"National Integration and the Communist Party" was a discussion document written by E.M.S. Namboodiripad in 1962 and published in advance of the 1964 Communist Party of India (Marxist) congress. The CPI(M) had formed in 1964 after a split in the Communist Party of India. This split centred on a division between the faction led by S.A. Dange which sought accommodation with the ruling Congress Party and a left-wing faction led by figures such as E.M.S. Namboodiripad, P. Sundarayya, Jyoti Basu, Harkishan Singh Surjeet. The split was also caught up in the dynamics of the Sino-Indian War and the Sino-Soviet Split.

Namboordiripad wrote regularly on the national question. His National Question in Kerala in 1952 outlined national basis of the left-wing struggle in Kerala and the historical development of a Keralese nation, a book influenced by Stalin's Marxism and the Problem of Linguistics. Yet beyond Kerala there was also the question of how India – understood by the communists as a multi-national state -- could address problems of national integration and the questions of the national language and culture this entailed. His "National Integration and the Communist Party" is notable for its more critical engagement with thinking on the national question, both within India and internationally.

Central to this is Namboodiripad's concern with the problem of communal and regional separatism which he saw as an ongoing threat to Indian politics. This was a problem he saw as emerging out of the elections in 1952 with the emergence of regional or communal parties, yet the Congress was able to attain a significant victory leading it to believe that it would be able to see out communal forces. Central to this was a belief that state socialism and more equitable development would provide the basis for overcoming communal divisions:

Subsequent to the election, the congress leaders thought that the new orientation that they were giving to their policies—friendship and cooperation with the Socialist powers on a world-scale; adopting of the Socialist pattern, and subsequently Socialism, as the goal of the nation; the new perspective regarding planned economy; agrarian reform, etc—would secure them such solid support from the people that a crushing blow could be dealt to communalism and regionalism.

As he would go on to argue:

Subsequent developments showed how misplaced was their optimism in this regard. Parties based on communal and regional separatism grew stronger, rather than weaker. They were able to cash in on the growing discontent of the people against Congress policies to a far greater extent than Left Democratic Opposition. And by 1959, they had grown so serious that the then President of the AICC, Smt. Indira Gandhi, called a representative meeting of Congress workers to discuss the problem. That Conference decided to appoint a Committee to consider the whole question of what has since come to be known as National Integration. This decision. however, was not implemented in the meanwhile, the language disturbances in Assam took place and showed the explosive character of the situation.

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It was against this background that the Bhavanagar session of the Congress, held in January 1961, adopted a resolution on National Integration. That resolution stated: “democracy, with its widespread: system of elections, which is vitally important and which is the very basis of our Constitution, has also resulted in some ways in encouraging certain: disintegrating forces. Under the cover of political and social activities, the old evils of communalism, casteism, provincialism and linguism have appeared again in some measure...... Communalism which has in the past done so much injury to the nation is again coming into evidence and taking advantage of the democratic apparatus to undermine this unity to encourage reactionary tendencies. Provincialism and linguism have also injured the cause for which the Congress stands. Caste, although losing, its basic force, is beginning to function in a new political garb. If these tendencies are allowed to flourish, then India’s progress will be gravely retarded and even freedom will be imperilled. It is, therefore, of the utmost importance that every effort should be made to remove these evils and always to keep in view the unity and integrity of the nation. Adequate progress can only be based on a national scale, embracing all communities and states.”

In response Namboodiripad would outline the way in which the Communists under Ajoy Ghosh would advocate to Nehru for an alliance of non-communal and secular politicians. As Ghosh would argue in a letter to Nehru in 1961:

"In the light of what happened in Jabalpur and other places, it is evident that the Congress, by relying on its own influence alone, cannot wage an effective battle against communalism. Not merely is the influence of the Congress to-day considerably less than it was in the days of struggle for national freedom but also it is a well-known fact that many Congressmen themselves have come to “imbibe communal ideas. At the same time, larger numbers of Congressmen are definitely non-communal. There are non-communal and secular-minded men and women in other parties also and many of those who ness of the menace, we feel that an appeal should be issued by you and by the Congress Working Committee to ask Congressmen in all parts of the country to join hands with other non-communal forces to wage a concerted struggle against communalism. Also we feel that it is high time that a Conference is convened of all the major secular parties and elements in the country to discuss communal problem in all its aspects and evolve ways and means to eradicate it"

This highlights the manner in which the CPI saw the problem of communalism as central to left-wing politics in India in the period. As a fundamental question which needed to be addressed. Yet as Namboodiripad outlines, the CPI had not managed a coherent theory of the national question. It had failed to undertake a "proper Marxist analysis" of communalism in India and the result was that the party was "not able to take a unified stand on the problem of national integration" and this produced conflicting trends in the CPI.

Namboodiripad then goes on to outline the Marxist approach to the national question and its relevance in India. Here he turns to Lenin's "On the Right of Nations to Self-Determination" which emphasised the processes of nation formation proper to modern capitalism and Marxist support for the right to self-determination of all nationalities. Yet as Namboodiripad argued, it would be incorrect to "make mechanical comparison of the conditions in Russia with those in India and to apply to India the principle of self-determination for all nationalities. Lenin himself had warned against such mechanical application of the principle of self-determination to all countries regardless of differences among them."

Lenin, he argues, suggested that the development of capitalism "does not necessarily awaken all nations to independent life. But to brush aside Mass national movements once they have started and to refuse to support what is progressive in them means, in effect, pandering to nationalistic prejudices, that is recognising 'one's own as the model nation'". Namboodiripad saw this in the assumption of the Indian state as a Hindi state and the denouncement of other sub-nationalisms.

Yet Namboodiripad would highlight differences between the Russian and Indian cases. Central to the nationalities question in Tsarist empire was the fact of Russian national domination and the requirement to resolve this domination in order to mobilise all nationalities. Yet as Namboodiripad argue, it would be "idle" to see the same features existing in Tsarist Russia as existing in 1960s India.

The very manner in which capitalism developed in our country and generated the national movement is basically different from that of Russia. It is therefore necessary to analyse the specific features of the development of capitalism and of the national movement in our country in order that we may be able to apply the general principle of Marxism-Leninism to our own conditions.

The central difference lay in the fact that in India the bourgeoisie was not from the dominant nationality but was largely foreign. As Namboodiripad argues, in fact in India the largest group, the Hindi speaking people were less economically advanced than in other territories. It was Bombay and Calcutta and not the cities of the Hindi Belt which industrialised under British rule and nor was the Hindi-speaking region able to become unified to become a dominant national political group. In this respect there are interesting links with a colony like Malaya in which the dominant linguistic and national group, the Malays, were also less economically developed, compared to the Chinese who had a large capitalist class.

In the case of India, the weakness of the Hindi-speaking region meant that it was the equality of languages that dominated the nationalist movement – focused against the domination of English. Alongside this was the emphasis on federalism. The two prongs of the nationalist movement were for Namboodiripad federalism and linguistic states. Yet against this the national bourgeoisie persistently advocated centralization, elements of the CPI also came to advocate centralisation as a means of combatting separatism.

Yet as Namboodiripad would argue, central to the traditional approach to the national question in the CPI was the attempt to produce "the utmost possible unity of the entire country consistent with the need for allowing all the linguistic and cultural groups to develop their languages and cultures". As he would go on to state, "The unity of the country is not to be counterposed to, but integrated with, the widest possible autonomy for the states formed on a linguistic basis". This emphasised the need to build unity through diversity and to combine national unity with autonomy which mirrored the ideas of unity central to Soviet nationalities policy. (As Stalin would argue in 1930: "It may seem strange that we who stand for the future merging of national cultures into one common (both in form and content) culture, with one common language, should at the same time stand for the flowering of national cultures at the present moment, in the period of the dictatorship of the proletariat. But there is nothing strange about it. The national cultures must be allowed to develop and unfold, to reveal all their potentialities, in order to create the conditions for merging them into one common culture with one common language in the period of the victory of social-ism all over the world. The flowering of cultures that are national in form and socialist in content under the dictatorship of the proletariat in one country for the purpose of merging them into one common socialist (both in form and content) culture, with one common language, when the proletariat is victorious all over the world and when socialism becomes the way of life—it is just this that constitutes the dialectics of the Leninist presentation of the question of national culture.

It may be said that such a presentation of the question is "contradictory." But is there not the same "contradictoriness" in our presentation of the question of the state? We stand for the withering away of the state. At the same time we stand for the strengthening of the dictatorship of the proletariat, which is the mightiest and strongest state power that has ever existed. The highest development of state power with the object of preparing the conditions for the withering away of state-power—such is the Marxist formula. Is this "contradictory"? Yes, it is "contradictory." But this contradiction is bound up with life, and it fully reflects Marx's dialectics.").

Yet, despite this position, due to the "chauvinistic" attitude of the Indian bourgeoisie and the central government, debates over the language issue had continued in the post-independence period. These debates mirror debates over language taking place in a colony such as Malaya. For Namboodiripad, failure to see the multi-national basis of Indian politics led the bourgeoise but also elements of the CPI to denounce forms of anti-national separatism without addressing its social, economic and historical roots. This led elements of the CPI towards "tailism", either following the position of the bourgeoise in denouncing separatism or, in dogmatically applying Lenin's right to national self-determination, tailing behind separatist movements. This contradicted the communist need to produce unity through difference.

As he would then argue:

The unity of the entire Party has to be built through a systematic struggle against bourgeois trends of all varieties (a) against the tendency of over centralisation and domination as well as against provincialism and regionalism; (b) against the efforts to develop Hindi and help it to dominate in the administrative and cultural life of the country at the expense of other languages, as well as against refusal to recognize the special role of Hindi as the language of all-India communication; (c) against the landlords and capitalists of the plains who want to dominate the tribal belt, as well as against the growing bourgeois elements among the tribal people to set their people against the plains people.... It can be done only if the Party independently comes before the people with a programme of building the unity of India on the basis of recognition of the real diversity which exists because of its multi-lingual character, the uneven economic and cultural development of various states and regions and the existence of the various tribes inhabiting the various parts of India.

He then ends by outlining the proper position of the Party on the question of national integration:

(a) On separatism: Opposition to separatism yet opposition to the centralisation of the bourgeoisie.

(b) On language: Adhering to the principle of replacing English by regional languages and Hindi as the official language.

(c) On provincialism and regionalism: Aim towards the rapid reduction of provincial and regional disparities. Allocations of funds for development plans on the basis of population size.

(d) Tribal discontent: Emphasising the need to protect tribal groups from the exploitation of landlords and capitalists and to assist them with modernising, yet on their own terms.

(e) Caste: opppostion to casteism but also opposition to the suggestion that the lower caste mobilisation along caste lines is casteism. Support for the continuation of educational concessions and reservations in government jobs.

(f) Communalism: support for secular politics and acting against the intrusion of religion into politics.

In Anticolonial Afterlives in Egypt Sara Salem develops a Marxist-oriented account of post-colonial political development in Egypt. In doing so, her book is part of an attempt to fit Marxist political analysis into the trajectory of political decolonisation. In bridging this gap Salem – like post-colonial scholars in India – turns to Gramsci, and particularly to Gramsci’s notion of hegemony as the anchoring moment around which post-colonial politics in Egypt has revolved.  The book, she notes, began as an interrogation of the 2011 revolution, yet Salem found herself repeatedly returning to the Nasserist moment of 1952 as the point against which the 2011 revolution was to be contrasted. It is then the apparent singularity of 1952 towards which Salem’s book turns.

This singularity is marked by the Nasserist construction of a meaningful hegemony over Egyptian society through the construction of a broad-based historic bloc, one which was able to contain business elites, religious elites, the military and the workers and peasants in a singular project of national independence and national-capitalist development. Salem’s central point is that this formation of hegemony – of governing through inclusion and consent – was a singular event in Egyptian political history, and its failure in the late 1960s, has led to a series of attempts to reconstruct of the governing bloc and the move from consent to coercion.

In turning to Gramsci Salem notes, quite rightly, the link between Gramsci’s own writings on Italian politics and the development of anti-colonial politics in the global south, particularly around Gramsci’s analysis of the divide between the industrial north and the ‘backward’ South. Thus in works such as “Some aspects of the Southern Question” the problem of generating hegemony was not simply that of a socialist party gaining leadership over the workers nor of a national bourgeoisie gaining leadership of the working class, but of the building a political coalition which transcended regional, developmental and cultural divides, and of integrating diverse groups of workers, peasants and intellectuals within a single bloc. It is in this sense that Gramsci’s writing has been so useful in understanding the politics of anti-colonial nationalism in the context of uneven economic development.

Yet beyond Gramsci, Salem also turns to the work of Franz Fanon and his concern with the post-colonial bourgeoisie and middle classes, to supplement a more political Gramscian reading. Salem’s point here is that Fanon’s conceptualisation of colonial capitalism understood peripheral economies in terms of a relation of dependence between colony and metropole, which in turn prevented the realisation by post-colonial states of a full national capitalism and a complete bourgeois revolution. This entailed then a failure of the post-colonial middle classes to attain a progressive hegemony over post-colonial societies. As she will argue,

Fanon’s point of departure is that capitalism in the colonial – and therefore postcolonial – world took a distinct form. He analyses this specifically through distinguishing between ruling classes in the West and those in the colonized world, arguing that the latter were structurally and fundamentally created to be dependent. Even in cases where this ruling class may want to become hegemonic, it will always fail precisely for the structural reasons emended within colonial capitalism, most notably a failure to accumulate capital on the scale necessary to create an authentic bourgeois project. For Fanon, then, decolonization did not always succeed in its stated goal of interrupting colonial structures and forms of dependency, and often merely transferred those same structures and forms to a native class.

This distinction between Gramsci and Fanon is really then a division between agency and structure. If a Gramscian account gives emphasis to the ways in which elites sought to produce a modern capitalist ruling bloc, then Fanon emphasises the limits placed upon post-colonial ruling classes by global capital – their failure to overcome external constraints. This forms for Salem the historical contradictions of decolonization.

Through such a frame Salem’s account of Egyptian politics mirrors a broader Gramscian reading of Indian political development, developed by Partha Chatterjee and Sudipta Kaviraj. First, the construction of a hegemonic anti-colonial ruling bloc through a process of passive revolution in which progressive and reactionary elites enter into coalition to attain leadership of the workers and peasants, secondly, the gradual breakdown of this process of passive revolution and elite compromise leading to attempts to resolve the crisis of the ruling elite through political contestation – without however inducing a broader revolution from below or process of social transformation. Whilst, finally, a turn to a more radical economic liberalisation which breaks up the terms of the post-colonial economic consensus and turns toward foreign capital, without this process of liberalisation gaining hegemony over mass society. This marks then a movement from a post-colonial national-capitalist project which sought to challenge foreign capital and produce a domestic capitalist consensus through integrating all classes within a ruling bloc, to a process of liberalisation which gives up the national-capitalist project and – in turning to foreign capital – gives up attempts to integrate subordinate classes within the ruling bloc. For Salem the era of hegemony is represented by Nasserism, the collapse of this hegemony by Sadat, and the turn to liberalisation by the story of Hosni Mubarak’s rule.

The great worth of Salem’s book is the attention it pays to the afterlife of hegemony, to the prolonged period of political stasis which emerged after the Nasserist historical bloc broke up and a new hegemonic project failed to replace it. This experience – common to many post-colonial countries, as anti-colonial united fronts confronted the realities of the world economy – is understood by Salem as an experience of ‘empty time’. This ‘empty time’ contrasts with the vision of progress and development central to hegemonic decolonising projects. Such projects promised national development and political empowerment, in ways which would resolve the persisting contradictions of the post-colony, between rich and poor, town and country, modern and traditional. Yet the failure of this project, for Salem, induced a politics which no longer sought to resolve political and economic contradictions but only to manage them. For Salem this forms the basis for a process of passive revolution which increasingly became defensive, as opposed to hegemonic.

Under Sadat, this was a period of interregnum, a revolution from above which sought to break up Nasserism and military influence without asserting a hegemony over Egyptian society but exercising more direct control over students and workers. Under Mubarak this became more evidently a programme of transformismo, what she terms “damage control”. What interests Salem about Mubarak is his lack of an ideological project. Whilst reforms occur in the first fifteen years of Mubarak’s tenure, “these were not gathered together under a project in the way we could see under Nasser and Sadat”. These years were then, argues Salem, “perhaps the clearest point post-1952 during which we see political change happening as a reaction and response rather than as an attempt to produce something new”.  As she will go onto argue, returning to her concept of “empty time”, “These years can be read as stable; they can also be read as stagnant, begging the question: what happens when time stops?”.

Salem’s reading of Mubarak centres on her argument that Mubarak didn’t himself produce a new government project, nor work with “a clear social force that had its own project”. His goal was rather to respond to discontent which emerged in response to the infitah project. In giving up on the project of national-capitalist hegemony he then paved the way for structural adjustment and the rise of a financial class, which would in turn mark a more fundamental break with earlier attempts to generate hegemony. So too would it mark a break with the politics of decolonization through a new focus on the internationalisation of capital and the financialisation of the Egyptian economy which moved away from the politics of development. What this then produced was a gradual shift towards coercion over consent, evident in the electoral arena as well as in labour disputes.

As Salem then comes to conclude, central to this process has been the state form. The shift she notes from the Nasserist historic bloc to liberalisation hasn’t taken the form of the weakening the state. The state has continued to be interventionist yet its interventions have moved from the production of hegemony to the management of empty time, to a process of passive revolution reproducing the status quo. What this suggests is a further need to understand the nature of the state-form in post-colonial societies and the basis of its power over society. Central to this will be the need to better locate the way in which the process of passive revolution, central to anti-colonial nationalism, intersects with concrete forms of social and economic power.

Finally Salem looks to highlight the afterlives of hegemony and at the end of the book Salem turns to the logic of haunting. The Nasserist project, she argues, has not gone away, the process of passive revolution it organised and its failure continues to impact the present. Why? Because the same contradictions persist, the problems of decolonisation, of class struggle, of economic and social modernisation still haven’t been resolved, a progressive compact hasn’t been produced which could move beyond such contradictions. And if the Nasserist moment is then still with us it is because we haven’t left the world of anti-colonial nationalism, we haven’t left the world of peripheral capitalism and uneven development. We are still in its empty time.

