chi-sigma : New Left Malaysia
PROLOGUE
Capitalism is manifested today in the convergence of
(1) the planetary ecological crisis, (2) the global epidemiological crisis, and (3) the unending world economic crisis.
1] INTRODUCTION
In its extreme manifestation as a system, capitalism is a process that perpetuates an unrelentless exploitation of resources by leashing global labour but extending global commodity chains that are entrapped within the neoliberalism niche as part and parcel of the neo-imperialism dimension.
The political-economy of nation has been designed and entrusted by capital-endowed institutions from DASH to IMF thereafter indebting the country +60-year of economic underdevelopment in development.
2] NEOLIBERALISM IN UNDERDEVELOPMENT
The wraith of neoliberalism as neo-imperialism and the consequential neocolonial economic development is footprinted during, and at post-independence.
a) The British assisted in scripting our initial national economic policy known as the Draft Development Plan that would became the Malaya Plans (1955-60); also implemented was the Second Malaya Plan 1961-65.
Often expressed is that there is always been a simmering in greater deference to foreign economic advisers who not only represent the neoliberal interests of international economic agencies but also enhancing the foreign business interests that successed in penetrating wholesomely the national economy.
b) The subsequent three Malaysia Plans that followed were said to be crafty masterminded by foreigners from the United States of America. In fact, the earliest Malaysia Plan – after peninsular Malaya becomes the enlarged Federation of Malaysia – was drafted with the advice of Warren Hansbuger from USA; the second plan was completed by Prof. V.M. Bernett, Dr. D. Snodgrass and Prof. H.J. Bruton, all from the USA; though Snodgrass had pointedly admitted that these programmes were to gain political support for the ruling regime, specifically for the rural Malays, if not indeed for the ruling leadership of UMNO itself rather than as a wholesome beneficiary to every rakyat-rakyat in the country.
The third plan had the advice of Prof. B. Higgins, also from the USA. The Development Advisory Service of Harvard (DASH) was heavily involved with the Prime Minister Economic Planning Unit (EPU) in drafting and promotion of these suites of development programmes.
Later in 2010, the government think-tank – Performance Management on Delivery Units (Pemandu) – even had allocated RM$66 million on “external consultants”, including American consultancy firm McKinsey and Co, which took the lion’s share of an estimated RM$36 million; other foreign consultants included the Hay Group (which was paid RM$11 million), Ethos & Co (RM$1.5 million) and Alpha Platform (M) Sdn Bhd (RM$1.5 million); an undisclosed “external consultant” named “Tarmidzi” had also received RM$3 million for work done in setting up Pemandu as part of a neoliberalism economic development collaboration.
During 1997 currency crisis, and the eventual Asian Financial Crisis in 1998 (AFC 1998), the Malaysian government initial direction was to rely on the International Monetary Fund consultancy response requiring expenditure reduction policies, that is, tighter fiscal and monetary control, which most unfortunately exacerbated the recessionary situation within the country concurrent with sharp portfolio capital outflow (see Athukorala 2000, “Capital Accounts Regime, Crisis, and Adjustments in Malaysia”, Asian Development Review 18, No:1 ,pp:17-48 and Kaplan and Rodrik 2001, “Did the Malaysian Capital Controls Work?”, NBER Working Paper No:8142).
Further, capital accumulation, averaging 16% annually from 1989 to 1997, fell to around 6% yearly from 1999 to 2019.
c) Forty-five years after the New Economic Policy (NEP) implementation, by 2002, Malaysia’s inequality remains extremely high: its top 1 per cent income share was 19 per cent and the corresponding number for the top 10 per cent was 44 per cent which is higher, at one time, than those of the US and substantially even higher than those of China :
d) The unpleasantness on why many Malays had not attained parity despite +60 years of neoliberal-enforced economic development is the emergence of a new class of compradore capitalist. With post-industrialisation and the subsequent incursion of financialization capitalism, the role of rentier capitalism – specifically ethnocratic clientelship capitalism – had inserted onto the monopoly-capital supply chain in an age of imperialism. Corporate capital in the SMEs collaborates with monopoly-capitalism in Global North to tighten the commodity supply chains; for instance, monopoly-capital M&E vendors like AIDA, SKF, Cohu, VAT, Oerlikon Balzers, Favelle Favco, Bromma, Vitrox, etc.; recently, Digi, Nestles and British American Tobacco are, by market capitalisation, leading the list of foreign companies that dominate our local businesses.
