A SwMc Project
a reprint from the New Left Malaysia
basing on the works of John Bellamy Forster, István Mészáros, Michael Lebowitz, Samir Amin and Li Minqi in the Monthly Review and the collective idealism within STORM
Preamble
Any renewal of socialism today has to point out how since capitalism’s disruption of most socio-economic existence in the late 1970s, the country has been engulfed in an era of catalymic capitalism with the convergence of global economic crisis, global ecological crisis and presently a global epidemiological crisis. In the midst of these chaos, there is a continuation of economic neo-imperialist exploitation in collusion with clientel capital and compradore capitalists as unbundled by global commodity chains‘ tightness to Global North monopoly-capitalism. There is the consolidation of neoliberalism policies permeating the whole country, and the stranglehold of parliamentary democracy with emergency ordanances; and the maintaining of a new stage of ethnocratic hegemonic leading to economic despair amongst even among urban poors and instability in youth employment.
On one side, one might say that the existential crisis is not limited to capitalism indulgence but its contributory factor to climate change, crossing of trans-boundaries in exploitation of depleting resources has defined the global ecological rift in the Earth System as a safe place for humanity. These crises cover the following dimensions: (1) ocean acidification; (2) species extinction (and loss of genetic diversity); (3) destruction of forest ecosystems; (4) loss of fresh water; (5) disruption of the nitrogen and phosphorus cycles; (6) the rapid spread of toxic agents (including radionuclides); and (7) the uncontrolled proliferation of genetically modified organisms, (see Johan Rockström et al., A Safe Operating Space for Humanity, Nature 461, no. 24 (2009): 472–75; William Steffen et al., Planetary Boundaries, Science 347, no. 6223 (2015): 745–46; Michael Friedman, “GMOs: Capitalism’s Distortion of Biological Processes,” Monthly Review 66, no. 10 (March 2015): 19–34).
This dismantling of planetary boundaries is essential to the system of capital accumulation that sees no barriers to its unlimited exploitativee advance. There is no exit from the current capitalist destruction of the overall social and natural conditions of existence that does not require any exiting capitalism itself. What is essential is the creation of what István Mészáros in Beyond Capital called a new system of “social metabolic reproduction.” This leads the new left movements in the country a crave to a politico-economic model in socialism as the heir apparent to capitalism in the twenty-first century, but to be conceived in ways that critically challenge the theory and practice of socialism as it had existed in the twentieth century.
Emancipation of the Working Class
In the country, key sectors of ethnocapital have attempted to mobilizing elements of the ruling class in the form of a racial and religious ideology to capitalise on the long history of destructuring the working class as part of union-busting arising out of the legacies colonialism and global neo-imperialism transnational corporation domination. The alliance of ethnocapital and corporate capital at a time of ecological-epidemological-economic crises just reflects the internal necessity of the capitalist class to maintain the basis of state power under monopoly-finance capital.
Appearing simultaneously with this new reactionary political formation in the country is a resurgent movement for socialism, based in the working-class majority and dissident intellectuals. Indeed, the sight of the demise of neoliberalism hegemony within the world economy, accelerated by the globalization of production, has undermined the feudal aristocracy among certain privileged sections of the ruling class, leading to a resurgence of socialism awareness as a progressive narrative and the practical praxis.
It was Engels who first argued in an 1885 article for Commonweal edited by William Morris (an analysis that was later incorporated into the preface to the 1892 English edition of The Condition of the Working Class in England) that the development of a socialist-oriented labour movement was made possible in Britain for the first time in the mid–1880s by the decline of the aristocracy of labour (consisting mainly of adult men and excluding women, children, and immigrant groups) brought about by the waning of Britain’s imperial hegemony. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works, vol 26 (New York: International Publishers, 1975), 295–301. Lenin’s other analysis of the labour aristocracy was built on this treatment by Engels; see also Martin Nicolaus, “The Theory of the Labor Aristocracy,” Monthly Review 21, no. 11 (April 1970): 91–101; Eric Hobsbawm, “Lenin and the ‘Aristocracy of Labor,’” Monthly Review 21, no. 11 (April 1970): 47–56.
It is during a moment in time when the country has its number of unemployed graduates rising 22.5% last year to 202,400 from 165,200 in 2019 as the latest report from the Department of Statistics Malaysia (DOSM) revealed, (Theedgemarket 28/07/2021). DOSM
chief statistician Datuk Seri Dr Mohd Uzir Mahidin has attributed the higher number to the unfavourable economic environment in 2020 and its consequences for the overall labour market situation.
“There were 5.36 million graduates in 2020 (up 4.5% from 5.13 mil-
lion graduates in 2019). The increase in the number of graduates over the years was concomitant with awareness of the importance of higher education to improve livelihoods. Upon completion of tertiary education, graduates aim to secure jobs equivalent to their qualification and subsequently earn higher wages and all the perks that come with it.”