Published in Mekong Review. Read it here.

In A Brief History of Commercial Capitalism Jairus Banaji makes an argument for the need to reinstate commercial capitalism within narratives of capitalist accumulation and domination. Highlighting the way in which popular and scholarly accounts of capitalism have associated it with industrial capitalism, centred around industrial capitalists and the factory system, this has entailed a situating of capitalist power relations at the point of production and not within circulation. Against this Banaji seeks to tell a history of capitalism which highlights the role of circulation in the capitalist restructuring of societies. In doing so he offers another reading of the transition to capitalism which has relevance in the development of capitalism in Malaysia.

Central to this is the transition debate which took place between Maurice Dobb and Paul Sweezy in the 1950s which produced two different models for the transition from feudalism to capitalism. For Dobb the process was driven by contradictions within the feudal mode of production between lord and tenant, relations which slowly broke down and opened the way for the development of capitalist relations of production (principally free wage labour) at the point of production. For Sweezy on the other hand the transformation of feudalism was brought about in the realm of circulation with increases in trade producing external pressures on feudal lords to institute changes in production which formed the basis for a future capitalist mode of production. Whilst Dobb argued that it was productive relations which were key, Sweezy would argue that it was relations at the level of circulation which indirectly restructured production (and thus he would be accused of neo-Smithian Marxism). What both then accepted, however, was a separation between production and circulation.

A large part of Banaji’s book challenges this supposed separation, widely accepted in Marxist thought, between production and circulation in the functioning of capital. Focussing on the history of commercial capitalism from antiquity he seeks to highlight the way in which merchants have long intervened at the point of production, restructuring and determining the process of production from their position as merchants not industrialists. For Banaji this produces a strong historical overlap between the figure of the capitalist and the figure of the merchant.

Such a distinction was itself based on another distinction regarding the realisation of capital. In classical Marxist thought capital was increased at the point of labour through the exploitation of labour, and circulation then merely moved capital around, realising the value produced in production but without adding to it. This assumption however ignores for Banaji the fact that historically capitalist forms of circulation often preceded capitalist forms of labour organisation – suggesting then that capitalism wasn’t led by production but could have also been led by commercial elements.

What is important then about Banaji’s book is his revaluation of the work of commercial capitalists, centred around his analysis of the putting-out system. The putting-out system for Banaji is the place in which capitalist production “in the strict sense may be said to have begun”. Central to this is Marx’s own assumption that historically capitalism appropriated existing labour processes “as it finds it” yet for Banaji this isn’t reducible to Marx’s notion of either the real or formal subsumption of labour, as whilst the formal subsumption of labour accepted that labour was brought within capitalism whilst maintaining its pre-capitalist character, this incorporation remained centred on waged labour, leaving other forms of incorporation unthought. The role of the merchant in production, Banaji argues, didn’t concern the real or formal subsumption of labour (proletarianisaiton, wage labour, the factory system etc.) but rather the way in which the merchant “controlled, managed, and coordinated production itself”, offering then an indirect organisation of labour. As Banaji notes of the putting-out system: “The dispersal of living labor was re-totalized in the final commodity thanks to the merchant’s control and integration of production.”

This indirect capture of labour was driven for Banaji by two factors, firstly a control or monopoly on the raw materials/inputs of production, which made the putter-outer (in control of their own means of production) dependent upon the merchant for work (though not necessarily all of their work). Secondly such control was brought about by the power of the merchant to organise production, “in ways that would have been impossible for isolated groups of workers within it”, which talks to a managerial and bureaucratic aspect of commercial capital. Whilst then wage labour has been historically seen as key to the subordination of labour to capital, Banaji looks to highlight through the history of the putting out system alternative forms of subsumption.

In the final chapter this then leads him to place greater focus on the role played by large commercial firms in the history of capitalism. These firms with their “drive to monopolize markets, vertical integration, concentration of capital, and a striving for flexibility” can be seen as key agents in the growing concentration and domination of capitalism in the 19^th century, particularly also in the role they played in imperialism, with Britain’s mercantile capitalism central to its empire. Yet through these processes Banaji will argue that there was developing in the late 19^th century an “entirely new sort of capitalism, driven by modern industry but also bound up with more aggressive forms of expansion and unprecedented degrees of vertical integration industries like tobacco, rubber and oil, which dramatically reduced the dependence of manufacturers on merchant capital” which formed the basis for the new form of finance-monopoly capitalism which would then become dominant in the early 20^thcentury.

How can we conceptualise the history of capitalism in a country like Malaysia? One way has been to focus on the history of the modern industrial sector and the often-limited nature of proletarianization, wage labour and factory production up until the 1970s. This was particularly true of earlier analyses by figures such as James Puthucheary, Li Dun Jen and later Stenson, who would highlight the under-industrialized nature of Malaysian capitalism, what Stenson would term its “underexploited” aspect. If modernising capitalist development was then to occur it would be led by the development of industrialisation and by the change in social relations this would bring about.

Yet whilst today we see in Malaysia a highly-developed capitalist economy which has transformed the ways in which people work and consume, this has not been predominantly brought about by levels of industrialisation which made wage labour a hegemonic category or proletarianised significant elements of the country. Whilst wage labour has significantly grown in the decades since independence forms of informal, family or subsistence labour have continued to be reproduced, yet without, I would argue, limiting the capitalist nature of the country. This isn’t perhaps surprising. As Terry McGhee would argue in the 1970s, with limited industrialisation the development of capitalism in Malaysia would likely occur at the level of circulation and consumption, as against production, as it was in those areas where transformations were already taking place (concentration of consumer goods, marketing monopolies etc.). At the same time those like Puthucheary writing in the late-1950s were already highlighting the ways in which the non-industrial, non-modern sectors of the economy weren’t traditional subsistence economies but were by that time solidly within the cash and market economy, driven particularly by rural moneylenders and traders, producing already forms of capitalist incorporation. So too would he argue that it was the commercial clearing houses which commanded the economy.

There has been a lot of writing in Malaysian economic history about the importance of these commercial forms, from the colonial clearing houses and plantation companies to the post-colonial state-owned corporations which have continued much of this commercial legacy, yet there has been little reflection on these commercial forms as an expression of commercial capitalism, with capitalism forming a social-economic system and not simply a model of economic organisation. Yet in focusing on the centrality of commercial capitalism in Malaysia we can start however to have a better understanding of the forms of social change and power dynamics which it brought.

Two examples would here be relevant, the first that of FELDA, today a major agribusiness corporation, the second that of Grab, a major gig economy corporation.

FELDA was from the 1950s onwards one of the principal ways in which the peasantry was brought within modern economic development. Yet an understanding of the nature of this incorporation has been lacking. Halim Salleh would argue in the 1990s that FELDA was an incorporation of the peasantry into state capitalism focusing however on the fact that FELDA was run for profit and advanced money to tenants as loans, charging interest and holding them in debt. Seen however from the perspective of merchant capitalism we can find more at work. From this perspective FELDA was a form of agricultural production without the subsumption of labour or the entry of the peasantry into wage labour. In this reading FELDA operated more like a commercial trading house, advancing capital to smallholder peasants to realise returns on this capital through the marketing of FELDA produce after production, and in doing so FELDA played an important role in economic development. Oil Palm is here instructive, between 1960 and 1976 oil palm production grew from 135,016 acres to 1,540,716 acres, with FELDA plantations forming 1/3^rd of oil palm land by 1976, and became a significant crop in the Malaysian economy. Beyond loans then FELDA would make its money through the founding of mills for processing and controlling the marketing of the produce, particularly for export. By the 1970s FELDA then began to move from a developmental to a commercial model, forming corporations in areas of transportation, milling, marketing, storage etc. This enabled vertical integration and economies of scale within FELDA which allowed for a greater commercialisation of activities and venturing into commercial plantations directly controlled by FELDA which helped then form the basis for commercial diversification and the formation of large publically-traded investment companies which are financialized global corporations in the 1990s and beyond.

A similar perspective could also be brought about Grab, a company which has recently commercialised a whole series of services which were often in the informal sector (food delivery, ride services, cleaning etc.) and has changed the way in which whole sectors of the economy are organised whilst realising new areas of accumulation for capital. Grab sells and organises services yet without the subsumption of labour or the direct intervention into the labour process, yet as in Banaji’s understanding of commercial capital, still managing and exercising control over labour and production. One-way Grab has done this is through its control over resources, notably capital. This has allowed it to bring in and keep drivers and merchants using its service through the provisions of loans, smartphones and cars on credit which both tie users to its service but also act as an advance of capital on future labour. Through GrabKitchen’s they have moved from just linking up drivers, merchants and customers to providing facilities for food merchants and more directly organising production. Another key aspect has been its near monopoly on marketing and organising services through its app. Able to revolutionise the older systems of ride sharing and food delivery, it has increasingly tied drivers and merchants to its own services, and through this technology it has vastly increased the ways in which labour can be directed, organised and even disciplined, without the use of waged labour. Key also to Grab’s role in capitalist integration has been its diversification into financial products, eWallets and ePayment systems, tying more and more small businesses, which have long been part of the informal sector and the cash economy, within Grab’s network, increasing therefore dependency on this network, and transforming the ways in which the small merchants and hawkers work and produce.

What is important to note however is that way in which this transformation is/has been changing the shape of service provision and forms of production in Malaysia without the category of wage labour or the subsumption of labour under capitalism, rather the control and exploitation of labour has been effected by commercial capital, and the ways in which through vertical integration and concentration these organisations have become very dominant in determining the nature of capitalist development in Malaysia. These are of course only two (very incomplete) examples of commercial capitalism in the Malaysian context, but Banaji’s insights into its development can, I think, provide both a historical and contemporary framework to discuss the nature of Malaysian capitalism.

Image source: English Questions by Perry Anderson

In 1964 in New Left Review Perry Anderson published an essay titled “Origins of the Present Crisis” which became the basis for a critique of left-wing understandings of British capitalism and the power of the British state. Central to this were questions of the place of a structural analysis of British society within socialist thought and the nature of capitalist crisis and class power in Britain. Read in the context of contemporary Malaysia it could be argued, that Anderson’s insights can usefully form the basis for a broad structural analysis of Malaysian society, and a means to outline the nature of class power and the contemporary nature of political and economic crisis in the country.

The Crisis in Britain

“Two commanding facts  confront  socialists in  Britain  today” argues Anderson, a “profound,  pervasive but cryptic crisis, undramatic in appearance, but ubiquitous in its reverberations” and, linked to this, the decline of the Labour government of the day. What was missing from political writing of the period, argued Anderson, was a systematic reading of the crisis. Political writing offered only symptoms but not diagnoses because they ignored the historical dimensions of the crisis.

As Anderson would go onto argue:

We [Britain] must be unique among advanced industrial nations in having not one single structural study of our society today; but this stupefying absence follows logically from the complete lack of any serious global history of British society in the 20th century. The limits of our sociology reflect the nervelessness of our historiography. Marxist historians, whose mature works are only now beginning to emerge and consolidate each other, have so far nearly all confined themselves to the heroic periods of English history, the 17th and early 19th centuries: most of the 18th and all of the 20^th remain unexplored. Thus no attempt has ever been made at even the outline of a ‘totalizing’ history of modern British society. Yet until our view of Britain today is grounded in some vision of its full, effective past, however misconceived and transient this may initially be, we will continue to lack the basis for any understanding of the dialectical movements of our society, and hence—necessarily—of the contradictory possibilities within it which alone can yield a strategy for socialism.

What was necessary then was a linking up of the contemporary dynamics of capitalist rule and class power, with the historical process through which both came to be. In turning British socialism to the past Anderson would go on to highlight a few key aspects of British capitalist development.

The first of these was the fact that England’s bourgeois revolution was the earliest, “most mediated” and least pure of any major European country.  Thus whereas other European bourgeois revolutions had seen a rising capitalist class seize hold of the state apparatus and depose the old order, British development occurred differently. Occurring initially through the English civil war bourgeois revolution in England formed the “the most obscure and controversial of all the great upheavals which lead to the creation of a modern, capitalist Europe”.  It took the form of a conflict of two segments of the land-owning elite, neither of which “were direct crystallizations of opposed economic interests” but were “intelligible lenses” through which broader antagonistic social forces came into focus, a sort of stage for broader social antagonisms. This was for Anderson a “revolution by proxy”. The English bourgeoisie benefited but were not the main protagonists, and the main protagonists were rural not urban, and the central struggle was over the economic, political and religious role of the monarchy. Such a revolution by proxy led by non-bourgeois classes entailed then the fact that in the long run the Civil War, whilst transforming the state structure in some ways, didn’t transform the personnel of the ruling class, it didn’t displace a social group or class, but rather changed the approach of the ruling class to the state.  Nor then did it give power to a militant bourgeois ideology. The effects of the Civil War were then to be as follows:

For the next hundred years the British aristocracy proceeded to perfect the ruthless and richly rewarding triad system of capitalist landlord, tenant farmer and landless agricultural labourer, which destroyed the English peasantry and made Britain the most agriculturally efficient country in the world. But no career open to talents, no enlarged franchise, no weakening of the principles of heredity and hierarchy, followed this. Landed aristocrats, large and small, continued to rule England.

The second aspect was the fact that the English industrial revolution coincided with a period of international counter-revolutionary war in the aftermath of the French Revolution. The effect of this was to ensure the rising British manufacturing class allied itself to the aristocracy to ward off popular revolution in Britain. The direct assumption of bourgeois power took the form then of a slow cumulative process. After 1832 the new middle class continued to elect progressive elements of the old aristocracy. Even by 1865 Parliament remained made up of the same kinship network in a process described by Anderson as “delegation of power by one distinct social class to another”. The direct assumption state power by the bourgeoisie took the form then of a slow symbiosis of classes, central to which was the development of education in allowing bourgeois families to enter into the ruling class.

What enabled this process to succeed was for Anderson two factors, the first, the fact that the British proletariat emerged on the scene prematurely, before the development of socialist ideology and mature working class organisation. The second, the fact that Britain’s external imperial engagements helped to “set” British society in a fixed matrix, externally maintaining its class structure.

This process gave the power structure of British society a unique form. The continuing feudal structure of the British state (the monarchy, House of Lords, Church etc.) didn’t refer to the economic structure of British society but helped to “camouflage” this a class structure, “intensifying [against the visible elements of class power] and displacing [away from the true elements of] class-consciousness”, thus neutralising class struggle. Such a process contributed to other aspects of British political life: the absence of dominant ideological elements in political life, in preference of prejudices and taboos and the ruling ideology of traditionalism and empiricism, and a social imperialism which if not directly benefiting the working class, tied them to a national frame and a colonial style of leadership which emphasised a distinction between ruling class and ruled.

Returning to the crisis of the 1960s Anderson would then go on to argue that in understanding the contemporary nature of power in British society, this history of ruling class power had to be understood and this would require a more complex understanding of the nature of power in capitalist societies.

In the long run, to be sure, power coincides with control of the means of production. But at any given moment of history, this is not necessarily true. On the contrary, what is needed is not a reassertion of the banality that power ultimately derives from the pattern of ownership in a society; the urgent need is for a concrete typology of the different modalities of power today. A whole spectrum of possibilities exist, realized in more or less pure forms in different societies at different epochs.

Yet beyond the question of forms of power, Anderson would also call for socialist analysis to be sensitive to the nature of historical development in which these forms of power were produced. Central to this was the argument that the development of Britain’s political-economic system had historically followed the path of least resistance, avoiding the rigours of class conflict and significant intra-elite conflicts, avoiding economic overhaul after early industrial development and avoiding cultural revolution. The nature of the crisis of the 1960s lay then for Anderson directly in the earlier ability of the English ruling class to avoid the revolutionary path and to choose a persistent reformist path, producing the gradual conditions for economic decline, cultural provincialism and a declining government class. As Anderson would conclude, “All these burdens of the present have their origins in blessings of the past.”

Outlines of the Development of Class Power in Malaysia

Can Anderson’s work contribute to an understanding of the development of class power in Malaysia, a country similarly lacking in contemporary structural analyses? Here three aspects of Anderson’s thesis appear relevant. The first, bourgeois revolution without the leadership of a bourgeoisie (bourgeois revolution by proxy), the second, the taking place of bourgeois revolution in a period of counter-revolution and finally the nature of the power structure in Malaysian society that these processes have produced.

The first of these is defined by the long process of bourgeois revolution in Malaya. The way in which the British colonial state imposed capitalist production relations from above and the way in which anti-colonial nationalism was led by an alliance between a local capitalist class and local aristocracy, conciliatory to foreign capital. This was an alliance in which the bourgeoisie and modernising elements led from behind, allowing an existing feudal power structure to lead a capitalist state.

So too was the popular movement neutralised in this process. Democratic power was realised in Malaya not through a popular nationalist movement winning power from the state but was given from above at a time in which the popular classes remained politically underdeveloped and the ballot box continued not to challenge the basic power structure of Malaysian society but to reinforce it. To take a broad view then of Malaysian capitalist development you can see then that despite the country’s independence movement not being dominated by a strong rising national bourgeoisie, historically it has continued to reproduce the basic elements for a successful capitalist state: a modern state capable of providing the framework for continued capitalist development, ruling in the interests of capital and a system of political stability preventing overt class conflict. Whilst the period from 1957 onwards have seen this structure amended, these basic aspects have remained completely consistent: a state totally devoted to capitalist development and focussed on holding down class conflict.

The second factor is defined by the counter-revolutionary nature of the Malaysian state and ruling class. Born in reaction to a socialist and labour movement, and in the Cold War struggle against global communism, bourgeois and progressive elements of the ruling coalition remained unwilling  to assume leadership of the anti-colonial movement, nor to take direct control of the post-colonial state. Rather capital, local and foreign, remained largely happy to lead from behind and to govern by proxy through an established political elite. Again, this doesn’t preclude the history of tensions between the state and capital, which has regularly occurred, but it does suggest that fundamentally this system of leading from behind worked in favour of capital, and that capital has generally continued to be happy to allow others to govern by proxy, avoiding mounting a direct political challenge to take hold of state power. In this sense, Anderson’s argument of a “delegation of power by one distinct social class to another” can be seen to have continued to determine the nature of political power in Malaysia.