According to the UNDP 1997 Human Development Report, and the 2004 United Nations Human Development Report, Malaysia has the highest income disparity between the rich and poor in Southeast Asia, greater than that of Philippines, Thailand, Singapore, Vietnam and Indonesia:
e) That what is widely referred to as neoliberal globalization in the twenty-first century is in fact a historical product of the shift to global monopoly-finance capital.
The politico-economic stage where the country is presently stationed confirms Amin’s imperialism of generalized-monopoly capitalism and closely adhering to Emmanuel’s unequal exchange under Neo-Imperialism.
Jason Hickel, Dylan Sullivan and Huzaifa Zoomkawala contended in the New Political Economy – published online: 30 Mar 2021 – that wealth drain from the Global South remains a significant feature of the world economy in the post-colonial era; rich countries continue to rely on imperial forms of appropriation to sustain their high levels of income and consumption. The Global North appropriated from the Global South commodities worth US$2.2 trillion in Northern prices that are enough to end extreme poverty 15 times over; and we are immently one of the politico-economic victims in this neoliberalism participation with poverty accelerating through the years due to monopoly-capital repatriations and capital laundering by comprador kleptocrates:
f) The emergence and ascendancy of ethnocapital clientel capitalism had witnessed the consolidation of ethnocratic clientel capitalism under postcolonial affinity in the country as well as the constructed concentration of economic power in the banking, pharmaceutical and infrastructural platform sectors – all coexisting with neoliberalism economic developmental policies that aligned with late imperialism monopoly-capital and financial monopoly-capitalism – the expansion of these concepts, aspects, models and modes can be explored in the various manuscripts in STORM 2021, The Political Economy of Malaysia.
g) Whatever benefits from “economic development” and “economic growth” did not trickle down to everyone, and that only the well-connected capital cronies who, through rentier capitalism by way of clientele corruption, had enjoyed the immense wealth of development. Everyone had seen a marked rise in absolute inequality through the years:
3] NEO-IMPERIALISM WITH MONOPOLY-CAPITAL DOMINATION
The vast deployment of capital abroad is whereby capitalism emerged as late imperialism by exploiting the application of global labour arbitrage to global value chainings.
a) On one side, the political economies of newly independent countries encourage foreign investment from Global North monopoly-capital. On the other perspective, through the application of global labour arbitrage where, as a result of the removal of or through the disintegration of barriers to international trade, jobs and industries have since moved to nations where labour and the cost of doing business is with low-pay and operational costs are inexpensive, respectively. This approach, together with labour value commodity chains, contributes to the enlarged capital accumulation by the transnational corporations, deepening the extracting surplus value from the labouring class, (see also STORM 2021, Global Labour Arbitrage in Global Value Chains).
b) The uneven labour employment landscape can be seen in the Second Malaysia Plan, 1971-1975, where it was projected that 22% of the 495,000 new jobs to be created in peninsular Malaysia would be in the manufacturing sector. This means a three folds increase in employment in the manufacturing sector from the 1960 figure of 121,000 to 378,000 by 1975. Past performance had shown that the low employment absorption capacity in the manufacturing sector, especially in the pioneer companies; in fact, the manufacturing sector provided only 5,500 new jobs per year during 1966/67, (Lo Sum-Yee, The Development Performance of West Malaysia, 1955-1967, with special reference to the industrial sector, Heinemann, Kuala Lumpur, 1972, Chapter 7, pp.66-73 and E.L. Wheelwright, Industrialisation in Malaysia, University of Melbourne Press, 1965, Chapter 4, pp.62-70).