However, the challenging labour market condition is only a partial consequence of the Covid-19 pandemic resulted in fewer job openings and increased competition. Extracting from the DOSM’s Graduates Statistics 2020, the rise was observed for both degree (+22,400) and diploma holders (+14,800), largely among graduates aged 35 and over. Indeed, graduates’ unemployment rate in 2020 increased by 0.5 percentage point (ppt) to 4.4% against 3.9% in the preceding year. In addition, more than 75% of unemployed graduates were actively seeking work, whereby almost half were unemployed for less than three months.
In fact, among the 4.35 million employed graduates last year, more than two-thirds (68.8%) were in the skilled occupation category.
However, this number was down 0.8% from 2019. The decrease covers a wide segment of society as seen in the occupation categories of professional, as well as technician and associate professional. In contrast, the semi-skilled category gained 19.3% of employed graduates, particularly in the occupation categories of service and sales workers, and plant and machine operators and
assemblers. Thus, the composition of employed graduates in the semi-skilled category increased to 28.9% versus 25.6% in the previous year, whereas 2.3% of employed graduates were in the low-skilled occupation category. From the perspective of the economic sector, more than 75% or 3.37 million graduates were employed in the services sector, followed by 14.6% in the manufacturing sector last year; those in the service sector is predominantly slotted within the burgeoning civil service.
Therefore, confronted with what Michael D. Yates has called “the Great Inequality,” the mass of the population in the country, particularly generasi muda, are faced with diminishing prospects, finding themselves in a state of uncertainty and often despair. They are increasingly alienated from a capitalist system that offers them no hope and are attracted to socialism as the only genuine alternative, (Michael D. Yates, “The Great Inequality,” Monthly Review 63, no. 10 (March 2012): 1–18). These objective forces propelling a resurgence of socialist movements are occurring elsewhere in the global system, especially in the Global South where in an era of continuing capitalism expansion has extended economic stagnation, extractive financialization, and a consequent universal ecological exploitation.
But if socialism is seemingly on the rise again in the context of the structural crisis of capital and increased class polarization, the question is: What kind of socialism? In what ways does socialism for the twenty-first century differ from socialism of the twentieth century? Much of what is being referred to as socialism is of the social-democratic variety, seeking an alliance with left-liberals and thus the existing order, in a vain attempt to make capitalism work better through the promotion of social regulation and social welfare in direct opposition to neoliberalism, but at a time when the parade of neoliberalism is regarded as imperialism.
To indulge in such movements are bound to fail at the outset in the present historical context, inevitably betraying the hopes that they unleashed, since focused on mere electoral democracy which is a procedural process than rakyat2 consultation and participation. More recently, we are also seeing the growth of a genuine socialism, evident in extra-electoral struggle, heightened mass action, and the call to go beyond the parameters of the present system so as to reconstitute society as whole.
The general unrest latent at the base of society was manifested in the varied uprisings in late July of this year, which took the form, of massive solidarity protests with people in the streets, and with the working class unemployed and generasi muda in particular, crossing the polititical line en masse in response to an ineptitude governance. This event, coming in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic and the related despairing economic, had only energise the new left endeavour to strife ahead.
But while the movement toward socialism is gaining ground as a result of objective forces, it may lack an adequate subjective basis. A major obstacle in formulating strategic goals of socialism in the world today has to do with twentieth-century socialism’s abandonment of its own ideals as originally articulated in Karl Marx’s vision of communism. To understand this problem, it is necessary to go beyond recent left attempts to address the meaning of communism on a philosophical basis, a question that has led in the last decade to abstract treatments of The Communist Idea, The Communist Hypothesis, and The Communist Horizon by Alain Badiou and others, see Alain Badiou, The Communist Hypothesis, New Left Review 49 (2008): 29–42; Alain Badiou, The Idea of Communism, in The Idea of Communism, ed. Costas Douzinas and Slavoj Žižek (London: Verso, 2010): 1–14; Alain Badiou, The Communist Hypothesis (London: Verso, 2015); Jodi Dean, The Communist Horizon (London: Verso, 2018).
Rather, it may be a necessity to formulate more concrete historically based starting point particularly focusing directly on the two-phase theory of socialist-communist development that emerged out of Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Programme and V. I. Lenin’s The State and Revolution; see also Paul M. Sweezy’s article Communism as an Ideal, as it was published more than half a century ago during our university education period in Monthly Review on October 1963, which is now a classic text in this regard. Sweezy emphasized the new forms of labour that would necessarily come into being in a society that used abundant human productivity more rationally. Many categories of work, he indicated, would “be eliminated altogether (e.g. coalmining and domestic service), and insofar as possible all jobs must become interesting and creative as only a few are today.” The reduction of the enormous waste and destruction inherent in capitalist production and consumption would open up space for the employment of disposable time in more creative ways.