Finally then, this process has also continued to the reproduction of the feudal nature of power in Malaysia, camouflaging the fundamental role played by capital in determining the nature of power in the country. On the one hand this has displaced class struggle into cultural struggles, suggesting questions of power are cultural (the question of the cultural identity of state and nation) and not class questions. And in the same way that Anderson would talk of Britain, Malaysian politics has also been marked by a complete absence of real ideological conflict: whilst ideological challenges have occurred they have historically been displaced by the state and ruling order. Rather as Anderson argues, an order based upon “prejudices and taboos” and the ruling ideology of “traditionalism and empiricism” has been dominant. The ruling ideology has remains both traditional and technocratic, traditionalist and developmental, not ideological. Linked to this is then an aversion to cultural revolution, which may favour greater capitalist development but destabilise the existing class structure, making Malaysia’s ruling system a persistent endorsement of cultural conservatism.

The Nature of Crisis

Another aspect of this process is however the consistent ability of the ruling order to choose the path of least resistance, in its preference for reformism over revolution—in the same way that Anderson would talk in terms of the “burdens of the present [having] their origins in blessings of the past.”

In the case of Malaysia what made this particularly possible was the highly profitable nature of the modern sector of the economy which developed under the British and was inherited by the post-colonial state. These sectors, whilst significantly unevenly developing the country, made the problem of post-colonial Malaysia the problem of inequality and uneven development but not one of absolute poverty and dispossession. The political pressure on the ruling elites was not therefore one of resolving an impoverished mass but one of redistributing wealth and making development more even and inclusive. This fact allowed them however to consistently make choices which preserved the best and the most profitable of the economy they inherited whilst modifying other elements. This was true in the 1960s with the maintenance of the plantation economy and the focus on rural development, as well as in the 1970s with the focus on “market nationalisation”, the continued reliance on migrant labour, and the continued openness to foreign capital and foreign ownership in the economy.

What this consistently reformist strategy prevented was however the kind of more radical transformation which was witnessed in the East Asian Tiger states. In the same way then that Anderson would argue that Britain’s early successes in the long term underdeveloped the country in reference to more modern and technological economies like Germany in the early 20^th century, so too can it be argued that Malaysia’s own early successes, its highly profitable plantation and mining sectors burdened the country with an economic structure that it has continued to be affected by today: heightening the risk of radical changes to the economic structure, and reducing the benefits that such changes might provide, insofar as such changes may disrupt existing economic successes.

The problem lies then not just in the way in which the colonial economic structure produced a racialised division of labour but also the way in which this structure has underdeveloped Malaysia in its willingness to address the need to modernise and transform its social, economic and cultural structures. In the last decade then, when economic growth has been increasingly unable to produce stronger growth, and particularly stronger wage growth, the country has been hampered by earlier structures of power which have continued to incentivise against a greater transformation of the country. The country retains high-levels of foreign ownership, a significant crony sector, a highly conservative governing system, a dominant semi-feudal social system and an education system highly unsuited to a new economic world.

Reading Anderson it can however be argued that these contemporary limitations are the structural expression of earlier decisions enabled by the earlier successes of Malaysia’s political and economic system. These successes have put off a need to resolve questions of perfecting economic development, cultural modernisation and educational improvements because risks of upheaval remained high, and rewards for transformation relatively low. A path of least resistance could be pursued which, whilst not producing optimal economic growth, produced sufficient growth to keep both capital and labour satisfied. With this growth now increasingly insufficient, the Malaysian state finds itself hampered in its ability to respond to this situation. It hasn’t historically had to develop the tools to respond to such a crisis.

It is perhaps then not surprising that the fallout from this slowly developing systemic crisis has been high levels of political fragmentation and the break-up of the country’s ruling elite, but without a strong political force offering a resolution to the crisis. What has occurred is rather that an independent political elite, liberated from the main areas of capital, has increasingly turned in on itself in a fight for state power, but without this fight being linked to more broader systemic concerns over the future political and economic direction of the country.

If however a resolution to the crisis can’t be found from above, the development of this crisis might open up the opportunity, long denied, for more radical transformations to the system through new political forces or through labour and popular movements. It was to this question that Anderson would turn to in a subsequent article, “Critique of Wilsonism”, arguing that whilst Wilsonism largely diagnosed the crisis of British capitalism and the British state, its preference for personalised politics and avoidance of a more fundamental conflict with British capital and the British state hampered its attempts to offer a more fundamental resolution. The need for economic modernisation, assaulting traditional and hierarchical forms of power, cultural liberation, the improvement in the position of the working class and democratisation of the state would all require for Anderson conflict, a conflict which the Labour Party sought to avoid, but which the Left would have to take up if it was to capitalise on the crisis of British society in the 1960s. As he would conclude:

Public ownership, social priorities, civic democracy, workers’ control, a liberated culture—all these involve conflict, an inescapable confrontation with capitalism, and a lasting defeat of it. The chances of the Left are now tangible. It will take the utmost courage and imagination to seize them.

In 1988, theorist Guy Debord published a new text revising and supplementing his earlier work The Society of the Spectacle. Titled Comments on the Society of the Spectacle the work built upon the reflections on power and the commodity-form which defined his earlier post-1968 work, but in an emerging post-Cold War context, it moved beyond the binary between capitalist and communist societies, and addressed itself to the growth of a new form of state power. As this piece will go on to argue the form of state power that Debord began to outline in Comments has a strong similarity with the way in which the modern state has developed in Malaysia, and can offer therefore a way to conceptualise political power in the country.

The Integrated Spectacle

Central to The Society of the Spectacle was Debord’s analysis of the way in which capitalist societies were increasingly transitioning from a model of power centred around property and ownership, towards one centred around spectacles and images. Basing his work on Marx’s theory of the commodity fetish the spectacle was for Debord not only a proliferation of images but the process through which images (and imaginaries) of desire, enjoyment, aspiration, belonging, identity, of unity and violence, mediated social relations between individuals, and thus the way in which the image and imagination would come to dominate and subordinate societies, proliferated by new forms: cinema, pop culture, advertising. This in turn moved the antagonisms central to capitalist society beyond the walls of the factory, and highlighted the way in which capitalist domination was increasingly penetrating all areas of social life.

In doing so Debord outlined two models of spectacular domination: the diffuse spectacle, based on the competition of commodities in the free marketplace of Western capitalist societies, and the concentrated spectacle, based upon the commodity production of bureaucratic capitalist societies of the Communist East. Whilst Debord in this earlier work didn’t address himself to countries of the Global South he argued that with the expansion of capitalist production in the "least industrialised places”, the reign of the spectacle was extending itself over the entire world.

One of the weaknesses of The Society of the Spectacle was however its lack of an analysis of states which fell outside of the binary of bureaucratic capitalism vs free market capitalism, which is to say its exclusion of developing states. In the era of the Cold War the world appeared split between those highly centralised one party-states of the Eastern Bloc and the democratic consumer societies of North America and Western Europe, yet there was little attention paid to those states which fell outside of this binary, states in which neither the concentrated spectacle nor the diffuse spectacle reigned supreme, states defined by a mixture of the two and whose development pointed towards neither side of the division.

This was the case in post-Colonial Malaysia which after independence took the form neither of a purely free-market capitalist nor bureaucratic capitalist regime, but a mixed model of state-led development. Nor did political power take either democratic or authoritarian forms, taking a form which was mixed, and divided between radical and conservative forces. So too in the areas of media and culture in which top-down statism mixed with global flows of information and technology.

It was a similar developments in Western Europe which led Debord to add onto his concepts in The Society of the Spectacle a new third term, that of the integrated spectacle. Such a concept emerged out to the popular movements of 1968 and the reaction to these movements which in the years after ensured the continuing stability of the old order in which the reign of the spectacle “continued to reinforce itself”. The integrated spectacle thus emerged out of a defensive response to a revolutionary challenge and represented the survival instincts of an old order under siege.

As Debord outlined it, if the country of the diffuse spectacle was the USA, and the countries of the concentrated spectacle were Russia and Germany, the countries of the integrated spectacle were France and Italy. These were societies firstly, of ongoing political instability and of fierce competition between Left and Right and secondly, caught between tendencies towards both Americanism and Totalitarianism (inspite of the Fascist heritage of both nations). What they shared argued Debord was, “the important role of the Stalinist party and unions in political and intellectual life, a weak democratic tradition, the long monopoly of power enjoyed by a single party of government, and the necessity to eliminate an unexpected upsurge in revolutionary activity.” In France and Italy this experience took different forms.  In France this took the form of Gaullism, of working-class populism, the colonial war in Algeria and the development of the OAS (a French-Algerian terror organisation made up of French Army officers who turned against their own side) and the collapse of the 4th Republic. In Italy it was the Anni di piombo (Years of lead), the period of labour unrest and student protest and a period of political terrorism, assassinations and kidnappings, as well as of preventative detention, secret police and pentiti's (what Debord terms, “sworn professional accusers”).

These realities shaped, however, the nature of a developing authoritarianism in both societies: not the popular totalitarianism of Russia and Germany, but operating through the mobilisation of extremist groups, political assassinations, secret terrorist and militant organisations and the mobilisation of the underworld (gangs, criminal elements etc.) – to reinforce the authority of the state through the use of force, extra-legal operations, the state’s use of secrecy and its alliance with forces of extremism in order to maintain stability. More generally then, what linked these counties was the way in which weak states lacking hegemony over society responded to revolutionary challenges through a process of counter-revolution which utilised the mixed nature of the regime's constitution to its benefit.

Typology of the Integrated Spectacle

To what extent is a structural analysis of Malaysian politics possible? There has been an important history in Malaysia of structural analyses which seek to link up he country’s political economy with forms of social and political power. Increasingly however, under the influence of democratisation theory, systemic analyses have declined in favour of formalistic political theory. Today the nature of power in Malaysia is often spoken of in terms of authoritarian democracy, semi-democracy or as a repressive-responsive regime. These categories, which highlight the kind of dualism Debord notes in the integrated spectacle, leave unsaid however the social, political and economic dynamics through which this system of authoritarian-democratic power functions, both at the micro and macro levels.

Central to Debord’s work was an attempt to link changes to the political economy of modern capitalism, to changes in political and social forms of power: to highlight new systems of power through which capitalism was reproducing itself. For societies of the integrated spectacle, this system would be defined by the following five characteristics: “incessant technological renewal; fusion of State and economy; generalized secrecy; forgeries without reply; a perpetual present”.

Incessant technological renewal entailed for Debord the overtaking of social development by technological development and the subordination of society to experts. The fusion of the state and economy expressed the fusion of the invisible hand of the market and the authority of the state. Generalised secrecy took the form of the mystification of the true, whilst forgeries without reply, took the form of the triumph of falsification within society, and therefore the displacement of truth as a fundamental value. The perpetual present marked the absence of systemic opposition or of an outside or future that could offer something an alternative route of social development, forming then a system which is beyond critique.

The cement holding these factors together for Debord is the category of "integration", which in manipulating the diffuse and concentrated, the market and state, anarchy and authority forms the basis for a new system of rule. As Debord argues:

The integrated spectacular shows itself to be simultaneously concentrated and diffuse, and ever since the fruitful union of the two has learned to employ both these qualities on a grander scale. Their former mode of application has changed considerably. As regards the concentrated side, the controlling center has now become occult, never to be occupied by a known leader, or clear ideology. And on the diffuse side, the spectacular influence has never before put its mark to such a degree on almost the totality of socially produced behavior and objects. For the final sense of the integrated spectacular is that it integrates itself into reality to the same extent that it speaks of it, and that it reconstructs it as it speaks. As a result, this reality no longer confronts the integrated spectacular as something alien. When the spectacular was concentrated, the greater part of peripheral society escaped it; when it was diffuse, a small part; today, no part. The spectacle is mixed into all reality and irradiates it. As one could easily foresee in theory, practical experience of the unbridled accomplishment of commodity rationality has quickly and without exception shown that the becoming-world of the falsification was also the falsification of the world. Beyond a still important heritage of old books and old buildings, but destined to continual reduction and, moreover, increasingly selected and put into perspective according to the spectacle's requirements, there remains nothing, in culture or in nature, which has not been transformed, and polluted, according to the means and interests of modern industry.

As Debord argues the integrated spectacle operates through the combination of the features of the diffuse and concentrated spectacle. In so doing it overcomes the defects of these previous modes: the concentrated spectacle imposed order from the centre but was powerless to control  those movements which fell out of its orbit, the diffuse spectacle sacrificed the principle of centrality but at the expense of order and control. The integrated spectacular for Debord thus enacts a centralization with diffusion and a diffusion with a corresponding centre, a movement which aims towards both totalization and diffuse control.

Thus whilst in earlier eras incessant technological renewal could destabilise concentrated political power, the fusion of state and market would lead to the demise of either term, secrecy and falsity could lead to dictatorship, the success of regimes of the integrated spectacle has been to stabilise these tensions in a present which is perpetual and perfected: producing both dynamism and stability. It is a system which ensures resilience and stability and neutralises political opposition.

Malaysia and the Integrated Spectacle

Within such a definition Malaysia appears as a country highly representative of Debord’s integrated spectacle. As in the case of Italy and France, it is a state with a long authoritarian tradition, a weak democratic tradition, a long monopoly of power enjoyed by a single party of government, and born out of a counter-revolutionary attempt to  suppress popular revolution. Since its birth it has continued to permit competitive elections but has mobilised the state to increasingly concentrate political power, it has become significantly developed through a model of state capitalism and government-linked companies which integrate the state and the market. So too is it a democracy in which generalised secrecy reigns, and in which slander and political lying now take place without response, as the proliferation of accusations and counter-accusations in the aftermath of prosecutions around the 1MDB scandal highlight. So too is it a society of a perpetual present, devoid of enemy or future, its governing system, now long entrenched, represented by its political elites as the best in all possible worlds, ensuring stability and prosperity in the country.

Malaysia is therefore a society of “fragile perfection”, the kind of perfection Debord describes in reference to modern democracy, negating both a need for opposition (because the system of rule can’t be improved) and a right to opposition (because opposition will serve only to destabilise this perfection):

Once it attains the stage of the integrated spectacular, self-proclaimed democratic society seems to be generally accepted as the realization of a fragile perfection. So that it must no longer be exposed to attacks, being fragile; and indeed is no longer attackable, being perfect, which no other society has been. It is a fragile society because it has great difficulty managing its dangerous technological expansion. But it is a perfect society to be governed; and the proof is that all those who aspire to govern want to govern this one, in the same way, maintaining it almost exactly as it is. For the first time in contemporary Europe, no party or fraction of a party even tries to pretend that they wish to change something important. The commodity can no longer be criticized by anyone: as a general system or even as the particular forms of junk which heads of industry choose to put on the market at any given time.

Debord’s insight allows us however to highlight what is central to the functioning of power in Malaysia: the process of integration between concentrated and diffuse spectacles. Through such a reading we can also highlight the way in which largely under-interrogated aspects of Malaysian politics refer back to this process of integration as described by Debord:

- The disappearance of public opinion

The false without reply has succeeded in making public opinion disappear: first it found itself incapable of making itself heard and then very quickly dissolved altogether

- The fabrication of an enemy on which the system wishes to be judged: ethnic violence

This perfect democracy fabricates its own inconceivable enemy, terrorism. It wants, actually, to be judged by its enemies rather than by its results. The history of terrorism is written by the State and it is thus instructive. The spectating populations must certainly never know everything about terrorism, but they must always know enough to convince them that, compared with terrorism, everything else seems rather acceptable, in any case more rational and democratic.

- The loss of historical knowledge

Spectacular domination's first priority was to make historical knowledge in general disappear; beginning with just about all rational information and commentary on the most recent past. The evidence for this is so glaring it hardly needs further explanation. With mastery the spectacle organizes ignorance of what is about to happen and, immediately afterwards, the forgetting of whatever has nonetheless been understood.
...
The precious advantage that the spectacle has drawn from the outlawing of history, from having condemned the recent past to clandestinity, and from having made everyone forget the spirit of history within society, is above all the ability to cover its own history of the movement of its recent world conquest. Its power already seems familiar, as if it had always been there. All usurpers have wanted to make us forget that they have only just arrived.

- The proliferation of political lying and disinformation

The relatively new concept of disinformation was recently imported from Russia, along with many other inventions useful in the management of modern states. It is always openly employed by a power, or, consequently, by the people who hold a fragment of economic or political authority, in order to maintain what is established; and always in a counter-offensive role. Whatever can oppose a single official truth must necessarily be disinformation emanating from hostile or at least rival powers, and must have been intentionally falsified by malevolence. Disinformation would not be simple negation of a fact which suits the authorities, or the simple affirmation of a fact which does not suit them: that is called psychosis. Unlike the pure lie, disinformation -- and here is why the concept is interesting to the defenders of the dominant society -- must inevitably contain a degree of truth but deliberately manipulated by a skillful enemy. The power that speaks of disinformation does not believe itself to be absolutely faultless, but knows that it can attribute to any precise criticism the excessive insignificance which is in the nature of disinformation, and of the sort that it will never have to admit to a particular fault.

- The secrecy of the state and the market

Our society is built on the secret, from the 'screen companies' that shelter from all light the concentrated wealth of their members, to the 'defense secrets' that today cover an immense domain of full extra-judicial liberty of the State; from the often frightening secrets of shoddy production, which are hidden by advertising, to the projections of variants in an extrapolated future, in which domination alone reads the most probable routes of things that it affirms have no existence, calculating the responses it will mysteriously make.

- The use of shadow politics: gangs, militant groups, shadow state organisations etc. Defined by Debord in terms of the mafia.

When it began to manifest itself at the beginning of the century in the United States, with the immigration of Sicilian workers, the Mafia was only a transplanted archaism; at the same time, there appeared on the West Coast the gang wars between Chinese secret societies. Founded on obscurantism and poverty, the Mafia at that time was not even able to implant itself in Northern Italy. It seemed condemned to vanish before the modern State. It was a form of organized crime that could only prosper through the 'protection' of backward minorities, outside the world of the towns, where the laws of the bourgeoisie and the control of a rational police force could not penetrate. The defensive tactics of the Mafia could only suppress witnesses, neutralize the police and judiciary, and install as ruler in its sphere of activity the secret that is necessary to it. Subsequently it found a new field in the new obscurantismof the society of the diffuse spectacular, then in its integrated form: with the total victory of the secret, the general resignation of citizens, the complete loss of logic, and universal cowardice, all the favorable conditions were united for it to become a modern and offensive power.