Whatever industrialisation initiatives have yet to promote the welfare of proletariat workers but their submission to harsh labour legislations curbing workers rights with the transnational corporations collaborating with ruling regimes and corporate capital parties in busting trade unionism in the free trade zone enclaves, (see also Ng Yap Hwa, Whither labour law reform in Malaysia? newmandala, May 2021).
c) Thirdly, without promulgated regulations, financial monopoly capital had worked against the vision and goals set by country for her industrialisation initiatives. Instead, the insurgent of capital financialization since the late 1990s had created an abundant circulation of paper instruments and their generation of created debts :
4] ALTERNATIVE PROGRESSIVE ROUTES
With this state of politico-economic development, the capitalist class will likely continue to form the basis of state power especially increasingly under monopoly-financial capitalisation. This is whence a question is expressed in Iskra as to whether those neoliberial ideas since cultivated, and enthrenched, within our society through a fusion of import from advanced capitalist countries as well as propagation by local elites educated in these very countries would negate a socialism fruition.
Since a host of societal institutions had been ‘infected’ with communal and capitalist realism, these vested entities tend to serve to enforce and reproduce the neoliberalism ideas and ideals associated with them. On the other hand, we may comfortably enquire whether some of these public institutions could be better managed under community-based supervision and control, see the first article in this July 2021 NLM issue on Does Malaysia already have Socialism?
Whereas John Bellamy Foster in the Renewal of the Socialist Ideal published by Monthly Review propounds that renewal of socialism today must begin with capitalism’s creative destruction of the bases of all social existence because since the late 1980s, the world has been engulfed in an epoch of catastrophe capitalism, defined as the accumulation of imminent catastrophe of crisis after crisis.
It is stated that the demise of U.S. hegemony within the world economy may be a necessity given that with accelerated globalization of production, monopoly-capatlism has undermined imperial-based labour aristocracy among certain privileged sections of the working class, leading to a resurgence of socialism.
It may require the withering away of the state as a separate apparatus standing above and in antagonistic relation to society on any project aimed at building the community of associated producers “from the outset” as part of an ongoing, if necessarily uneven, process of socialist construction.
Whereas, it is technically possible to feed to world’s people, but it is not possible to do so as long as capitalism exists. We need to create a human-centered and ecologically sound system of food production, from viability to sustainable livelihoods.
For instance, soy has become one of the world’s most important agroindustrial commodities – serving as the nexus for the production of food, animal feed, fuel and hundreds of industrial products – and South America has become its leading production region. However, the soy boom on this continent entangles transnational capital and commodity flows and disrupted social relations deeply in contested ecologies and economies, see The Journal of Peasant Studies : Soy Production in South America: Globalization and New Agroindustrial Landscapes and John Wilkinson, The Globalization of Agribusiness and Developing World Food Systems, Monthly Review, Sep 01, 2009.
The outcome is that, for instance, prominent transnationals have had an important presence in the Brazilian agrifood industry since its birth; players include: Nestlé, Unilever, Anderson Clayton, Corn Products Company, Dreyfus, and the Argentine transnational Bunge y Borne (now simply Bunge). They were later followed, as different markets matured, by Kraft, Nabisco, General Foods, and Cargill from the United States, and United Biscuits, Bongrain, Danone, Parmalat, and Carrefour from Europe.
The consequences are that uneven and often uncoordinated foray of metropolitan corporate capital is subjugating the agriculture and domestic food markets of many developing countries, particularly smaller, peripheral ones undergoing rapid urbanization, to the needs of global agribusiness monopoly-capital.
Therefore, as an independent nation, we need to redefine agriculture – and organic farming – on a large scale to push for radical land reform and national food sovereignty. This is where the concentrated monopoly capitalism role in defining and controlling the supply chain from soil to souls will no doubt has to come to be increasingly understood and realized as food politics for the rakyat.
As Sweezy argued in 1971, “state ownership and planning are not enough to define a viable socialism…………..”. Something more was needed: the continuous struggle to create a society of equals, (Sweezy, in Sweezy and Bettelheim, On the Transition to Socialism, 131).
It is appropriate hence, to synthesize the task of transforming the state through deep democratisation interstitial transformation (building alternative projects on the margins of capitalist society) with possibility of mass mobilisation of people to set up cooperatives in Malaysia (see Jentayu) would not be difficult as the state already has seen this approach as an actual strategy for economic growth and poverty alleviation.