Towards Socialism with Malaysian characteristics
Evidently, the pathway to build socialism in the twenty-first century is to embrace precisely those aspects of the marx-socialism ideal that allow a theory and practice radical enough to address the urgent needs of the present, while also not losing sight of the needs of the future. If the planetary ecological crisis has taught us anything, it is that what is required is a new social metabolism with the earth, a society of ecological sustainability and substantive equality. This can be seen in the extraordinary achievements of Cuban ecology, as recently shown by Mauricio Betancourt in The Effect of Cuban Agroecology in Mitigating the Metabolic Rift in Global Environmental Change, (Mauricio Betancourt, The Effect of Cuban Agroecology in Mitigating the Metabolic Rift: A Quantitative Approach to Latin American Food Production, Global Environmental Change 63 (2020): 1–9). This conforms to what Georg Lukács called the necessary “double transformation” of human social relations and the human relations to nature, (Georg Lukács, The Ontology of Social Being, vol. 2, Marx’s Basic Ontological Principles (London: Merlin, 1978), 6).
To undertake such an emancipatory project may necessarily has to migrate pass through various revolutionary socio-economic phases such the community-based projects of various scopes, scales and dimensions, (see chi-sigma, Towards a Socialist Community with Solidarity Involvement as one such possible undertaking). To be successful, therefore, requires a commitment to a pulsating socio-economic change that seeks to make itself irreversible through the promotion of an organic system directed at genuine human needs, rooted in substantive equality and the rational regulation of the human social metabolism with nature. On this question of an irreversible revolutionary changes demanded, it is pertinent to read further Mészáros, Beyond Capital, 758–68; István Mészáros, The Challenge and Burden of Historical Time (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2020), 251–53; John Bellamy Foster, Chávez and the Communal State, Monthly Review 66, no. 11 (April 2015): 9, 11, 16).
Therefore, as expounded by Michael Lebowitz in The Socialist Imperative, “rather than a continuous struggle to go beyond what Marx called the ‘defects’ inherited from capitalist society, the standard interpretation” of Marxism in the half-century from the late 1930s to the late ’80s “introduced a division of post-capitalist society into two distinct ‘stages,’” determined economistically by the level of development of the productive forces. Fundamental changes in social relations emphasized by Marx as the very essence of the socialist path were abandoned in the process of living with and adapting to the defects carried over from capitalist society. Instead, Marx had insisted on a project aimed at building the community of associated producers “from the outset” as part of an ongoing, if necessarily uneven, process of socialist construction, (Michael Lebowitz, The Socialist Imperative (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2015). 71; Karl Marx, Grundrisse (London: Penguin, 1973), 171–72; see also Peter Hudis, Marx’s Concept of the Alternative to Capitalism (Boston: Brill, 2012), 190).
It is here, following Mészáros, that the notion of substantive equality or a society of equals, also entailing substantive democracy, comes into play in today’s struggles. Such an approach not only stands opposed to capital at its barbaric heart but also opposes any ultimately futile endeavor to stop halfway in the transition to socialism. Immanuel Kant spelled out the dominant liberal view shortly after the French Revolution when he stated that “the general equality of men as subjects in a state coexists quite readily with the greatest inequality in degrees of the possessions men have.… Hence, the general equality of men coexists with great inequality of specific rights of which there may be many”, (Immanuel Kant, The Philosophy of Kant: Moral and Political Writings (New York: Random House, 1949), 417–18; Mészáros, Beyond Capital, 193).
In this way, equality came to be merely formal, existing merely “on paper” as Engels once had pointed out, not only with respect to the labour contract between capitalist and worker but also in relation to the marriage contract between men and women. Such a society establishes, as Marx demonstrated, a “right of inequality, in its content, like every right.” It demands a change in the constitutive fabrics of society, which can no longer consist of possessive individualists, or individual capitals, reinforced by a hierarchical state – fossilised within a bourgeois capitalism ethos and practice. Our new progressive society has to be, and must be, based on the associated producers and a communal state towards a wealth-sharing environment.
In building an equity society with socialism as the dominant foundation, we must do all we can to develop the productive forces and gradually eliminate poverty, constantly raising the people’s living standards. Only when this outcome is achieved and there is significant prosperity for all will it become possible to begin the shift to advanced stage of an economy that is highly developed and where there is overwhelming material abundance. Only by this process that we shall be able to apply the principle of from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.
To achieve this process, there is a need on genuine planning and genuine democracy where these are through the constitution of power from the bottom of society. It is only in this way that a progressive socioeconomic society, and its healthy and well-being domain, becomes irreversible.