Finally then Debord’s understanding allows us to problematise political opposition under the regime of the integrated spectacle. Before one could oppose the diffuse spectacle through the assertion of unity – through the assertion of a united class organized under a centralized party. Alternatively could oppose the concentrated spectacle through the proliferation of activism, art and writing outside of its centralised control. But within the bounds of the integrated spectacle both challenges through diffusion or concentration can be responded to in kind.

One can take the example of technology, under the concentrated spectacle the state sought to monopolize the means of technology, it sought through super computers and military research to harness the power of technology for its own end. Diffusion was here the process through which a monopoly was challenged and the means of technology became liberated from the state and harnessed by a multiplicity of actors: personal computers, hand phones and the internet all placed the power of technology in the hands of a multiplicity of individuals, leading to a break up of the monopoly of the state over communication, public opinion etc. And yet as the diffusion of technological renewal has not simply led to a liberation of technology from control, rather continuous diffusion has in a certain sense led to the production of its opposite: to new forms of control which thrive through diffusion, from internet surveillance to the proliferation of fake news. One cannot simply turn here to either advocate further diffusion or concentration one appears caught between the two. The same is true of the other factors listed by Debord, the intensification of capitalist production calls for new forms of state control, the increase in information leads to a corresponding increase in secrecy, falsification begets more falsification.

What this means in the end is that political opposition isn’t confronted by a singular enemy against which one can act – either the state or marketplace – but a complex interplay between opposing forces and tendencies which form the basis for a stable system of political rule. How to respond to this political rule requires us then to problematise and develop new tactics to respond to the key features of the integrated spectacle Debord notes: incessant technological renewal; fusion of State and economy; generalized secrecy, forgeries without reply; a perpetual present.

In Managerial Capitalism: Ownership, Management and the Coming New Mode of Production authors Gerard Duménil and Dominic Lévy seek to understand trends in global capitalism through the theorisation of a new mode of production contained within the label “managerial capitalism”. The book is an eclectic mix of materials: data on income trends, discussions of Marx's theory of history, discussions of the work of Althusser, E.P. Thompson and Foucault, as well as of the nature of class power and the potential for popular struggles today. What this produces is a provocative, if incomplete, argument about contemporary capitalism and the nature of class power which underpins it.

Central to Dumenil and Levy's argument is the contention that global capitalism today has witnessed the continued growth of a managerial class who now take precendence over capitalists in the functioning of the economic system. This trend is evidenced in part by the fall out from the 2008 financial crisis, the response to which amongst corporations was to cut capital dividends but maintain managerial salaries, a fact which for the authors only continues a longer running trend which has placed greater emphasis upon the management as against the ownership of capitalism.

Building upon ideas of managerial capitalism introduced by Alfred Chandler and John Galbraith who noted the importance in the era of state-monopoly capitalism of the separation of the ownership and control of capital and thus the growing importance of a managerial and technocratic class within corporations (what Galbraith would term the technostructure) which gained increasing control over how capital was employed and increasing autonomy from the owners of capital, notably shareholders. Whilst the advent of neoliberalism and the decline of ideas around state-monopoly capitalism suggested the decline of managerial power, as Dumenil and Levy argue, it has remained resilient through the process of restructuing. Whilst they don't discuss directly, their work has a great relevance to contemporary discussions around the new state capitalism, particularly in the global south.

Dumenil and Levy's discussion is however not as such with the theorists of managerial capitalism, as it is with Marx, and his failure to more develop the role of managers within capitalist production. Managers are present in Capital in the discussion on cooperation, an in the discussion on the separation of ownership and control in joint-stock companies in Volume 3, but the reality of managerial capitalism remained hidden from Marx who would eventually argue that the growing importance of managers in joint-stock companies would provide the basis for socialism, as the "the abolition of the capitalist mode of production within the capitalist mode of production". What Marx ignored, they would argue, is the way in which managers and bureaucracies whilst not a class – as understood from the perspective of the relations of production – continued to play a role within the capitalist mode of production, and not outside or against it.

To argue this Dumenil and Levy argue for a development of Marx's concept of mode of production, to take in two moments. The first the development of capitalist relations of production, through proletarianisation and stratification, producing class differentiation and the opposition between worker and capitalist. The second, and they argue the more overlooked, processes of socialisation which organise and manage human beings in their interaction with modes of production, consisting of all other relations which take place outside the division between capitalist and worker.  This sociality is defined by Dumenil and Levy as the process through which:

Human beings interact within sets of relationships in the realization of production and the conduct of general social processes, such as government or law, which are governed by mechanisms whose intelligibility oversteps the limits of class relations.

This suggests then two aspects to the functioning of capital, on the one hand the power dynamic between capitalist and worker of exploitation and surplus-extraction, and on the other hand a relationship of socialisation as the management and direction of individuals.

Returning to Marx’s theory of the workshop in his chapter on co-operation (Capital, Chapter 13) , they note two dynamics at work, the first the development of a distinction between the owners of capital and workers, producing an antagonistic division within the workshop, and the second  processes of co-ordination, supervision and administration, which work along more fine grained and diffuse lines to organise labour processes. The first defines individuals in reference to their relationship with the ownership of capital, the second based on their role within a managed and governed process. Dumenil and Levy are here reproducing the distinctions Michael Foucault would note when he would talk of the governmentality or governmentalisation of power, the distinction between governance and rule, and bring the problems of the administration and governance of populations within the analysis of mechanisms of power.

This returns Dumenil and Levy also to a long running debate within Marxism over the "relative autonomy" of the superstructure from the economic base and thus of the autonomy of relations of socialisation from relations of class. Whilst arguing that relations of socialisation always occur within the framework of class societies, and that there is no "factual disconnection" possible between class relations and relaitons of sociality, they talk rather of a two-sided historical process in which relations of sociality aren't contained within class relations but contain what they, following E.P. Thompson term their “own independent history and logic of evolution”. Thus quoting from Thompson's own Whigs and Hunters they echo Thompson's own discussions of law as not simply class relations translated into other terms, but as an institution mediating class relations, but with "its own characteristics" and “own independent history and logic of evolution”. As Thompson would himself argue, "The law may be rhetoric but it need not be empty rhetoric. Blackstone's Commentaries represent an exercise far more rigorous than could have come about from an apologists pen."

What Dumenil and Levy then argue for is a development of capitalism through a productive tension between class relations and relations of sociality, with the experience of life under capitalism being reducible to neither. For their part Dumenil and Levy wish to reproach traditional Marxism for a failure to understand the difference between the mode of production and processes of socialisation. Failure they argue to understand the difference has led to the development of a simplistic understanding of the relationship between the two with the assumption of socialisation in its broadest sense (social governance, social welfare, popular organisation) as being held back by processes of class domination, leading to the assumption that 1) capitalism, and capitalists, were opposed to a growth in socialisation, 2) the growth in socialisation would imply a growth in socialism as the growth in social welfare of a population. Rather they wish to argue, capitalist societies have been able to develop more complex relations between capitalist relations of production and processes of socialisation. This is of course to return to debates over the emergence of Fordism, the welfare state and Foucauldian biopolitics.

For Dumenil and Levy this process takes the form of a "hybrid mode of production" which represents a particular configuration of capitalism and socialisation, in which we can talk of neither class structures nor social structures independently, but always in relation to one another. This allows them also to redefine ideas around the politics of class struggle (Chapter 8) to understand the intersection between class heirarchies and social heirarchies which predate contemporary "managerial capitalism", for example pre-capitalist "capitalist feudalism", as well as hybrid revolutionary ideologies, which concern both class antagonisms, and social antagonisms, for example Chartism.

This focus on hybridity leads  Dumenil and Levy to conceptalise managerial capitalism as a “mode of production-socialisation”, defined by the growing centrality of managers in their relations to capitalists and workers.  The role played by managers and bureaucrats more generally is as "profit-rate maximisers" by this notion of profit-rate maximisation is centred on the kind of hybridity which managerial capitalism represents. On the one hand the maximise profit in the traditional form of increasing the returns on investment to capital, but on the other hand through the maximisation of the conditions in which the profitability of capitalism might be realised, a fact which concerns itself with the social fabric of a workplace or society, and the realisation of long term conditions within corporations and societies for capitalist production to be reproduced, a fact which addresses itself to the organisation of labour, education and other social relations.

The growth of managerialism then was linked to the crisis of capitalist profitability emerging towards the end of the 19^th century and the tendency of the profit rate to fall . The rise of managerialism is then seen as a means of resolving macroeconomic crises of capitalist profitability, through on the one hand the revolution in private management which sought to resolve the problem of profitability through the increase in administrative and organisational knowledge, and on the other hand through the growing role of the state in the capitalist process through economic coordination, economic planning and social development and welfare.

This fact they argue has also modified the class structure of modern capitalism. Whilst the early era of industrial capitalism was marked by a division between capitalist and worker, the managerial class has increasingly come to mediate relations between capitalist and worker, and in with the growth of mangerialism, the contradiction between manager and managed has become central, bringing in a whole series of social contradictions within the management of capitalism on what they term the "obediance-authority spectrum". On the one hand this places emphasis on the politics of wages and the politics of distribution more generally, as a conflict between managers and managed, on the otherhand it can be said to place emphasis on the techniques of government and the contradiction between govenor and governed.

The great worth of Dumenil and Levy's work is on the one hand developing the role that government, bureaucracy and management apparatuses play in the functioning of modern capitalism, a fact which can help explain modern day "hybrid" capitalist formations particularly in the global south, new forms of state capital (State capitalism 2.0) and the important role of governance to the contemporary development of capitalism. Works like Kalyan Sanyal's work on post-colonial capitalism, as the relationship between accumulation and governmentality, as well as broader work on governmental relations between corporate and non-corporate capital can be placed in conversation with Dumenil and Levy's work. As can the growing literature on government-linked companies or state owned enterprises and both the governmental and economic role they play in developing societies.

At the same time in highlighting the antagonism between the managerial class and the popular masses, they help to bring in a whole series of struggles around economic distribution, welfare, employment and austerity, within the frame of capitalism, as antagonisms not only within social relations, but with a "mode of production-socialisation" in which what is at stake is the governance and reproduction of capital itself.

The question that the book ends on is however not the struggle between the managerial class and the popular masses but intra-class struggles within the capitalist-managerial bloc which might make possible new alliances between the lower managerial strata, not directly aligned with capital, and the popular masses. Yet a more concrete investigation of this idea is missing. What they hint at is perhaps the kind of anti-neoliberal populism which has been emerging in Europe (Syriza, Podemos, Corbynism etc.) which in proposing older forms of social democracy against neoliberalism appeals to more diverse class groupings. This politics is driven for Dumenil and Levy by social struggles which attempt to increase the social development of societies, improve their lives over and above the dictates of class society – a politics of emancipation which will occur within the terms of governmentality and existing social relations, yet whilst opening up a trajectory for socialism. The progressive role of lower levels of the managerial class in these struggles is questionable but the focus on an anti-capitalist politics outside of class antagonisms but between the managers and managed, governors and governed offers to open up analyses of capitalist politics to new political forms and to make them intellegible within the development of capitalism in more complex ways. Insofar however as Dumenil and Levy focus only on the American and European experience, they leave out the experience of a wide range of societies in which these struggles are particularly evident, and in which struggles over contemporary capitalism are increasingly taking place.

To what extent can economic developments form the basis for political contradictions in Malaysia? Economic developments, notably around the cost of living have played an important role in political changes in the last few years. Yet to what extent does this tendency describe a more long-term political contradiction in the country, or to what extent does it just reflect short-term economic circumstances?

I would argue that economic developments have formed the basis for a growing political contradiction between two sectors of the economy, the modern corporate capitalist sector centred around manufacturing, modern services and corporatised agro-business, and on the other hand a mixed sector, non-corporate in character and made up of smaller non-capitalist enterprises, subsistence businesses, centred around medium-sized enterprises and micro-enterprises, with lower levels of productivity and remuneration.

This process is part of a longer trend in Malaysia's political economy which in the years after the Asian Financial Crisis saw a weaker trend of modernising economic growth – which in the decades preceding the crisis had uplifted large sections of the population. The table below shows the way in which occupations grew from 1957 onwards, moving the country from an agricultural one, towards significant growth in manufacturing and services.

Development of occupation categories over time 1957-2000

In this process the country experienced high levels of modernisation with more workers moving into the modern corporate sector and a new and sizeable middle-class formed out of these processes, emerging as an important political force.

After the 2000s the country experienced slower levels of FDI, lower rates of growth, lower levels of wage growth, and a decline in the manufacturing sector, towards a growth in services which was however concentrated in traditional rather than modern services.

In this period the World Bank would divide Malaysian households into four categories, middle and high income, aspirational, vulnerable and poor. The largest and fastest growing group it would note were aspirational households who were around the median income but were struggling to enter into the middle-class, defined in terms of income security and lifestyle. Meanwhile the vulnerable group defined those who had been lifted out of poverty but who risked falling back into poverty. In 2004 it assessed 32.2% of households as aspirational and 26.5% as vulnerable, by 2009 this was 38.7% and 24.4% respectively, and by 2014 the aspirational group formed 51.2% of the population, with the vulnerable 14.8%.

Distribution of income groups 2004-2014

This reality was being driven by broader macroeconomic trends. The onset of deindustrialisation was moving labour towards the service sector, and particularly towards the traditional service sector in areas such as retail and wholesale and food and beverage, stagnating growth in modern manufacturing and modern services and growing sectors which were less technologically advanced, more dependent on low-skilled labour and offer lower wage remuneration.

Percentages of high-and-medium tech manufacturing and modern services in the economy

Linked to this was the fact that whilst the the country experienced in this period a higher labour share of income, this was driven by growth in low-technology, low-productivity and low-remuneration work in sectors such as wholesale and retail trade, food, beverage and accommodation and construction. As Bank Negara would note:

Specifically, between 2010 and 2017, the share of income accounted for by low- and mid-skilled workers has increased due to stronger expansion and employment growth in the wholesale and retail trade, food, beverage and accommodation as well as construction industries. While faster growth in these labour-intensive industries has contributed towards improvements in the headline labour income share, these industries continue to provide lower wages negating ongoing efforts to achieve the “high-income nation” status.

Important to this was the divergence between GDP growth and wage growth in these sectors, with big divergences in the construction and wholesale retail and food and accommodation sectors, suggesting high levels of labour exploitation in these sectors, with wage growth diverging from economic demand for these services.[1]

Sectoral GDP growth and median wage levels (2011-2017)

This is evidenced by the fact that even when accounting for lower levels of productivity between Malaysian workers and workers in other advanced economies, as a portion of productivity Malaysian workers were still paid less than workers in other advanced economies. This is found in all economic sectors, but was again particularly prevalent in low-skill, low-technology sectors such as wholesale and retail trade, food and beverage and accommodation industries, industries which form 19% of economic activity and 27% of total employment. Bank Negara would argue that this explained by the presence of high levels of foreign workers in these sectors, a lack of bargaining power but also because these sectors are labour intensive and low-skilled.

This fact would be further explained by the way in which these low-technology, low-productivity sectors are particularly dominated by small enterprises and micro-enterprises, particularly found in traditional services, which have a low capacity for technological innovation, which are highly labour intensive and are often subsistence oriented. Again sectors like food and beverage and hospitality are highly dominated by small and micro enterprises and during this period SMEs and micro-enterprises were playing an increasingly important role in the economy. As has been argued, this importance of micro-enterprises in the economy could also impact better quality economic growth:

The other issue with the prevalence of Malaysian SMEs and micro-enterprises in low-productivity economic activities is that both the business owners and employees of these firms may find it difficult to increase their earning power. This then leads to slower growth in domestic demand, which has an impact not only on the short-term indicators of the Malaysian economy, such as private consumption but also on the structure of the economy.

This fact was also reflected in the trajectory of the skill make-up of the economy over the period. Thus in the period between 2001 to 2017, low-skilled jobs increased from 10.6-13.6% of total jobs, whilst semi-skilled jobs declined from 65.0% to 59.2% in the same period. This has suggested a hollowing of semi-skilled jobs and the onset of labour market polarisation between high and low skilled jobs, a fact attributable both to automisation, but also the structure of the economy itself, polarising between corporate and non-corporate capitalist sectors.

Distribution of occupations by skill 2001-2017

This divide in terms of skill was also important in terms of those who lived above or below Bank Negara's calculation of the living wage (defined in terms not only of neccesities [food and shelter] but also in terms of  being able to “meaningfully participate in society, the opportunity for personal and family development, and freedom from severe financial stress”). Bank Negara found that in a city such as Kuala Lumpur, 27% of families were living below the standard of a living wage. Of this group, low-skilled and semi-skilled workers made up the vast majority and as was noted, this division has strong overlaps with levels of education.

Living wage by skill group

This process suggests in the long terms the development of two forms of polarisation in the economy:

• Firstly a polarisation between the advanced corporate capitalist and non-corporate capitalist sectors which has seemingly been developing since the early 2000s. Thus whilst Malaysia's economic growth in the 1980s and 1990s was emphasising modern manufacturing and modern services and was reducing the importance of the non-corporate capitalist sector, the restructuring of growth since 2000 seems to have reversed this trend, and sugggests that the non-corporate capitalist sector has come to play a much more important role in the economy, with lower-productivity, labour intensive, low-technological work in manufacturing and traditional services, particularly within small and micro-enterprises playing a much more signficant role, or picking up the slack that the advanced corporate sector hasn't been filling.
• Secondly a polarisation between low-skilled workers in the non-corporate capitalist sector who live below a realistic understanding of the poverty line as the living wage, and those in the corporate capitalist sector and high-skilled workers who have greater opportunity for social mobility. If these dynamics are correct then we could talk of a growing class division which doesn't just take into account typical class identifiers but which will take into account education, skill level, sectors worked in, work in corporations or small or micro enterprises etc.