Though the malaysiamuda writer did emphasised carefully that socialist or even progressive elected government could face fierce resistance or sabotage from state bureaucrats so a plan to make the transition needs to be carefully crafted, see the various forseeable and aftermath analyses of what is known as the Sheraton Move that toppled an elected government (Shamsul 2018, Aliran 2020, newmandala 2020, malaysiakini 2020, Hew Wai Weng 2020, RSIS 2021, Welsh 2021, ADC 2021a & ADC 2021b: the Asian Democracy Chronicles’ reprint of People’s Democratic League Adam Adli paper on The lost tale of New Malaysia (Part 2), is reposted in this July NLM 2021 issue).
The progressive path forward is thus to
Build It Now as puts forward by Lebowitz who offers a clear and innovative vision of a socialist future, and at the same time shows how concrete steps can be taken to make that vision a reality.
This author addresses the concerns of people engaged in struggle to create a better world, but aware that this struggle must be informed by the realities of the twenty-first century. Many of the ideas and concepts of Lebowitz had began life on those speeches to worker organizations in Venezuela where worker self-management is on the agenda.
Build It Now is a testament to the ongoing vitality of the Marxist tradition, drawing on its deep resources of analytical insight and moral passion and fusing them into an essential guide to the struggles of our time.
Build It Now helps us transcend the impasse created by the implosion of statist socialism need to build now the political traditions capable of forging the solidarity that revolutionary movements in the Global South will require. In a way, Lebowitz has offered a very useful model, method and mode in that struggle of ours, too.
5] TOWARDS A SOCIALIST COMMUNITY WITH SOLIDARITY INVOLVEMENT
With so many problems: the vast number of poors who are suffering continous poverty – but the few rich people enjoying immense wealth – rakyat2 having no employment or those who are working as gig-workers being underpaid and over-exploited as underemployment, and there is no affordable housing in sight, what shall we do? :
i] Today’s forces who want changes are the “precariate,” mostly young people like many of us who hold precarious jobs that usually are casual, part-time, and without benefits such as Socso and EPF and who see no future for yourselves in capitalism, within capitalism, under capitalism. Other key rakyar2 are the Orang Asli and Orang Asal indigenous peoples in Sabah and Sarawak whose lands and natural resources continue to be expropriated by global foreign capitalism, at times in close collusion with compradore capitalists; other minority groups who have once suffered as indenture labour like Indians in the rubber estates or coolie Chinese in mines post-colonialism, and those who continue to experience oppressions of many kinds like the LBGTS; and people in the so-called informal sector who survive hand to mouth even without regular wages earned by selling their labour to capitalists. One may be any of the many households in the cities facing dire urban poverty at time of pandemic lockdowns.
ii] We need to be building communal organizations and governance to emerge as an important path beyond capitalism and the capitalist state.
We have examples like in Venezuela (influenced partly by the theory of transition beyond capital that Mészáros developed and that Hugo Chávez and his comrades have tried to implement against great odds), Chiapas and Bolivia (shaped by indigenous concepts of community and mutual aid), and Rojava in northern Syria (affected by Kurdish principles of community, anarchist theories of communalism, and revolutionary feminism). This role can be undertaken by present younger generation of civil and mechanical engineers who need to transform their mindset into a new dimension as social engineers towards the well-being of nation.
iii] Firstly, the path to a solidarity economy includes solving the food problem. The goal is sustainable, local food production and consumption with a low carbon footprint (meaning minimal petroleum products used for fertilizers, pesticides, and transportation of food and its raw materials) and with a more favourable impact on the health of human beings, other living species, and mother earth.
(a) The country is burden with a food supply problem that resulted in money flowing out just to fill everyone’s stomachs. This glaring untenable situation is visually seen every night, in the midst of spiking Covid19 pandemic, the dozen of food banks serving to the poors in the Klang Valley alone. Indeed, upon a casual review, we spend almost RM$45 billion annually on food imports alone; and, the amount is growing more frightening each year :
According to the Minister of Agriculture and Agro-Based Industry, in the event of a global food crisis, Malaysia can only last for two days, compared to China and our neighbour Thailand, which can survive with local produce for six to eight months.
(b) Community gardens and food co-operatives are key components of achieving food security, a critical goal for obvious reasons. Gardening principles include cultivating plants that produce healthy nutrients such as non-animal sources of proteins, with limited sugar and fat. These principles recognize the worldwide epidemics of obesity and diabetes, which reflect a combination of food insecurity, “food deserts” where healthy foods are unavailable or too expensive for purchase in many inner-city and rural areas, and over-promotion of sugar- and fat-rich foods by capitalist agricultural and food industries that manufacture and market processed foods.
