Does Malaysia already have Socialism? An Assessment of Our Public Institutions and Democratic Control

Would destroying the Malaysian state completely make sense when it already has the rough frame of socialist institutions? What it lacks is the orientation towards people and democratic control.

Image: A Landsgemeinde, or assembly, of the canton of Glarus, on 7 May 2006, Switzerland. (Wikipedia)

Self-identified socialists in Malaysia would likely lament the lack of even the most basic of social-democratic institutions. We see the lack of a strong mass socialist party, independent trade unions and left-wing social movements. This bleak outlook on the societal potential for socialism, coupled with a long history of fighting our authoritarian state, can lead to the perception that the state should be smashed and rebuilt. Even if one does not take such a revolutionary stance, there may be a tendency to overlook the Malaysian state as having any potential to contribute towards a socialist society.

What can frame this context is looking to socialist discourse in the United States. This new generation of US socialists is fighting for public institutions to make people’s lives better. They are currently struggling for public banks, support for the cooperative movement, state intervention to create jobs, better social security and universal healthcare. The penetration of the market into the public space of education, healthcare and common spaces have destroyed the systems that allow people to reproduce themselves and have dignified lives.

Yet, nearly all these institutions are already in place in Malaysia. We have EPF and SOCSO that covers a great number of Malaysians. It does have flaws as it does not cover informal workers and pre-existing inequality can be made worse through these social security systems. We have public banks that serve development goals (whatever you may think of development by itself) like Agrobank and SME Bank. We have state support and sanction for the cooperatives, with some citing that there are over 12,000 cooperatives under its national union.

While leftists abroad are calling for nationalisation, we have nationalised natural resource extraction in the form of Petronas. We have state-funded universal education and healthcare, despite having to pay a token sum to access it. There are rules and legislation that mandate a portion of land development set aside for public housing. Despite the criticism of its political nature, cash transfers to the poor is an institution that looks like it’s here to stay.

So what we are confronting is a form of Malaysian degenerated social democracy — invoking to Trotsky’s labelling of the Soviet Union as a degenerated workers’ state — a set of institutions that have the potential to make a positive difference in the lives of ordinary Malaysians. The question here is why don’t they?

Set aside issues of quality and execution, a common Malaysian response to this question would be corruption and possibly the opaque nature of these institutions. Yet, addressing corruption would merely be treating the symptoms rather than the cause, which I would argue is the lack of democratic controls. While some might think it sufficient to have politicians — who are elected for 5-year terms — do oversight, what enhances these institutions and moves a socialist agenda is to have citizen oversight or direct control through a local democratic process.

How this could be done is predicated on the notion that there are local democratic institutions to be mobilized towards this accountability process. What these local democratic institutions could look like might be a townwide residents association that gathers all its members to discuss an issue and brings any decisions to a municipal or district body. Depending on whether said municipal or district body has control over the matter, it would either be carried out or brought to the next level with other bodies concerned with the matter.

In an oversight situation, residents associations could elect from among themselves to take on the responsibility or appoint a third party to regularly question the public institutions and report back to the affected community. For instance, a state’s supplier of water can be subject to quarterly reporting of projects and incidents by a panel made up of members from a ‘federation’ of residents associations at the state level. This panel would then have the responsibility to communicate their findings and ensure the community is kept informed. In this case, the public institution is still run outside of the community either by professionals or government bureaucrats but would be directly accountable to their stakeholders.

In a direct control case, the members of a ‘federation’ of residents associations would meet in their individual associations to discuss an issue, bring it to the next level and vote on a decision to be carried out by an elected executive from within the federation. An example might be the operation of a state development bank. The residents could meet discuss the priority areas the bank should invest in for the year, infrastructure and education for instance. A board of members from the ‘federation’ could be elected to oversee the execution of these priority areas from within the bank itself. This would allow democratically elected representatives to have a say in the running of public institutions.

While some might dismiss these ideas of democratic control as utopian, they have already been implemented in various forms in Europe, see Switzerland for example. So if these ideas are desirable and viable, are they achievable within our current institutional setups? In short, no for now. First, these democratic resident associations would need to be established across the country to allow for the oversight and control mechanism to function. Secondly, the government bureaucracy and the public institutions themselves must be open to accepting these systems. It would not be difficult to imagine bureaucrats, who are set in their ways, resisting these democratic impulses, either from a position of professional propriety or one of preservation of individual power.

With these two obstacles in place, the task ahead is naturally two-fold. One is to organize these local democratic associations/councils ahead of the control of public institutions. These associations can be mobilized towards other ends so they can do more in the meantime. The second task is more challenging, taking state power in order to reorient these public institutions. A 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.