Politically in Malaysia this division could be represented in these terms:

This process has played out in the politics of the B40. We know the B40 are particularly centred in lower-skilled, lower-productivity sectors of the economy, in SMEs and traditional services and small-holder agriculture etc. The B40 increasingly became an increasingly important group both because of higher levels of electoral competition but also because the possibility of economic growth continuing to uplift such groups became problematic. Increasingly the state had to step in to contribute to B40 incomes through transfers such as BR1M which from 2009 onwards increasingly formed the most significant contributor to income growth amongst the B40, with wages and self-employment continuously declining as shares of income.

Slow wage growth linked then to the longer term structural changes in the economy mixed together with rising prices to produce levels of political disaffection which influenced a turn of many B40 voters against the BN governmnt. The extent to which a rising cost of living was brought about by this polarisation of the economy would also be interesting to look into. The cost of living effects different income levels in different ways because of different consumption habits across income groups, but it could also be interesting to understand the rising cost of living in terms of divergences between corporate and non-corporate capital in Malaysia. This would be complex to go into but particular goods could be looked at to see the ways in which rising prices in the corporate capitalist sector have effected rising prices for those in the non-corporate sector. See for example the story of Sekinchan fishermen, fish being a good seeing high price increases, who noted the rising costs of diesel, and costs of boat repair and nets were pushing up fish prices. To what extent was this brought about by rising prices in the corporate sector or through the corporatisation of the supply chain thus increasing prices? The same would likely be true of food goods, most of which is controlled by corporate capital, or whose inputs come from that sphere. At the same time we know that prices were increased by GST, yet to what extent can the implementation of GST be understood as part of this divide? In terms, for example, of the way in which limited ability to further tax corporate incomes and the need by the state to maintain expenditure for welfare and development purposes required the state to increase taxes on the non-corporate sector also, which furthered economic imbalances.

Such an approach might help to make more evident the way in which developing economic contradictions began to turn into political contradictions in the country, with economic polarisation creating the basis for a stronger conflict of interests between the corporate capitalist and non-corporate capitalist sectors, and thus politicising elements of the B40 against the establishment forces. This didn't produce a political conflict with firm frontiers or ideas of class or group identities centred around such economic contradictions, but could form the basis for such identities in years to come.  

[1] As Jan Lust has argued in the case of Peru, this divergence could be understood in terms of super-exploitation in low-income, low-productivity sectors yet is only really meaningful if the relationships between these sectors and the modern corporate capitalist sector is understood. The super-exploitation doesn't only occur within these sectors, but because the corporate capitalist sector is unable to provide jobs for workers in these sectors, producing a reserve army of labour, lowering wages and reducing incentives for innovation in low-skill sectors, and producing a dependency between the corporate capitalist sector, and cheap services in the non-corporate capitalist sector.

The work of Jan Lust on Peruvian capitalism and, in particular, the development in the Neoliberal era of what he terms a "capitalist subsistence economy" offers interesting insights into contemporary peripheral capitalist formations, as well as the possibility for comparative research on the development of subsistence economies and subsistence sectors outside of the Peruvian case.

Lust's Capitalism, Class and Revolution in Peru, 1980–2016 begins with an important contradiction of contemporary Peruvian politics, whilst elites on both the right and social-democratic left have been fractured and weakened by corruption scandals and elite conflict the socialist left has not been able to capitalise on this weakness and to mobilise people onto the streets, against elites, to seize power.

Important for Lust has been the inability of the Left in Peru to react to the changing composition of its electoral base with the advent of Neoliberal capitalism in the 1980s. Central to this is an inability of the Left to understand the evolution of class structures in Peru and the way in which these changes have limited the traditional methods of socialist mobilisation.

The key to this for Lust lies in the dynamics of economic crisis which between 1985 and 1990 laid the basis for Fujimori's rise to power in 1990 and the beginnings of neoliberalism in Peru. Central to this was the role of economic crisis in eroding existing class-based solidarities through a growing informalisation of labour, through unemployment, the growth of subcontracting and labour casualisation – central to which was the weakening of the trade unions.

This process is built for Lust on a broader understanding of the dynamics of capitalism and class within Peruvian capitalism. A primary export economy, dependent upon external capital Peruvian capitalism has maintained its place within the global division of labour as a primary commodity exporter, with limited development of a strong domestic bourgeoisie or a domestic industrial base. This has produced for Lust a significant division between the export-oriented sector, and the sector serving the domestic market, a divison between major international corporations, and domestic "micro-enterprises" which play a significant role in Peruvian capitalism. This division has been exacerbated by neoliberalisation. On the one hand Lust notes declining manufacturing between 1980 and 2015 (from 17.7 to 13.5% of GDP, mirroring other deindustrialising developing states) as well as a growth of micro-enterprises in the economy in the same period, becoming he argues the most important providers of employment in the economy.

This role of micro-companies is for Lust fundamental to the nature of Peru's model of development, externally dependent and export-oriented, capitalism in Peru hasn't produced the kind of domestic revolution which has been able to include a significant totality of the Peruvian population within its operations. Peruvian capitalism is fundamentally a capitalism which services markets of the global north, and as such isn't directly able to produce levels of employment and prosperity for the majority of Peruvian workers, and the Peruvian economy remains fundamentally reliant then upon micro-enterprises which are largely non-capitalist in character, a fact exacerbated by the crisis of profitability in the 1970s. Alongside then the decline of manufacturing, this trend is linked to the growth of the services sector, particularly low-skill, traditional services which come to provide both low-wage employment and low-skill services towards the reproduction of labour (food, basic goods, transportation healthcare, childcare etc.).

The conversion of Peru in an economy of micro companies finds its origin in the country’s role in the international division of labor. As its main function is to provide the raw materials for the enlarged reproduction of capitalism abroad, this means that a large number of individuals in the working age are in fact superfluous. The mining sector, the principal provider of the required raw materials, employs only a very small part of the EAP.

Although the country’s conversion into an economy of micro-business undertakings is structurally rooted in the international division of labor, the conversion itself is principally the consequence of the economic crises in the 1980s, the restructuring of the companies in the 1980s and 1990s, and the implementation of neoliberalism in the 1990s. The crises reduced employment opportunities in big companies and diminished real income. Salaries and wages were not sufficient anymore for the reproduction of labor-power and forced individuals to set up their own (micro) companies. Micro companies serve as a safety net for all those individuals who have not been able to find adequate employment.

In noting this Lust notes a distinction that others such as Partha Chatterjee and Kalyan Sanyal have argued for in the Indian context, a distinction between capital-as-accumulation and capital-as-governance of labour. For Sanyal this is a distinction between capital as a system of accumulation, and capital as a system of govenmentality – governing the subjects under it. For Chatterjee it is the distinction between the state and civil society as the domain of corporate capital, and the domain of political society, as the domain of non-corporate capital. Central to both is a split between capitalism's ability to reproduce profitability and its ability to reproduce the conditions for human existence, tendencies which they argue have significantly diverged under late capitalism, reproducing ideas of a dual economy between capitalist and non-capitalist sectors, split between two tendencies, corporate capitalism with its tendency towards increasing profitability and expansion of capital and non-corporate capital with its subsistence ethic.

In Peru Lust is also arguing for the presence of a dual economy, but one in his terms divided between the advanced capitalist sector and the capitalist subsistence economy. Whilst the advanced sector forms the sector of modern corporate capital, the capitalist subsistence sector is on the other hand marked by low levels of productivity and remuneration, and by the proliferation of micro-enterprises and forms of self-employment and own account work in which individuals sustain themselves outside of the advanced capitalist sector. As then in the thought of Chatterjee and Sanyal, central to the existence of the capitalist subsistence economy is the problem of the reserve army of labour.

Businesses in the CSE function as a safety net for all those individuals that have not been able to find employment in the advanced economy. In Peru, it might be argued that the reserve army of labor not only encompasses the unemployed and the underemployed, but, in fact, all those individuals that are employed in the CSE. Palma (1988, 37) explains that countries at the periphery of the world capitalist system have a permanent surplus of workers that does not have other possibilities than to start small businesses. These business undertakings are characterized by a scarcity of capital and a high level of work intensity.

Thus whilst both sectors of the economy are money-based, market-oriented and profit-driven they remain governed by different logics, the advanced sector is driven by the expansion of accumulation of capital and the maximisation of the profit rate, the subsistence sector isn't driven by expansion nor the same levels of profit maximisation, but rather the simple reproduction of labour power.

The CSE is similar to what has commonly been called a subsistence economy in the sense that the economic surplus is minimal and the economic activities employed are meant for the reproduction of survival, i.e., the companies in the CSE do no tend to reproduce themselves at enlarged scale. Companies in the CSE are businesses that, in general, do not invest in what is called human capital or in technological development (the production of absolute surplus value dominates over the production of relative surplus value). Not only the quantity of surplus value appropriated seems to be too low to expand constant capital, but also low wage costs do not “stimulate” these businesses to replace variable capital for constant capital. As can be expected, FDI is not directed toward companies in the CSE.

As against however the old model of dual economy producing a division between the modern and traditional sectors Lust highlights the relationship of dependence between the advanced and subsistence sectors. In particular the way in which the presence of a subsistence sector allows the advanced sector to externalise the costs of raw inputs and of the reproduction of labour through cheaper commodity prices and cheaper costs of basic goods, a fact which allows the advanced sector to hold down wages and not provide a living wage because workers can live cheaply off of the subsistence sector and find additional work there. This relationship is understood by Lust as one of  super-exploitation, in which workers "receive a remuneration that appears not to be sufficient to reproduce their labor-power". This definition of super-exploitation refers not to a definition of exploitation within the subsistence sector, and therefore between the owners of microenterprises and employers, but between the corporations within the advanced sector dependent upon low-wages in the subsistence sector, and workers of the subsistence sector. This tendency produces competition within the subsistence sector for survival:

In the case of Peru, super-exploitation is a reality for the majority of its working population because of (i) the weakness of the labor movement (ii) the enormous number of low skilled employees that compete with each other for small temporary jobs; and (iii) the ferociousness of price competition between the huge amount of micro-businesses. In addition, although the super-exploited individuals produce for “their” own market and for the market of the advanced economy, this does not impede the companies to pay wages below the costs of reproduction. The individual negative effect of super-exploitation, wages and salaries that are too low to reproduce one’s own labor-power, is “solved” by the credit system and by sharing one’s household with other individuals, among other “measures”.

This process has also come then to alter the class structure of the Peruvian economy. From the old division between the middle class, divided itself between modern and traditional, the industrial proletariat and the rural peasantry, the neoliberalisation of the 1990s this has seen the development of new class fractions. Firstly an intermediate class containing sections of the middle-class but also elements of the self-employed, own account workers, owners of micro-enterprises and elements also of the urban semi-proletariat including informal workers, street vendors etc. At the same time the proletariat has increasingly seen a rise in semi-proletarianised workers, casual workers and own account workers, as well as workers working multiple jobs, working in both traditionally proletarianised sectors as well as in self-employed or own account work (putting-out work etc.). The same has occured amongst the peasantry in which increased urban migration has seen an increasing mix of agricultural and own account work through processes of semi-proletarianisation alongside traditional forms of subsistence (market-oriented) production.

Such transformations in turn have come to transform the nature of class struggle in the country. The traditional methods for the Peruvian Left were the mobilisation of proletarianised labour, and peasant mobilisation against the exploitation of landlords and struggles over land ownership, yet the weakening of the labour movement through economic crisis, and its fragmentation through the development of a growing capitalist subsistence sector  allowed for the state to pursue a class struggle from above, repressing organised labour and rural movements and increasing then the power of corporate capital and the advanced sector. Whilst then Lust notes the advanced elements of the working class struggle are in those advanced sectors such as mining and manufacturing, where the contradiction between valorisation and labour is most evident, the organisation amongst the more varied elements of the subsistence sector, and intermediate and semi-proletarian groups, in which such a contradiction is less evident and mediated by a series of other factors, has been non-existent on the Left.

As Lust then notes, the failure of the Left in Peru has been to live up to this reality, which has seen it tend towards a more social-democratic elite-led movement from above, than a socialist movement from below. Central to this has been the failure of the Left to build its politics on an understanding of the structure of Peruvian capitalism. "The socialist Left forgot that a thorough understanding of social reality is a precondition for changing it."

Lust's study provides however the basic markers for this kind of thinking. In highlighting the role of low-skill, low-remuneration micro-enterprises based on relations of super-exploitation between advanced and subsistence sectors, and centred around the reproduction of labour through employment and cheap commodity production, he is describing whole economic sectors found all across the global south. These sectors, which are perhaps overlooked by economists and social scientists, have increasingly become important in employment and economic production across the global south and will play then not only an increasingly important economic role but also a political one.

"Some Aspects of the Southern Question" was an unfinished essay by Antonio Gramsci, the last of his writings before incarceration in 1926. Whilst Gramsci considered it unfinished, it forms nevertheless one of his most developed accounts of Italian political dynamics in the 1920s, taking in the workers movement and the peasantry, as well as questions of underdevelopment, finance capitalism, colonialism and semi-colonialism, racism and hegemony. It is for that reason that the essay has served as a model for the analysis of capitalism and class in colonial and semi-colonial countries, particularly through Subaltern Studies.

The central question of "Some Aspects" is the way in which the Italian proletariat of the North can attain hegemony through a series of class alliances with the majority of the Italian working population against the Italian state. This entails for Gramsci the need to deal with the peasant question, but the peasant question is an extension of the Southern Question – a class distinction which is also a territorial/regional distinction. For the Italian proletariat to form a class alliance with the peasantry then, they have to resolve not only the peasant question but also the Southern Question, and incorporate these solutions into their programme.

Beyond the peasant question, however, the nature of the Southern Question threw up more obstacles against the unity of the masses. The division between North and South wasn't simply a territorial division but also a division of coloniser and colonised, "The Northern bourgeoisie has subjugated the South of Italy and the Islands, and reduced them to exploitable colonies", enslaved by the "the banks and the parasitic industry of the North". This colonial relation was also the basis for a process of "divide and rule" on the part of the Italian bourgeoisie. It threw up what might be termed "the myth of the lazy native":

It is well known what kind of ideology has been disseminated in myriad ways among the masses in the North, by the propagandists of the bourgeoisie: the South is the ball and chain which prevents the social development of Italy from progressing more rapidly; the Southerners are biologically inferior beings, semi- barbarians or total barbarians, by natural destiny; if the South is backward, the fault does not lie with the capitalist system or with any other historical cause, but with Nature, which has made the Southerners lazy, incapable, criminal and barbaric - only tempering this harsh fate with the purely individual explosion of a few great geniuses, like isolated palm-trees in an arid and barren desert.

This myth as Gramsci notes hadn't only perpetuated itself in bourgeois circles, but also amongst the Italian proletariat of the North, forming the basis for a proletarian chauvinism or egoism which divided them from the non-proletarian masses – a fact which has to be overcome for the proletariat to attain political hegemony.

The proletariat, in order to become capable as a class of governing, must strip itself of every residue of corporatism, every syndicalist prejudice and incrustation. What does this mean? That, in addition to the need to overcome the distinctions which exist between one trade and another, it is necessary - in order to win the trust and consent of the peasants and of some semiproletarian urban categories - to overcome certain prejudices and conquer certain forms of egoism which can and do subsist within the working class as such, even when craft particularism has disappeared. The metalworker, the joiner, the building-worker, etc., must not only think as proletarians, and no longer as metal-worker, joiner, building-worker, etc.; they must also take a further step. They must think as workers who are members of a class which aims to lead the peasants and intellectuals. Of a class which can win and build socialism only if it is aided and followed by the great majority of these social strata. If this is not achieved, the proletariat does not become the leading class; and these strata (which in Italy represent the majority of the population), remaining under bourgeois leadership, enable the State to resist the proletarian assault and wear it down.

Nevertheless as Gramsci notes, the dynamics in the South also work to prevent the realisation of proletarian hegemony in Italy. The South is characterised as "a great social disintegration" and the peasantry as having "no cohesion among themselves" and thus "incapable of giving a centralized expression to their aspirations and needs". The important class emerges then as the intellectual strata of the South, defined particularly by the role of bureaucrats – not the technical advisers of the modern industrial state, but the old intellectuals, the intermediaries between the peasantry and the central state.

Democratic in its peasant face; reactionary in the face turned towards the big landowner and the government: politicking, corrupt and faithless. One could not understand the traditional cast of the Southern political parties, if one did not take the characteristics of this social stratum into account.

This intellectual class emerges for Gramsci from the rural bourgeois:

the petty and medium landowner who is not a peasant, who does not work the land, who would be ashamed to be a farmer, but who wants to extract from the little land he has - leased out either for rent or on a simple share-cropping basis - the wherewithal to live fittingly; the wherewithal to send his sons to a university or seminary; and the wherewithal to provide dowries for his daughters, who must marry officers or civil functionaries of the State

Included in this class for Gramsci is the clergy who, beyond their spiritual function, perform roles as land administrators and money lenders. And form then alongside the bureaucrats the means through which the Southern peasant is tied to the landlord.

As Gramsci goes on to argue this intellectual class has been central to the process of the production of a "national" frame in Italy. Divided between North and South and peasant and worker, it has been this intellectual bureaucratic class, through the ideas of Croce, providing a particularly Southern form of Italian reformation which could form then a "national" alliance with the national and European culture of the Northern bourgeoisie.

Against this process Gramsci describes another process, defined by the figure of Piero Gobetti, the radical liberal journalist, who breaking from this tradition, provided a link between the proletariat of the North and intellectuals of the South who were anti-capitalist (though not communist) in outlook and who problematised the Southern Question along new lines – providing a means then for the proletariat to better incorporate a new approach to the Southern Question, and providing the proletariat, who had no intellectual class of their own, with intellectuals who promoted their programme. Beyond then a simple alliance between proletariat and peasantry, the role of the intellectuals mattered.