Land in Malaysia that could be used to grow food is planted with palm oil to ‘feed’ the Global North need from cosmetics and as cooking oil to lubricants or as a biofuel, whilst the devils milk latex is oozed out of rubber trees to make tyres and gloves for cosmopolitan western countries. The farmers in the highly productive Bertam Valley in the Cameron Highlands prefer to grow chrysanthemums for the Japanese market as they are a more valuable crop than vegetables for local consumption.
Yet, there are in existence, under electric pylons and overhead bridges in the Klang Valley, where self-maintained small-farm plots by ordinary rakyat2 or community gardens by residence communities, like in the heart of Bangsar, are blooming and flourishing.
(c) Rearing animals that provide meat, fish, eggs, and milk products for human beings who opt for continuing non-vegetarian or non-vegan diets are locally raised, slaughtered, and packaged for local consumption. A key objective is independence from capitalist agriculture. Food independence means giving up consumption of food that requires access to seasonal production in distant places with carbon-based transportation over long distances, whose high costs and pollution contribute to the climate crisis, depletion of fresh water, and continuing exploitation of agricultural workers. For families of average size, the aim again is easily RM$1000 saved per month on food purchased.
(d) Why aren’t we growing vegetables supply in FELDA to feed ourselves? Why don’t we give land to the titleless cultivators in Pahang, the untitled communities in Sabah and Sarawak interiors that have distinctly special soil to harvest coffee or pineapples? instead of commodifying Big Farm’s commercial crops to benefit Global North consumers? Why don’t we expand to cultivate our own rice in the fertile Tanjung Karang district or on hills of Bario in Sarawak? Why aren’t we to provide former plantation settlement “orphans of the Empire” Indians the land as they are good cattle breeders. Why don’t we go through a truly land reforming as in Taiwan and South Korea so that everyone – anyone – can have land titles to live as a belonging nation? Why are there be so many unemployment and underemployment?
(e) At a short-term, operational level, a coupon system (like in Cuba) should be introduced to promote group’s profile in the food banks: social-political vision and mission’s activity objectives printed on free coupons could be distributed to potential supporters to promote socialism objectives and to rally mass inspiration.
iv] To achieve a solidarity economy we have to develop ways to solve the housing problem. For most people, paying for housing becomes the biggest expense requiring us to labour for wages in the capitalist economy and also becomes a main source of day-to-day insecurity. Therefore, the solidarity economy initial primary goal has to find ways to create cheap, small-scale, cooperative, pleasant, and comfortable housing units that require very little money, with collaborative solutions to avoid the exploitative conditions that capitalism imposes on rakyat2 – such as rent, loans, mortages, debt, taxes, and insurance – who need little more than affordable housing.
Housing co-ops can, and should, find inexpensive properties in cities or rural areas where housing can be rehabilitated or constructed with sweat labour and the increasingly sophisticated technologies (tiny homes, 3-D printing, and so forth) that reduce costs and improve the environmental sustainability of housing materials.
Initial financing can come from multiple creative sources and can possibly prove less challenging than expected. They could be from social-conscientious real estate developers, social-creative architects, civil and mechanical engineers, social-engineers, non-profit organisations or trust-fund managers – all willing to participate or develop a targetted low-cost housing site as a community-based yet socialism-envisioned model.
The aim is about RM$150 per person per month of housing costs or non-monetary time equivalents of donated work (called by such names a “Mutual Exchange of Work” unit or “MEOWs”) like in the barter-exchange of work in New Zealand or the gotong-royong as practised in Malaysia.
The passing of dominant interests of the monopoly-capitalist world economy seeking to define its exploitative expropriation and deprivation of the poor in tight collusion with local compradore capital, specifically at this moment of time – to destruct the ethnocentric construction – those clientel capitals within rentier capitalism, cannot succeed without our determined class struggle ahead.
EPILOGUE
Socialism with a Malaysian characteristics – on its gained surplus accumulation – is a gift to the real needs of humanity: comforting the daily needs of our people and sustaining an equality in wealth distribution equity for every rakyat2 in this country.
New Left Malaysia 