Epilogue to Malaysia’s ‘Incomplete’ Revolution
My reflections on my piece on class coalitions in Malaysian development post-May 2018, and on the incoherence of class politics in Malaysia.
I’ve had time to reflect on my essay, a lot of time. And since appearing on BFM to talk about it, I have had to relook at some of my basic assumptions and the logic I used to answer questions during my interview.
When I was asked what kind of economy or capitalism we have today and why class politics are absent in Malaysia, race was the only answer I could come up with. I mentioned how the British, during their colonisation, sort of set the terms of politics and locked in this communalist or racial dynamic that would remain in our politics to this day. The standard Marxist dichotomy between the base (the economy) and the superstructure (politics, race, ideology, culture) of a society and the presumed primacy of the former over the latter would leave no room for race to be the primary explanation of why the Malaysian economy is currently configured in this way. But the subject just seems inescapable when you try to give any account of Malaysia’s political economy. I was unable to avoid it in this essay, in my dissertation, in so many of my assignment essays on Malaysia.
Through my reflections on this impasse, I looked to see if I could develop a materialist — as opposed to philosophical idealism — account of race in Malaysia. The British technology of census taking and categorisation; the funding and colonial support by UMNO and MCA politicians to win the favour of the then Malayans; the commercial and political interest in reproducing racial cultures through consumption and state-sanctioned institutions; the low-level and high-level patronage and engenders a sense of racial belonging and otherness. These are just some of the examples of ‘race-making’ I could think of that have apparent material elements of money and resources — either from the colonial, state, feudal or capitalist elites. The nature of this dialectic is, I feel, crucial to understand if the entrenched racialism is to be undone deliberately. We could certainly sit around to wait for revolutions, wars or catastrophic natural disasters to remake our racial discourse but that would likely come at a heavy cost.
The incoherence of political parties being cross-class alliances will also need to be better understood as the more proletarian aspects are very seldom obvious at first glance. It is hard to imagine that if members of the Malaysian working class and peasantry were part of mainstream political parties like UMNO, their suffering would just simply be smothered in internal discussions. Granted, their dissent may not surface in explicitly class terms but the content of their demands might. This internal party dynamic and its external interaction with other parties and the state are worth examining at length.
I am currently reading Marxism and Politics by Ralph Miliband (available on libcom) and his introduction on why many Marxists have not sufficiently developed compelling Marxist theories of politics for their particular national or regional contexts. Miliband’s own innovative attempts to develop more robust theories have not inspired nearly enough efforts in this field. I hope to write on this a bit more after I am done with conglomerate capital.
Links to my essay, Malaysia’s ‘Incomplete’ Revolution: From Comprador Capitalism to State-Led Development to State-Dependent Development: https://rosaluxmanila.org/malaysias-incomplete-revolution-from-comprador-capitalism-to-state-led-development-to-state-dependent-development/
And my BFM interview: https://www.bfm.my/podcast/bigger-picture/beyond-the-ballot-box/malaysias-incomplete-revolution