The alliance between proletariat and peasant masses requires this formation. It is all the more required by the alliance between proletariat and peasant masses in the South. The proletariat will destroy the Southern agrarian bloc insofar as it succeeds, through its party, in organizing increasingly significant masses of poor peasants into autonomous and independent formations. But its greater or lesser success in this necessary task will also depend upon its ability to break up the intellectual bloc that is the flexible, but extremely resistant, armour of the agrarian bloc. The proletariat was helped towards the accomplishment of this task by Piero Gobetti, and we think that the dead man’s friends will continue, even without his leadership, the work he undertook. This is gigantic and difficult, but precisely worthy of every sacrifice (even that of life, as in Gobetti’s case) on the part of those intellectuals (and there are many of them, more than is believed) - from North and South - who have understood that only two social forces are essentially national and bearers of the future: the proletariat and the peasants.

The Southern Question in Malaya

The problem of understanding the class basis of post-War Malayan politics has been a task made problematic by Malaya's relatively unique economic structure, its racialised division of labour, and its overlapping ethnic and class-based categories – a fact which marked the writings of the Malayan Left in the period. Whilst the standard theory has understood the class struggle as divided between an alliance consisting of British capital, local (Chinese and Indian capital) and the Malay aristocratic-bureaucratic class against an alliance of Chinese and Indian workers and the Malay peasantry, it has regularly been acknowledged that these coalitions contain as many forces for disunity as unity.

On the post-War Malayan Left this fact was reflected in a shift in discourse from early assumptions around the unity of races and classes in Malaya against foreign capital, towards a stronger recognition of the forces of disunity between workers and peasants, which came to require a reassessment of the Malayan situation along lines not dissimilar to Gramsci's understanding of Italian politics in "Some Aspects of the Southern Question". It problematised the way in which British capital and colonial domination divided the workers and peasants, it reassessed racial divisions between the workers and peasants (and their relation to cultural, linguistic and religious divisions), and sought to understand the ways in which Malay elites were able to capture the Malay peasantry.

Central to this was reassessment was the development of a concern with chauvinism on the Left, a factor related both to racial divisions between workers and peasants, but also differences in levels of political development, a fact which referred back to the nature of uneven economic development. Already in the 1930s Ho Chi Minh visiting Malaya had noted the way in which the MCP remained Chinese-centric and looked down upon the native Malays, in a manner which reproduced colonial ideas of Malayness:

They thought that being Chinese, they must work only for China, and only with the Chinese. They looked upon the natives as inferior and unnecessary people. There were no contacts, no relations between the Chinese members and the native masses. The consequences of that exclusiveness are that when they need the cooperation of the natives they find no one or find only mediocre elements.

Whilst in the next decade the MCP stepped up their attempts to make contacts amongst the Malays, this was principally undertaken through an idea of the equality of all races, premised itself upon an idea of colonialism as exploiting equally all races, which sought to mobilise the Malay peasantry alongside Chinese and Indian workers, under the banner of anti-colonial and anti-capitalist struggle. Yet this line continuously failed to mobilise significant sections of the Malay peasantry.

By the 1950s the approach of the Malayan Left reflected far more Gramsci's own concerns regarding proletarian hegemony in socialist struggle. Recognising the ways in which the Malay peasantry had been both economically and culturally marginalised under British rule and the way in which the division between the workers and peasants was not only a class distinction but also an ethnic, linguistic, cultural and religious distinction. The theory of the united front of peasants and workers developed by the Socialist Front towards the end of the 1950s took seriously the problem of the need for the workers to strip themselves of corporatist ideas and chauvinism and egoism (both in terms of class and ethnicity), and to think of themselves not only as a proletarian class, but as a political class capable of leading the peasants and intellectuals of other races and religions, a fact reflected in the focus given to the Malay language and the relationship between socialism and Islam in their early policy statement "Towards a New Malaya". This was also reflected in their focus given to Marhaenism and peasant ideology more generally.

In doing so they argued that what was central to socialist struggle in Malaya was the need for the more advanced classes to privilege and incorporate the cultural and class perspectives of those less advanced classes – notably the Malay peasantry. And therefore what they were really reflecting upon was Gramsci's understanding of hegemony outlined in "Some Aspects" – the production of national leadership by casting off corporate class interests and incorporating sub-altern perspectives.

Yet whilst the Malayan Left in the period was reflecting on themes of class and hegemony in the context of uneven economic and cultural development, what was less discussed was the role played by "intellectuals" in this class struggle.  The focus given to such a group by Gramsci, and their role in leading the peasantry in the Italian South, might however provide a useful frame to understand the nature of leadership over the Malay peasantry in the post-War period.

The radical intellectuals were those in the Malayan context who emerged with the Malay Nationalist Party, radical journalists, writers and religious clerics who espoused a mixture of liberal, nationalist and Islamist thought and were not communists but in alliance with the socialism of the workers movement and sought to link up that movement with the Malay peasantry. Through the AMCJA-PUTERA and the Socialist Front they were therefore part of an attempt to unite Malay radical intellectuals with the Malayan proletariat, and thus in Gramsci's terms to "break up the intellectual bloc that is the flexible, but extremely resistant, armour of the agrarian bloc". This was evident in the mixture of socialism, nationalism and Islamism espoused by figures such as Burhanuddin Al-Helmy and the Marhaen socialism of Boestamam and the Parti Rakyat which both helped link the Malay peasantry to the workers movement, and revise the understanding of the workers movement on the Malay question.

Yet the very nature of the relationship between the intellectual bloc and the agrarian bloc and the question of whether or not this intellectual bloc played the kind of role  of shoring up the agrarian bloc Gramsci outlines in his essay has been less explored in the Malayan context. To explore this it would be necessary to look towards the two groups outlined by Gramsci the government bureaucrats and religious leaders .

As in the Italian South these were two groups who played important roles in rural Malaya, with government bureaucrats, particularly teachers, playing important roles in rural areas both as land owners, educators and in village politics, playing both a cultural and intellectual role at the village level. This process is evident in the accounts of anthropologists of the Malay peasantry such as Syed Husin Ali or Clive Kessler, who highlight the intellectual roles played by teachers in rural Malaya, both as a functional role through the distribution of knowledge and through their connections with local towns, as well as a cultural role in discussing politics and national issues with villagers. As such accounts show this role of intellectuals in the formation of hegemony could function both to reinforce support for the Alliance government of the period, as well in studies such as Kesller's in Kelantan, to intellectually contest support for the Alliance government and provide alternative bases for leadership amongst the peasantry, both religious and secular. Similar roles were also evident in the formation of Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka and the role played by intellectuals, both radicals and traditionalists in the construction of a Malayan nation-state.

Returning to Gramsci's essay can lead us however to focus on the more dynamic process through which these groups were incorporated within nationalist ideology and the neo-colonial state, as well as the ways in which these groups absorbed and reproduced what Gramsci would see a elements of modern bourgeois ideology, producing a tension which helped shaped nationalist politics in Malaya. One such event would be the debates on the national language and the political role played by Malay teachers in pushing the Alliance government in the immediate period after Independence towards a stronger support for Malay language education, a debate which opened up splits between Malay teachers and political elites, but which also was part of significant debates on the Malayan Left over the cultural basis of a Malayan nation, and which was central to the question of hegemony on the Left in this period.

This dynamic outlined by Gramsci can then help to explain not only the role of intellectuals in forming the basis for a politics of proletarian hegemony as well as in incorporating the peasantry into the post-colonial nation-state, but also more generally the central role played by the bureaucracy, including the religious bureaucracy, in post-colonial state formation in Malaya – important both to the incorporation of the peasantry and the shoring up of the agrarian bloc, preventing therefore the kind of national-capitalist revolution which would overcome the uneven structure of Malayan capitalism.

Cihan Tugal's Passive Revolution: Absorbing the Islamic Challenge to Capitalism is now over a decade old, published before the attempted coup d'etat in 2016, yet it still provides important insights into the relationship between neoliberal capitalism, Islamic politics and elite rule, which can provide a way to think of similar processes in other Islamic countries.

The book is centred around an attempt to understand the way in which political forces which were Islamist, anti-capitalist and anti-Western in orientation were brought within the fold of moderate Islam, neoliberal capitalism and moderate foreign policy:

Today, the effective leaders of moderate Islam are not those who have always been liberal Muslims, but they are those who have fought against neoliberalism, secularism, and U.S. hegemony for decades, only to deliver their experiences to the service of their past enemies in the end.

The result has been a model of Islamic Liberalism popular around the Muslim and Non-Muslim world, amongst leaders such as Anwar Ibrahim –  as a form of government which marries economic development with moderate democratic, Islamic government.

Central to this process has been the division between the statist-secularist hegemony of the Ataturkists and the Islamist challenge to this hegemony. This division is also for Tugal a division between a corporatist economic model and popular discontent with that model from small businessmen and the urban and rural poor. This dynamic produced both a series of contests within the dominant power bloc, by populist leaders from the centre right of the bloc mobilising excluded groups against the statist-secularist consensus, as well as more significantly a counter-hegemonic political strategy led by political Islamists.

As the economic crisis of the 1970s began to weaken the power of the corporatist consensus and necessitate economic restructuring Tugal argues for the emergence of an organic crisis, which provided new openings for Islamist politicians to mobilise political disaffection against elite consensus – yet political Islam was regularly integrated within the governing coalition. The tension between corporatist and Islamist forms would emerge then as a tension between an established ruling bloc, centred around elite-led coalition building, and attempts by Islamists to build an Islamist mass-based party, a process which was disrupted in 1997 by military intervention.

The transformation of this tension occured with the formation of the AKP. The AKP's strategy spoke both to the counter-hegemonic elements of the opposition bloc, as well as disaffected elements within the existing power bloc, merchants, businessmen, professionals, religious intellectuals, as well as the "neoliberal and internationally oriented sectors who once constituted the subordinate sectors of the bloc". This was achieved by a series of transformations which made political Islamism more acceptable to mainstream forces. The AKP affected a professionalisaiton of politics within the opposition bloc, they weakened the culture war by differentiating themselves from the Islamists of the past, in foreign policy they were willing to assume more pro-Western stances. But central for Tugal was the role of the party in promoting neoliberal economic reforms, which endeared them to large sections of the business elite. What this affected for Tugal was a process through which a new power bloc was formed in Turkey through the appropriation of elements of the old power bloc, a new alliance with popular forces, mediated by a process of revolution and restoration which reproduced many of the conditions of the earlier structure of power under changed circumstances.

Yet how did this elite strategy mobilise the masses? Central to this was the way in which the AKP mobilised Islamisation. Islamisation of everyday life was a phenomenon Tugal notes from the 1980s onwards yet the AKP which, in electoral terms, benefitted from this tendency once in power didn't accentuate Islamisation but pursued a dual strategy. This strategy Tugal terms as "Islamization of top institutions, de-islamization of everyday life", was a process through which the earlier elite-based secular consensus in the media, and political institutions was (relatively) Islamised, and in which elites were also Islamised (neutralising divisions between corporatist insiders and the rest) whilst the role of Islam in everyday life and in the economy was limited, in a process which preached transformation from above to prevent transformation below.

Central to this process was the way in which Islamisation came not to challenge existing social relations, but to naturalise and justify them, in particular to naturalise capitalist relations, a process tied up with the neoliberalisation of Turkish society.

A few years ago, Islamist politicians used to say "we are both against capitalism and communism," arguing that the Islamic economy would take the best of both systems but be fundamentally different from both. Now politicians said their "understanding of the economy includes some aspects of capitalism, but no elements of communism," which was against their program. One of the crucial capitalistic elements they pointed out was "getting rid of the memur [civil servant] type, who has one eye on the clock and always wants to quit work when the clock strikes five. Even in the public sector, people will work with contracts rather than having tenure as memur." Civil servants in Turkey started to lose status and economic power with the neoliberalization of the 1980s. Under Turgut Ozal's rule, "memur" became a bad word with connotations like laziness and corruption. For AKP activists, one of the defining elements of economic reform was a wholesale attack on memurs, which was interrupted after the death of the Motherland Party's Ozal. In other words, the AKP's project was liquidating anybody who did not conform to the work ethic through administrative reform.

Central to this was the role of Islam in naturalising capitalism. The workings of the market was "sacralized", seen as part of the divine order. The sermons of clerics promoted a work ethic and Islamic morality was increasingly tied to the morality of the work place. It was now acceptable for women to find meaning in the world of work instead of in the family, and work itself became an end for Muslims, social mobility and getting ahead in careers emerged as an important social value, whilst a culture of individualism grew, among women as among men. As Tugal notes, amongst workers the rise of the AKP also altered perceptions of capitalism. Whilst previous grievances such as unemployment or family planning were perceieved as attacks on workers from outside, from the state and capitalists, gradually became accepted as the normal working of things and what was required was to allow a government they now viewed as legitimate, and as their government do what it could.

Traditional religion's emphasis on patience was now disarticulated from the "Islamic economy" project and articulated to neoliberalism. Workers still talked frequently of patience in 2006, but now they patiently accepted the reigning economic order, rather than patiently and quietly rejecting it like in 2001.

The result of this process of revolutionising social relaitons above and naturalising social relations below was a project of passive revolution which Tugal would outline in the following terms:

As a result of the AKP's passive revolution, political society and civil society-which had fallen out of sync at the end of the 1990s-were reintegrated. Religious people sought upward mobility and happiness at work using the political party, Sufi communities, associations, and networks. The political party, municipal authorities, imams, media channels, friends, kin, and co-locals merged to build bourgeois Islamic ethics through preaching that working hard and privatization are an integral part of religion. The AKP had appropriated certain Islamist understandings of religion (social solidarity, purified religion, etc.) to put them in the service of capital accumulation.

Workers consented to the rule of experts, as these experts and the politicians who appointed them were good Muslims. The rule of experts (or "rationalization") was not simply an outcome of modernity but of the AKP's successful localization of that modernity. As Muslim rulers held the reins, workers were disciplined to the point of accepting family planning and the supreme virtue of secular education, two focuses of the secularist discourse in Turkey that some of them had resisted for decades. This was not only a discursive acceptance of the system, as the daily practices of at least some workers had started to be more work oriented, disciplined, and productive.

In sum, the AKP's empowerment culminated in a passive revolution: the incorporation of subaltern religious elements without the decisive organization of the subaltern. The regime was Islamized but did not become Islamic. It opened up to popular voices but did not become popular. Secular elites retained control, and this was no mere token control. Military, legal, and paramilitary action, especially from late 2005 onward. repeatedly raised the possibility that secularists could remove the AKP from power or even close it down. However, such a fateful downfall would not necessarily signify the termination of the passive revolution. Repression of Islamic politics in the past decade, for example, has postponed and (dramatically) changed the content and form of Islamization but has not brought about its end. Despite this secularist control, the provincial bourgeoisie and the religious orders also prospered. Islam became a defining feature of national unity, without reducing the salience of Turkish identity.

Tugal's understanding of passive revolution outlines then two forms which might be useful in the study of other societies. On the one hand the way in which opposition movements and counter-hegemonic ideologies can be brought within the basic structure of a ruling bloc, through a process of revolution/restoration in which processes of political change from above prevent significant upheaval from below, and in which elite interests are protected against the dangers of protracted class struggle through a limited process of reform. On the other hand the way in which counter-hegemonic ideologies and particularly religious morality can be mobilised to naturalise this process of passive revolution and its maintainence of dominant social relations. A fact which would seem common in the development of neoliberalism in much of the world, which has often taken the form of a "moral politics" and which has often then taken the form of a passive revolution, akin to that studied by Tugal.

Three charts perhaps sum up more than anything else the fundamental difference between Labour’s defeat in 1983, and that which has just taken place in 2019.

The first shows voting share by place type, comparing the Conservative and Labour votes. Showing Labour dominant in the cities, but losing out to the Conservatives in large, medium and small towns, as well as smaller communities.

The second shows Conservative support increasing in the most deprived communities in England and Wales.

Whilst the final graph shows that the Conservative vote grew predominantly in constituencies with fewer graduates, whilst conversely Labour suffered heavy losses in constituencies with fewer than 25% of graduates.

Source: https://twitter.com/drjennings/status/1205298127793729536/

When talking about 1983, the point is obviously that those voters who deserted Labour were not from the most deprived communities, nor those communities with the lowest educational levels. Large parts of the old industrial Labour heartland stood firm, but aspirational, more upwardly mobile working-class voters moved towards Thatcherism. Central here was the transition from a declining industrial economy, to a new more modern technological service-based economy, in which parts of working class hoped, at the very least, their children could participate in.

But that isn’t the reality of 2019. In 2019 the heart of the modern technological sector of the economy, the cities, have remained with Labour, whilst the traditional parts of the economy, the deindustrial towns of the North, have moved towards the Conservatives. This was already evident in 2017, where Labour was gaining across ABC1 voters, and the Conservatives were gaining amongst working-class voters, whilst the gains made by Labour were largely in urban constituencies. Aside then from discussions around the restructuring of social class, there is also the point that the roles of the two parties have changed. Increasingly the Conservative party has been representing voters from the traditional sector of the economy, the small towns in which industrial factories have been replaced by low-skill service work, whilst the Labour party has increasingly come to represent the more modern technological sector of the economy, based on higher levels of education, skill and connectivity.

Why is this? I think firstly that, unlike in the 1980s, this swing amongst working-class voters to the Tories, doesn’t lie in the idea of upward-mobility or aspiration, the vote for the now far-Right Tory party (far-Right in the sense that it is now neither conservative nor moderate) is more a vote to rip up the rule book and for a round of creative destruction which they hope, with enough destruction, might improve their lives, though in a manner far more intangible than under Thatcherism.

Secondly when looking at the changing nature of the urban vote the answer is more likely to lie in the changing nature of work than in the idea of urban populations as bleeding heart liberals. The modern technological sector of the economy in the era of big data and big corporations, is I think increasingly comfortable with a notion of big government as a manager of public resources and a provider of key public services, services on which many urban populations rely, from housing to healthcare to transport. At the same time they are aware of the importance of education to social mobility and success in the job market, as well as the need for investment in technology and a green industrial revolution. Whilst they are also against the kind of austerity which strips away the ‘public’ and leaves parts of the country and inner-cities to decay. And in the post-Financial Crisis era, they are aware of the fragility of markets. They support then something like the ‘socialism’ found in Singapore, emphasizing the role of the state, public services and promoting the modern sector of the economy for economic growth.

