe served as prime minister for nine months, until Nu resumed office on 28 February 1957. Tensions between Nu, on one side, and Ba Swe and Kyaw Nyein, on the other, over both policy and personal rivalry culminated in mid-1958 in the formal split of the AFPFL. Ba Swe, Kyaw Nyein, and thirteen other ministers resigned from the government on 4 June 1958 and tabled a motion of no confidence against Nu, which narrowly failed; the resulting political crisis led Nu to invite General Ne Win to form a "caretaker government" that October. Ba Swe and Kyaw Nyein's faction subsequently contested the February 1960 general election as the "Stable AFPFL," which was decisively defeated by Nu's "Clean AFPFL," reconstituted as the Union Party.

Regarded as politically spent, a "dead tiger," by the time of Ne Win's coup of 2 March 1962, Ba Swe was not among the AFPFL leaders detained by the new military government, and he withdrew from active politics thereafter. He died in Rangoon on 6 December 1987.

Ideas

Ba Swe's central intellectual commitment, sustained across more than two decades of public life, was that a deepening study of Marxism strengthened rather than eroded Buddhist faith. Addressing the Trade Union Congress (Burma) in 1950, he told delegates that Marxist and Buddhist Abhidhamma, systems of philosophical psychology, were "not only similar" but "a thing of one nature," even as he insisted that only the Buddhist teaching could ultimately "give liberation and release from the existences throughout transmigrations," treating Marxism as a valid but subordinate, mundane truth within a wider Buddhist framework of liberation from suffering. He made a parallel argument two years earlier in his English-language pamphlet The Burmese Revolution, writing that "the more I study Marxism, however, the more I feel convinced in Buddhism ... for any man who has deeply studied Buddhism, and correctly perceived its tenets there should be no obstacle to becoming a Marxist."

Alongside this doctrinal argument, Ba Swe habitually rendered revolutionary politics in Buddhist vocabulary: he used the Buddhist term for liberation from impermanence (bhava) to denote social liberation, in keeping with a broader Burmese left-wing idiom in which Buddhist terminology, including the monastic practice of "overturning the alms bowl" (thabeit hmauk) as a refusal of alms from unworthy donors, supplied the vocabulary of political strikes and protest.

This reconciliationist stance placed Ba Swe in direct and increasingly public tension with U Nu, who in his own landmark speech of January 1958 declared Marxism's materialism fundamentally incompatible with Buddhism. Frank N. Trager, reporting on the AFPFL split later that year, observed that Ba Swe, as leader of the Swe-Nyein faction, "did not like U Nu's assertion that Marxism and Buddhism are irreconcilable, for he had expounded a view which combined the two." Ba Swe's position also differed from that of his own close political ally, Kyaw Nyein, who, far less of a traditionalist in philosophical outlook, did not share the AFPFL leadership's broader project of reconciling socialism with Buddhism. Ba Swe's synthesis was thus neither Nu's late-career turn toward Buddhist nationalism nor Kyaw Nyein's secular technocratic socialism, but a sustained middle position, sincerely held rather than merely rhetorical according to contemporaries, in which Marxist analysis and Buddhist soteriology were treated as complementary rather than competing accounts of liberation.

Writings

• U Ba Swe (1950). Address to the Trade Union Congress (Burma). [Ba Swe's fullest statement of Buddhist-Marxist compatibility, arguing that Marxist and Buddhist Abhidhamma are "a thing of one nature"; translated and discussed at length in Sarkisyanz (1965).]
• U Ba Swe (1952). The Burmese Revolution. Rangoon: Ministry of Information. [An English-language pamphlet, addressed partly to foreign readers, restating in more concise form the claim that deep study of Marxism strengthens rather than undermines Buddhist conviction.]
• U Ba Swe (1955). Bama-to hlan-yei: hnin Bama lou'tha: lu-ti'/!- [Our Burmese Revolution and the Burmese Working People's Movement]. Rangoon. In Burmese. [A Burmese-language political tract incorporating the 1950 Trade Union Congress address and further elaborating Ba Swe's synthesis of Marxist and Buddhist doctrine; the primary source for Sarkisyanz's (1965) translated quotations.]

Secondary Literature in English

• Butwell, Richard (1963). U Nu of Burma. Stanford University Press. [The fullest documented English-language account of Ba Swe's political career, based on interviews with Ba Swe's contemporaries; essential for the institutional and biographical narrative, though its focus is U Nu rather than Ba Swe himself.]
• Sarkisyanz, Manuel (1965). Buddhist Backgrounds of the Burmese Revolution. Martinus Nijhoff. [Contains the fullest translated excerpts of Ba Swe's Buddhist-Marxist synthesis, drawn from his 1950 Trade Union Congress address and 1955 Burmese-language writings.]
• Trager, Frank N. (1959). "Political Divorce in Burma". Foreign Affairs 37.2: 317–327. [A contemporary account of the 1958 AFPFL split that explicitly identifies Ba Swe's disagreement with Nu over the relationship between Marxism and Buddhism as one strand, among others, of the conflict.]
• Totten, George O. (1960). "Buddhism and Socialism in Japan and Burma". Comparative Studies in Society and History 2.3: 293–304. [Quotes Ba Swe's 1952 pamphlet The Burmese Revolution directly, situating his views within a broader comparative account of Buddhism and socialism in Asia.]

Secondary Literature in Other Languages

(To be added.)

How to Cite This Article

Brons, Lajos (2026). "U Ba Swe". The Radical Buddhism Project. Version of 7 August 2026. http://radicalbuddhism.net/wiki/U_Ba_Swe.