Towards this process in striving the Socialism with Malaysia characteristics goal, there shall be a combination of planning and markets forming the basic socialist economic system. Second, we need to keep in mind the dialectical relation between ownership and the liberation of the productive forces that shall entail, then
(1) the system contains a multiplicity of components, but public ownership remains the core economic driver, with corporate capitals supplementing capital formation but without undue surplus value extracted from labour;
(2) while both state owned and private enterprises must be viable, their main objective is not profit at all costs, but social benefit that meets ‘people-centred’ needs from appropriate shelter, education equity to community-base healthcare, harnessing modern technologies towards social needs;
(3) it employs the primary socialist principle of from each according to ability and to each according to work, limiting exploitation and wealth polarisation, and ensuring common prosperity and wealth sharing for every rakyat2 wellbeing;
(4) the primary value should always be ‘socialist collectivism’ – gotong royong community-based than bourgeois individualism and inflicted neoliberalism ethos.
The emergence of such socialist democratic political practice shall embrace an organic unity of the components of socialist democracy which entails that the people are masters in the house supervising the servants of society through the socialist rule of law and the Federal institutional guarantees.
When arriving in such a new society, the four processes shall have endorsed the following key philosophical propositions, that are:
(1) the world is unified in matter and matter determines consciousness, so policies would be developed in light of objective reality;
(2) since the movement of contradictions is a determining feature of matter, one should strengthen one’s awareness of such contradictions and seek to resolve them;
(3) the fundamental under such situation it is to think dialectically and develop the ability to deal with complex situations and problems;
(4) theory has a crucial role in terms of the dialectical relationship between knowledge and practice, but theoretical innovation should always be based on practice, on seeking truth from facts.
In sum, since there are inherent contradictions in matter, nature, and human society, there is this need for dialectical analysis of such contradictions so as to develop appropriate theories, policies, and programs – under a progressive governance and socialistic economic planning dominion.
This is the moment of great re-imaging of the Malaysia nation and possibly the greatest challenging changes to be seen in a decade. This is the basic starting point of all planning work and the tasks ahead. This is a moment of the momentum of a movement.
A New System of Social Dynamics
Engels famously argued in Anti-Dühring that real freedom was grounded in the recognition of necessity. Real socioeconomic change was the point at which freedom and necessity met in concrete praxis.
It is an explicit recognition of the challenge and burden of twenty-first-century socialism in these terms that represented the extraordinary threat to the prevailing order constituted by the Venezuelan Revolution led by Hugo Chávez. The Bolivarian Republic challenged capitalism from within through the creation ofcommunal power and popular protagonism, generating a notion of revolution as the creation of an organic society, or a new social metabolic order. Chávez, building on the analyses of Marx and Mészáros, mediated by Lebowitz, introduced the notion of “the elementary triangle of socialism,” or (1) social ownership, (2) social production organized by workers, and (3) satisfaction of communal needs. Underlying this was a struggle for substantive equality, abolishing the inequalities of the color line and the gender line, the imperial line, and other lines of oppression, as the essential basis for eliminating the society of unequals.
From India Kerala’s redistributive politics with their engaged trade union movement have succeeded in having significant redistribution of income with the highest wage rates in the country. Further, the peasant movement has been able to redistribute landed assets through a very successful land reform programme. The social movements which pre-date even the Left movement in Kerala, and whose tradition the Left has carried forward, have pressurised successive governments which have endeavoured to provide education, healthcare, and for the other basic needs of everyone. Therefore, in Kerala, an ordinary person enjoys a quality of life which is much superior to the rest of India.
It is of interest to note that China’s modernization has her historical moments as recorded by Vogel, Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China to promote science and technology where people who worked with their minds would be considered members of the politically respected working class; further concured by Boer, Socialism with Chinese Characteristics, in chapters 1 and 10.
We need to be in the threshold of a new sovereignty re-imaging a New Malaysia positioning an entity adhering a New Narrative to perform New Politics for the generasi muda.
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RETURN TO MAIN PAGE: COMMENTARY #12 》
Ethnic Inequality : Poverty Poors : Dialectical Urbanism: Urban Debts : Next 20 Years : Achieving Low : Vision 2020 Betrayed : A Stagnated Economy : NEP hasn’t Worked : A Socialist Ideal
12th Malaysia Plan EDITION: 🇲🇾 Bumi dichotomy : Positive discrimination : 30% Bumi Equity : Affirmative Action : Burden of Privilege : Melayu tipu Melayu : Challenging status quo : 1957 Social Contract : Vision 2020 and beyond
MALAY LEFT : IBRAHIM YAAKOB : MERDEKA LEADERS: KONFRONTASI : OP LALANG : BOESTAMAM : AL-HELMY : SHAMSIAH: KARTHIGASU : ABDULLAH : CHIN PENG : TAN CHEE KHOON : WOMEN FREEDOM FIGHTERS : OBITUARY
New Left Malaysia 