Yet the question now for Labour is how to promote a vision of socialism outside of the modern technological sector of the economy, and it is here that they have obviously failed. One the one hand it can be argued that they haven’t been able to bridge the gap between the cities and towns, designing policies which speak more to urban needs, than to the needs of communities where large parts of the state have already been stripped out by austerity, and in which communities themselves have started to take over public services. On the other hand because they haven’t been able to craft a feasible vision of economic progress which can mean something to workers in deprived areas, beyond less tangible promises around investment and development, both of which are now outside the lived-experience of most of these workers for the past three decades.

There are major issues here with the complete death of labour organisation, the atomisation of labour, as well as the growth of the algorithmic management of labour, all of which displace the typical antagonism between labour and capital. But more importantly there is also the question of how you can build a socialism around state intervention in areas where the state, apart from its penal arm, has been increasingly destroyed, and in which the destructive politics of the far-Right has more meaning than state socialism.

This isn’t then, as Gary Younge has pointed out, a question of returning to a liberal centre ground, because it can address neither points. It would rather require thinking a socialism that addresses both the modern sector as well as the, de-developing, low-skill sector, as well as the meaning of a politics focused upon the state in relation to communities which have been excluded from it.

Published on New Mandala, read it here.

Sources: Politweet, Wikipedia, Undi.info

Seats Lost in Peninsular Malaysia by Barisan Nasional in GE14

Here I was particularly interested in the types of seats which rejected BN in Peninsular Malaysia in GE14, and went over either to PH or PAS. As you can see these swing seats were a majority rural seats alongside many semi-urban (or suburban) seats. This is as classified by Politweet based upon calculations of urban development density in constituencies (methodology here). Their full list from GE13 is available here.

Rural/semi-urban remain very broad categories to understand such constituencies, and don't allow for the diversities in their economies, level and type of development and their constituents, but what it does show is that the process of political competition in these seats is alive and well, and that rural politics was important in the election. It will also be important to understand why other rural Malay seats stayed with BN. (See the next table).

Seats Held in Peninsular Malaysia by Barisan Nasional in GE14

Three cornered fights between UMNO/PPBM/PKR/PAS/AMANAH

I put this together to see the kind of Peninsula seats controlled by BN post-GE14. Surprise surprise they're heavily rural and heavily Malay. But I was also wondering about the strength of BN in these seats and how secure their position is.

All but three of the seats contested by UMNO were three cornered races between UMNO, PAS and PPBM/PKR/AMANAH and with only a few exceptions UMNO gained fewer votes than the other Malay parties challenging it combined, showing strong tendencies in those constituencies towards PAS or PH.

In only but a few seats did UMNO manage to maintain good majorities and gain more votes than competing Malay parties, particularly Jeli (Kelantan) Lenggong, Bagan Datuk (Perak), Pekan (Pahang), Masjid Tanah (Malacca) Mersing, Tenggara (Johor). In very few seats was UMNO able to increase its majority and take more votes than other Malay parties combined. Only in Jeli (Kelantan), Lenggong, Bagan Datuk (Perak) and Rompin (Pahang). This may in the end be the result of local issues and local candidates.

In those seats where UMNO increased its majority but still had less combined votes than other Malay political parties, you perhaps see competitive voting between UMNO vs. PAS vs. PH, as a three way split. In seats where UMNO shed many votes but still won the seats due to the votes taken by PH and PAS you can perhaps see a split in an anti-BN/anti-UMNO vote going to PH or PAS.

Many UMNO seats don't have secure majorities and have seen a majority of votes going to non-UMNO parties. This seems to show a strong general trend even within these rural Malay constituencies towards non-UMNO parties. Much will depend in GE15 on redelineation, how UMNO reforms itself, PAS's relationship with PH and PH's relationship with rural Malays. Nevertheless its suggests that what is typically thought of as UMNO's base is less secure and loyal and more competititve than is usually assumed.

This also marks a major difference between GE13 and GE14, where UMNO was able to increase their support from Malay voters (4% in rural seats, and 1% in urban and semi-urban seats) and didn't see a signficant swing in youth votes against it. On this basis UMNO was able to gain seats and to regain the state governments of Kedah and Perak. It can be argued that GE14 has been part of a longer term trend of political change within these rural Malay seats, which has seen UMNO's majorities reduced and become less secure, but what happened then in these Malay between GE13 and GE14 will be an important question to answer.

At the launch of Barisan Nasional’s manifesto for GE14, after a state-by-state breakdown of BN’s policy proposals and developmental promises Najib declared a special announcement on BR1M,

Disebabkan ekonomi kita semakin baik, dan kedudukan kewangan semakin kukuh, hasil kutipan GST pun bertambah, yang di kutuk-kutuk oleh pembangkang, maka kerajaan Barisan Nasional dapat berkongsi nikmat ini  kepada rakyat

 [As our economy gets better, and the financial position is getting stronger, GST revenue increases (which is criticized by the opposition). Then the Barisan Nasional government can share this favour to the people.]

This favour took the form of a doubling of BR1M handouts and a one-off expansion of BR1M’s categories for those earning between RM4,000-5,000, and for those parents with children enrolling in university.

For many such as Bersih and C4, this announcement continues the tradition of the political use of public goods for electoral gain and the clientelistic nature of Malaysian party politics in which issues of economic distribution and patronage have superceded democratic decision making, and therefore links up the cash-handout BR1M with vote-buying. Such a narrative has been prominent in political debate, with Mahathir Mohamad most prominently referring to BR1M as ‘dedak’ (animal feed) and a form of corruption, in the academic literature, linking BR1M to patronage, money politics, ‘goodies’ and the commercialization of elections, and in popular commentaries, represented perhaps best by the cartoons of Zunar where BR1M regularly appears as the tool used to trick or con (money-hungry) voters into supporting BN.

Yet whilst the announcement of BR1M increases appears as a simple cash-inducement to vote BN, the differences between BR1M and other forms of cash-handouts perhaps calls for a more critical understanding of concepts such as money politics, vote-buying, clientelism and the figure of the ‘client’  within Malaysian politics. This will allow us both to better understand the effectiveness of BR1M as a political tool, and to move beyond a conceptualization of BR1M recipients as just easily bought.

Clientelism and cash-transfers

Not only in Malaysia, but also in other countries where conditional cash transfers (CCTs) and unconditional cash transfers (UCTs) have emerged as important to electoral politics, has there emerged a debate on the relationship between cash-transfers, money politics and clientelism.  Much of the problem has centred around the problem of identifying a coherence between traditional definitions of clientelism and the very nature of CCTs and UCTs. James Scott would define the patron-client relationship along three axes, firstly the inequality of power and wealth between patron and client, secondly the face-to-face nature of the relationship and thirdly the flexible nature of the relationship (its ability to across all areas of society). More recently Susan Stokes has argued for a more concrete definition of clientelism where “the proffering of material goods in return for electoral support”, constitutes clientelism “where the criterion of distribution that the patron uses is simply: did you (will you) support me?”.

In the case of Brazil where a major CCT, the Bolsa Familia, was established an important debate has taken place over the relevance of ‘clientelism’ to the understanding of the Bolsa Familia, and whilst initially its launch, in the aftermath of a vote-buying scandal and in proximity to the 2006 elections, and its benefitting the poor who formed the backbone of the Workers Party support led many in the Brazilian middle-class to see the Bolsa Familia as a means for a corrupt government to build itself a permanent electoral majority. And yet as many analysts came to argue Bolsa Familia’s lack of any tie to voting preferences, its lack of surveillance mechanisms, its nature as a ‘club good’ and bypassing of local patrons meant that Bolsa Familia didn’t produce partisan clienteles but produced electoral support only within the broader perspective of economic policy.

In the case of BR1M its politicization is rather more evident in its repeated use in proximity to national and state elections.  Yet as with Bolsa Familia it doesn’t fit neatly into a definition of clientelism.  BR1M is given to all Malaysian’s based upon the criteria of income and not upon their voting preferences or group affiliations. It contains no surveillance mechanism linking voting behavior to receipt of the benefit. Equally it is a state provision and not a provision provided by a particular political party or candidate, it can therefore be mobilized by opposition groups for electoral purposes and, as has occurred in Selangor and Penang, they can propose similar mechanisms. Equally, whilst the distribution of BR1M can be politicized through ‘BR1M ceremonies’ the fact remains that many can receive BR1M directly into their accounts or at collection centres run by banks and that many complaints of ‘BR1M ceremonies’ has encouraged the move towards direct transfers increasing the distanciation between benefactor and beneficiary.

In this sense BR1M has been part of a transition within Malaysian welfare policy from a heavily clientelistic model towards a more centralized, state-based programmatic model. Whilst in the past access to government services, from access to government housing, to agricultural development funds and FELDA land grants would depend upon political allegiance, contemporary welfare mechanisms are more centralized, technocratic  and impersonal, producing not strong clientelistic obligations but weaker, more complex and less transactional, responses from recipients.

From clientelism to populism

Yet without the surety of clientelistic mechanisms how are we to understand the importance placed upon BR1M within the electoral strategy of Barisan Nasional in its attempt to secure voter loyalty? I think when looking at BR1M it is more productive to analyse it through the nexus of neoliberalism and counter-neoliberalism, than merely the relationship between patron and client or benefactor and recipient.  BR1M offers a response to problems of inequality, the cost of living, indebtedness and economic precarity which have all become increasingly salient in Malaysian politics in the last decades. It is part of a shift away from a politics of developmentalism (whether one can experience the benefits of development or not), to one premised upon the quality, evenness and inclusivity of growth.  It has marked a transition from a focus on absolute poverty to one focused upon relative poverty.  It also provides a justification for neoliberal reforms, from the imposition of GST to the abolition of subsidies, and in this sense it forms a part of a reformist neoliberalism, which seeks to combine broadly neoliberal economic policy prescriptions with targeted social welfare mechanisms.

BR1M has thus been part of an ongoing process through which the government has sought to ameliorate the problems of neoliberal development, speak to the poor as a class and a political grouping and produce a visible response to the economic frustrations of a large swathe of voters. Yet in this sense I would suggest that we locate BR1M not on the register of clientelism or patronage politics (with its rather rigid patron-client model) nor on that of money politics, with its focus on the cash-based economic nature of the good, but on the register of populism and particularly pro-poor populism which places it at the intersection of political economy, ideology and culture and which emphasizes the importance of process and of the construction of electoral coalitions.

For his part, Najib has been keen to emphasise the poor or the Bottom 40 as an important class and BN as their champion. His government has promoted a whole series of welfare schemes aimed towards the Bottom 40, it has promoted a discourse of inclusive and even growth, particularly through the New Economic Model, arguing that uneven growth would fuel extremism and political radicalism amongst a ‘neglected underclass’.  Rhetorically his government has placed an emphasis on the luar bandar, Bottom 40 Malaysian Indians, indigenous groups, Sabah and Sarawak, rejecting ideas of them as underdeveloped or backwards and championing their achievements and promising targeted support. Similarly his government has tried to promote a vision of Malaysian modernity capable of talking to all classes of Malaysians, as is evident in the latest BN manifesto which juxtaposes ordinary Malaysians alongside the vision of Malaysia in 2050. Najib has himself talked of his own ability to feel equally at home addressing the United Nations and talking to working people.

This is rhetorically opposed to a kind of urban chauvinism which came to be associated with the years of Mahathir Mohamad, where development was particularly urban-centric, where rural voters felt left behind, where indigenous groups in East and West Malaysia were seen to be caught in the jaws of developmentalism,  and were largely talked down to by Mahathir who didn’t much appreciate rural Malay culture or ‘primitive’ indigenous peoples and privileged an ideal of development emphasizing the modern urban corporate class, many of whom he could count as his friends.

This was at that time rhetorical fuel for PAS who would emphasise the antagonism between the everyday kampung Malay and the urban corporate Malays of UMNO, to good effect in 1999. But in the time of Najib this been appropriated by BN itself in order to attempt to produce a more inclusive bloc of voters, emphasizing a harmony and reciprocity between the corporate world and everyday Malaysians, and emphasizing the role of all classes in the nation. In turn this populist image has been able to be turned against elements of the urban elite within the opposition. Thus the oppositions criticisms of schemes such as BR1M or Kedai Rakyat 1Malaysia as vote-buying or economic waste has been returned to them as forms of snobbery or a lack of concern for the poor. This has been intensified by the approach of the opposition itself to such welfare schemes, which have largely emphasized the criticisms of these schemes and how they have been undertaken but have said less about their own position on the poor as a class within Malaysian politics. Thus whilst Pakatan Harapan has been keen to promote schemes which will benefit the poor (abolition of GST, reintroduction of fuel subsidies, a minimum wage increase) what they have really lacked is a comparative pro-poor identity which perhaps has much to do with the dynamics of neoliberalism and anti-neoliberalism within their own coalition.

This differs from the earlier policy trajectory of Pakatan Rakyat which took this problem much more seriously. In the aftermath of 2008 PAS began promoting its idea of Negara Kebajikan Islam (Islamic Welfare State) on the German social democratic model, whilst Pakatan Rakyat was proposing the Ekonomi Rakyat (People’s Economy) to produce an economy which worked for all classes. Arguably however with the fragmentation of the opposition and the greater rhetorical and ideological focus upon 1MDB there has been a privileging of the discourse of corruption, which all around the world, in countries such as Brazil, Venezuela, Thailand, Russia or Philippines, serves as a critique of pro-poor populism and of cash-handouts. This has been an issue highlighted by Parti Sosialis Malaysia, who sought admittance to Pakatan Harapan, emphasizing the need for the coalition to focus on welfare politics and economic issues facing the bottom 60% of Malaysian households in rural and semi-rural seats in Malaysia, and particularly rural Malay poverty, in order to avoid being outflanked by UMNO. PKR’s Azmin Ali in Selangor has also promoted his own pro-poor schemes under Selangor’s Inisiatif Peduli Rakyat and has too come under criticism from Bersih for the politicization of these schemes during the election period. As against other elements in Pakatan Harapan Azmin Ali appears less concerned about the intersection between pro-poor populism and democracy.

Nevertheless whether or not this discursive battle around welfare reaches the ground and whether or not Najib’s political positioning gains traction will come out in the course of the election, for now there is a dearth of field research on BR1M. Yet its impact shouldn’t be too easily underestimated, it enjoys large rates of engagement and has been consistently the countries most Googled term for the last few years and has gained traction amongst Bottom 40 voters. That there is cynicism and weariness amongst many voters in the heartlands of BN is undoubtedly true yet how this will intersect with the potential feelings of gratitude, empowerment and inclusion in a governmental and developmental project will undoubtedly be an important factor in the outcome of the election. Najib’s pro-poor populism perhaps doesn’t have the charismatic pull of others in the region, but the question is really whether or not it will be enough to get him safely back to Putrajaya.

In Moral Politics in the Philippines Wataru Kusaka seeks to develop a reading of Philippine politics from the period of People Power until the present through the lens of “moral politics”. Moral politics is firstly for Kusaka opposed to interest politics, the distribution of resources, and secondly defined by the division of a given society between the good and evil, moral and immoral and between we and they, yet as will be seen throughout the book the sphere of moral politics and interest politics will continuously overlap, as the politics of distribution becomes moralized.

Implicit in Kusaka’s narrative is a wish to understand the development of popular democracy in the Philippines in reference to two other terms, populism and inequality. The problem of populism is defined perhaps more than anything by the rise of Joseph Estrada (“Erap”) on a wave of pro-poor populism which appeared to unsettle the hegemonic order ushered in by People Power, whilst the problem of inequality is defined by the structural gap between those members of civil society, the middle-class who live in gated communities and condominiums, work in office buildings and shop in malls, and the “rest”, who live in squatter settlements and slums, who work in the informal economy. This inequality was to become most evident in Philippine politics with the election and overthrow of Erap which saw the antagonism between the protestors of ESDA 2, stood against corruption, abuse of power and government impropriety and the protestors of ESDA 3, who stood with Erap and for the political empowerment of the poor. To the moral citizens of ESDA 2, these protestors who came from the provinces and the slums were nothing more than a drunk, violent and uneducated and self-interested mob, bought by political elites. As one joke was to put it “ESDA 1: free the nation from a dictator. ESDA 2: free the nation from a thief. ESDA 3: free lunch, dinner, breakfast and snacks too… let’s go!”

As Kusaka notes such moral politics has served as the basis for disciplinary politics against the poor in the aftermath of Erap, particularly in the sphere of electoral politics and urban governance. Yet implicit in Kusaka’s narrative is also the way in which moral politics has served as a means to mediate between the civil and mass sphere and to process this antagonism through the integration of pro-poor distributive policies into the moral politics of the middle-class, particularly under the rule of Aquino who ran on a campaign slogan of “Kung walang kurakot, walang mahirap”, (If there is no corruption, there will be no poverty) and through the 4P conditional cash transfer programme and the Responsible Parenthood and Reproductive Health Act of 2012. In this sense Kusaka wishes to highlight the role of moral politics in contemporary neoliberal governance.

Moral Politics and its Discontents

In an addendum added to the English edition of the book shortly before its publication Kusaka addresses the election of Rodrigo Duterte to the presidency as a moment within the trajectory of moral politics. Noting that the moral nationalism of Acquino had put a reform agenda, aimed at both the middle-classes and the poor at the centre point of Filipino politics, he argues that Duterte has played off an impatience with Aquino’s weak reformism and mobilized the discourse of moral politics on a more radical register as a need for more thorough going social, political and economic renewal, outside of the existing system, what he will term Duterte’s “drastic medicine”.

During the election it was Jejomar Binay who assumed the position of pro-poor populism and yet Duterte was able to attain significant votes from the poor who looked past cash handouts from politicians in favour of a more fundamental change to a system they saw as corrupt, unjust and oppressive. As one interviewee of Kusaka’s would note “If you vote for Binay, it would perpetuate the corrupt system. Now we have to change the very system instead of trying to get a small share from a corrupt politician like a beggar”. In a recent piece Walden Bello has located the rise of Duterteism in a form of fascist transformation premised upon a broad class alliance which mixes social transformation with exterminism. In an article published after his monograph Kuasaka has noted the relationship between Duterte and the morality of social banditry, his ability to deliver social justice outside of the law, as well as his ability to utilise the discourse of moral politics to drive a wedge between the “good” and “moral” poor, and the “bad” and “immoral” poor, the drug users, criminals … which Marx was to refer to as the “dangerous class” or lumpenproletariat. Nicole Curato has termed this “penal populism”, a mobilization of the politics and anxiety and politics of hope towards an exceptional politics, premised upon an imaginary of danger and crisis and the mobilization and empowerment of the poor for a better future and for emancipation.

Yet what underlies this is a particular model of transformation and reformism which has as its terms the idealism of morality and the mediation of class relations by the state, and thus the maintenance of existing economic and social structures. The hypermoralism of figures such as Duterte have as their counterpoint the rejection of any attempts to reform fundamental social and economic structural relations, prefering executive power to systematic reform. They privilege then the figure of the strongman over the figure of the political movement. It is in this sense that Duterte’s “drastic medicine” matches so closely to Modi’s demonetisation programme, surrounded as it was with hypermoralism.

The question then that Wataru Kusaka returns us to is that of democracy. The moral politics of the middle-class appears to harness particularly anti-democratic tendencies, challenging as it does the rule of the many against the rule of the just and righteous. That is perhaps its central contradiction, whilst it has in the name of People Power formed an important critique of the authoritarian state, its class position has led it to associate the “lower orders” with a democratic authoritarianism which it believes it must need protecting against. What the discourse of moral politics misses then is more than anything a discourse of class. As Benedict Anderson would argue of populism,

When Thaksin launched his populist policies, ex-prime minister Anand Panyarachun criticised such policies by claiming it was wrong to give money to peasants because they would not know how to use it and would waste it on such things as mobile phones. Inherent in this language is a clear sense of distance. I am not like a peasant, they are not like me – as if the two were members of different countries.

In the first 30 years of Indonesia’s history, the people were accordated great symbolic respect - as Rakyat with a capital R – because the people were the foundation of Indonesian nationalism. But the word has since disappeared, replaced by masa. This word too used to have a positive meaning, that is, the human material for vast political mobilisations. But now it has changed to mean the unorganised, brutal, greedy, looting, burning masses – the nightmare of the middle class.

Talking about the mass of the people in a way which positions them miles away is a powerful form of distancing in the imaginary of the state, which in some ways is a response to the fear that large social distances actually create. Real oligarchs, of course, are not afraid of the people. But the urban middle class – especially the Chinese middle class – are very afraid, and that is why they do not trouble the oligarchs or police. They fear they will become the victims of subaltern rage, greed and envy.

The question is whether or not moral politics has anything to say about this distance between classes or whether or not the transition from moral politics to political economy is required. For Wataru Kusaka’s part he argues for a transition from moral politics to one based upon social solidarity and mutuality which seeks to challenge the class division implicit in the development of moral politics. Building upon the negotiation of poor communities outside of the state, recalling Partha Chatterjee’s notion of political society, Kusaka’s book argues for a greater focus and solidarity with the politics of the poor, rather than its critique through the lens of moral politics. It serves then beyond the Philippines as a challenge to the politics of neoliberalism and as a call for a return to the analysis of subaltern resistances to established power.

Published on New Mandala. Read it here.

Much of Anand Teltumbde’s work has been devoted to the understanding or rather critique of the relationship between Indian Marxism and the dalit question. Central to his argument is the privileging within Indian Marxism of the economic struggle with its emphasis on economic classes as against the social struggle around the concept of caste. What this led to within the history of Indian socialism was a focus on mobilizing the masses along lines of class but a lack of concern for the way in which the rules and social practices around the caste system impacted upon the sphere of mass politics. As in the case of Malaysian socialism the problem was one of identifying the primary contradiction, whether economic or cultural, and thus of identifying the role of cultural or social politics within socialist struggle.

“One instance” Teltumbde argues, “of Communists ignoring the discrimination against Dalits came from Bombay’s textile mills. When Ambedkar pointed out that Dalits were not allowed to work in the better-paying weaving department, and that other practices of untouchability were rampant in mills where the Communists had their Girni Kamgar Union, they didn’t pay heed. Only when he threatened to break their strike of 1928 did they reluctantly agree to remedy the wrong.”

Trade unions were perhaps an expression more than any of the contradiction between economic and social exploitation. Challenging economic class oppression they remained spaces of cultural and social domination from forms which had a long history within Indian society.

Yet faced with such fragmentation of the labour movement the problem was how to interpret the existence of caste oppression. Was it secondary to economic oppression, was it an effect of colonial power or was it deep rooted within social relations in a way which overrode the economic sphere. And what then was the relationship between the economic and social which underlies this?

As Teltumbde has argued, central to the thought of B.R. Ambedkar is the belief that relations of caste supersede those of class and thus the belief that the politics of social reform integral to the politics of class struggle.

As Ambedkar would ask:

“Can the socialists ignore the problem arising out of the social order? The socialists of India, following their fellows in Europe, are seeking to apply the economic interpretation of history to the facts of India. They propound that man is an economic creature, that his activities and aspirations are bound by economic facts, that property is the only source of power. They therefore preach that political and social reforms are gigantic illusions, and that economic reform by the equalisation of property must have precedence over every other kind of reform.”

Social status he argues is nevertheless an important form of power in India.

“Why do millionaires in India obey penniless sadhus and fakirs? Why do millions of paupers in India sell their trifling trinkets which constitute their only wealth and go to Benares and Mecca?”

Ambedkar similarly gives the example of the plebians in Rome who attained political power only to have it denied to them by the Oracle of Delphi who held the power to deny an individual the right to their elected office. Yet this was effective notes Ambedkar only insofar as the plebians too accepted the rules of their domination.

“The fallacy of the socialist lies in supposing that because in the present stage of European society property as a source of power is predominant, the same is true of India.” Rather in India, over and above property, social status and religion continue to determine relations of power between individuals and if the goal is the liberty of individuals in such as case Ambedkar argues, more than economic struggle is required.

Indian socialists Ambedkar argued believed it sufficient to reform the economic order in order to bring about political and social change. But was not more than economic revolution required? Or rather Ambedkar would ask, is the possibility of economic revolution likely to be present without first addressing the question of social reform. Central here would be the figure of the proletariat. For the economic revolution to occur it would require the seizure of power by one class and the transformation of the economic order and yet this can only occur on the basis of a collective unity amongst such a class and a belief that revolution will bring about fair and just treatment of all. Yet would this be possible.

“Can it be said that the proletariat of India, poor as it is, recognises no distinctions except that of the rich and the poor? Can it be said that the poor in India recognise no such distinctions of caste and creed, high or low? If the fact is that they do, what unity of front can be expected from such a proletariat in its action against the rich?”

As Ambedkar goes onto ask,

“Suppose for the sake of argument that by some freak of fortune a revolution does take place and the socialists come into power, will they not have to deal with the problems created by the particular social order prevalent in India? I can’t see how a socialist state in India can function for a second without having to grapple with the problems created by the prejudices which make Indian people observe the distinctions of high and low, clean and unclean. If socialists are not to be content with the mouthing of fine phrases, if the socialists wish to make socialism a definite reality, then they must recognise that the problem of social reform is fundamental, and that for them there is no escape from it”.

Here Ambedkar challenges directly the assumptions of Indian socialists that the main antagonism or primary contradiction of Indian society was that between the masses and the colonial power, nor between rich and poor, these argument are, he would argue in a manner analogous to that of James Puthucheary, insufficient to unite together the masses in a form of collective political action. Nor anti-colonialism nor class struggle will be sufficient to overcome divisions of caste, race and religion within the political body. What is required alongside the economic struggle is social and cultural struggle. What is required is social reform.

What he is also challenging Teltumbte will argue is the model of base-superstructure prevalent within Marxist discourse which sees the economic process as the determining moment and social and political stuctures as determined through the economic base. Against this dualism what Ambedkar is arguing for is an immanence between economic, social and cultural power and thus the placing of political action within this immanent plane.

As Ambedkar notes this question went also to the heart of Indian nationalism. The nationalist movement was initially split between political and social reformers, between those who believed that social reform must occur prior to political change and those who believed that political reform could bypass a programme of social reform. Yet as Ambedkar shows in his use of Mill’s maxim that no country is fit to rule another country, transforming it into the idea that no class is fit to rule another class, the problem of domination which political reform seeks to challenge remains inseparable from forms of social, cultural and religious domination.

Yet why then did the project of social reform fail? It was Ambedkar argues because the kind of social reform envisaged was the reform of the high-caste Hindu family, of issues of marriage and female equality within the family, and not of wider social reform, not the reform of caste. What resulted then from this failure to truly reckon with social reform was the victory of political reformers and the Communal Award, the alliance between the poor and the bureaucracy. A process of passive revolution which in a limited manner incorporated excluded classes within the Colonial/Post-Colonial system.

Yet how is one to envisage this cultural or social revolution? Ambedkar argues that Marx’s injunction to the Proletariat that they had nothing to lose but their chains was quite useless in the fact of caste, “Castes form a graded system of sovereignties, high and low which are jealous of their status and which know that if a general disolution came, some of them would stand to lose more of their power and prestige than others do”. It offers a supple form of social differentiation and fragmentation. For this reason Ambedkar believes that it is not reformable from within.

“The wall built around caste is impregnable, and the wall around which it is built contains nothing of the combustible stuff of reason and morality. Add to this the fact that inside this wall stands the army of Brahmins who form the intellectual class … and you will get the idea why I think that breaking up of caste amongst the Hindus is well-nigh impossible.”

What is needed is for the destruction of the embedded rules and practices which reproduce the reality of caste within India. What this implies for Ambedkar is a regulation of religious practices, aligning religion with other practices and professions and the reform of religious customs in order to transmit onto future generations the best of Hindu practice. What Ambedkar perhaps aimed towards was a process of modernization which challenged the partial and uneven modernization of the Colonial and post-Colonial state.

In an essay entitled “Culture or Economy – Wherein Lies the Primary Contradiction” Jeyakumar Devaraj takes up the debate around what it means to struggle for the establishment of socialism in a multi-ethnic and multi-cultural country such as Malaysia, in particular around the problem which has divided the Malaysian left throughout its history, how one is to respond to themes of nationalism and culturalism. Here the left has often been split between those who would view the dominant forms of nation and culture, privileging Malay culture, the Malay language and Islam, as an expression of domination which needs to be confronted before a meaningful socialist movement is possible, and those who believe that in spite of such apparently racist and ethno-nationalist structures, the socialist movement can move in a sense directly to the primary economic and political contradictions around which it can organise.

As Devaraj notes, this is a question which goes back to the days of the Socialist Front and before and was expressed as a split between a focus on “civil rights” issues, of the kind chronicled in Kua Kia Soong’s The Malaysian Civil Rights Movement, which sought to gain educational, linguistic and cultural autonomy for minority groups and a “Marhaenist” style socialist activism which has sought to politicize issues of exploitation, economic inequality and poverty.

For Devaraj however, the politics of civil and communal rights are a dead-end for socialist activism in Malaysia. The politics of civil rights on the one hand places politics on the plane which parties like UMNO know best, the plane of ethnic and religious rights and on the other hand produces an easy enemy for parties like UMNO to hold up to the Malay masses, in politicizing culture and ethnicity it continues to reproduce both as the centre of Malaysian politics. Devaraj then calls for the left to continue with the “Merdeka consensus” present at the time of the independence of Malaysia, which wasn’t simply the construction of elites but was also supported by the parties of the Malay left and the non-Malay parties, which entailed recognition of Malaya as a Malay polity, Malay as the official and mediating language, Islam as the official religion and a recognition of the special position of the Malays.

In comparative perspective with a country such as Britain this assertion appears defeatist. British politics too contains ethnic and culturalist chauvinism particularly through an English nationalism which calls for an England for the English, and for the production of a majority mono-cultural and Christian country with its symbols as the Church and the Royal Family. The left has sought to continuously challenge this agenda and has perpetually been critical of the Labour Party which has been accomodationist in regard to it. The Labour Party has continuously failed to call into question the overriding structures of British political life, the unelected second chamber, the monarchy, the sheer weight of tradition and it has thus failed to challenge the popular beliefs and traditions of the mass of the electorate, it has repeatedly been unwilling to stand up to public opinion. It has, so the argument goes, failed to develop the basis of a modern British nation-state which has been to the detriment of meaningful Leftist politics and today in the face of Brexit and the swing to the right by traditional labour communities the argument amongst many Labour members is to rebuild this base through emphasising traditional nationalism and anti-immigrant sentiment. To many in the left this appears as no more than a capitulation to existing power structures and dominant cultures. It appears to reject Marx’s injunction for Leftists not to merely interpret the world but to change it.

Yet in the case of socialist politics in Malaysia the very relationship between class, nation and culture has to be taken into account and here it is worth turning to the writings of James Puthucheary. In essays written in the late 1950s such as “Socialism in a Multi-racial Society” and “On the Future of Socialism in Malaya” he analysed the relationship between nationalist and socialist politics and particularly the nature of socialist politics in an underdeveloped multi-racial society. For Puthucheary the application of European socialist analysis is limited for it bases itself upon class analysis but ignores the importance of communal differences which segment class identities. The problem faced by Socialists in multi-racial societies is then also how to handle communal differences. “Could it not be” he asks “that we cannot embark on building Socialism until we have gone some way in the task of building a Malaysian nation?.  This is aggravated for Puthucheary by the fact that Malaya’s communities were segmented not just by ethnicity but also by language, culture, religion, economic function, loyalty and locality. They spoke different languages, observed different customs, worshipped different Gods, worked different jobs, migrated for economic reasons and lived apart from one another.

No Malayan nation could then be said to exist, and nor was Malaya a multi-national nation, with a common national culture and sense of belonging, it was constituted by separate communities who often wished to remain separate, as in Furnivall’s “plural society”. Thus whilst Socialists assumed that communal disunity was a product of British rule and would cease to exist with the retreat of the British, what they found was that communalism was rooted in relations of economic exploitation, particularly between Chinese traders and Malay peasants, reproduced communal separatism. As Puthucheary sums up:

“It seems to me that the situation is one where there are very few forces for unity. We have no grounds to think that there is a natural momentum that would lead to unity if minor impediments are removed”.

Yet how was this supersession to be brought about? As Puthucheary states, “there can be no change of political power in any form unless such a change has the support of the majority of the Malays. That is, no coup d’etat by the other communities and no revolution based upon the support of Indians and Chinese, however non-communal its aims may be, can be effective. Such attempt will only lead to a civil war… Consequently, with the transfer of political power to a predominantly Malay electorate, all stable political changes will have to be constitutional.” Traditional socialist thinking in societies such as India and Chinese where capitalism and communalism lived side by side argued that unity must be produced through anti-colonial politics. And yet for Puthucheary, this assumed the importance of the antagonism between colonizer and colonised over and above those between communities which in Malaya was untrue, relations of exploitation between communities were often more evident and uneven, than those between British capitalism and each group, and the economic structure of Malaya reproduced communal fragmentation preventing meaningful common interests against foreign capital.

In this sense traditional socialist thinking on colonial/post-Colonial politics was for Puthucheary problematic. The truly meaningful antagonism which must be focussed on within Malaya for Puthucheary was not to be the different communities against the colonial power and foreign capital but the antagonism between Malay peasants and Chinese workers against Chinese capitalists. By disregarding the needs of the Malay peasantry he argues, the politics of communal division will only be perpetuated, communal relations of exploitation will only continue and the peasantry would be led into an alliance with political parties which would represent, in however limited a manner, their communal interests.

Important then for political change in Malaya was the need to take this argument to the Malay peasantry and to overcome the ethnically-neutral and multi-communal approach which led only to a popular belief in the continued Chinese domination of the economy. “These interests will be demonstrated as being common only when socialists lead both of them against the greater control of the economy by Chinese capitalists”. Malaya’s weak majority and powerful minority thus required a model different from that present in other national socialisms.

M.K. Rajakumar would sum up the problem as such “Contradictions exist between the peasants and workers in every country of the world. The people in the village distrust the people in the cities, deeming the city folk as having deprived them of the rightful compensation for their products. The city people on the other hand regard the peasants as being simple and irrational. Only a socialist can transcend these kinds of natural contradictions and understand the significance of establishing a worker-peasant alliance”. Yet as Rajakumar also notes, the problem of worker-peasant unity is also a problem of racial unity between the Malay peasantry and urban Chinese. Chinese workers had achieved a great sense of class consciousness based upon the socialist struggle in China, the Malays were excluded from this history and thus expressed relatively lower class consciousness, the problem then of socialist political change was how to generate this consciousness across ethnic lines. Here Rajakumar would similarly argue for the need to direct work towards the Malay masses with the consideration that:

                “when we are working in a Malay area, we have to be extra careful. In many villages, Malays and non-Malays live together; if we are very active in such areas, we have to take special care of the Malays who live with the non-Malays but form a minority in the community.

Finally when we interact with any Malay, they will pay special attention to how we carry ourselves. Even if they have no political consciousness and their tinking is different from ours, even if they are extremely racialist and say that all non-Malays are bad, we must at least achieve the point of having them say, ‘All non-Malays are bad but the socialist non-Malays are somewhat better’”.

For Puthucheary what was needed then was a common language and common system of education to arrest this process of fragmentation and begin the process of nation building and unity. And thus whilst some might argue that rather than focussing upon education and language Socialists should focus upon eliminating relations of economic exploitation, as Puthucheary shows, communal divisions are equally as important as economic divisions in this political equation. As he would argue, Malayan trade unions managed to clear spaces free from relations of economic exploitation, and yet within these spaces, communal divisions persisted.

Yet rather than focussing upon the matter of nation-building, Puthucheary worried that in its opposition to the education and language policies elements of the Left came to play a reactionary role, allying them with right-wing chauvinists and Chinese educationalists, and in politicizing the matter of language and education it was handing leadership back to traditional communal leaders and sabotaging the possibility of producing a more meaningful political unity. Thus:

 “But many socialists seem to look upon the unrest in the Chinese schools as an opportunity to embarrass the Alliance and to gather a few right-wing communal votes in the election. This may be a very-clever short-term tactic. But it may just be the sowing of the wind for which socialists – and for that matter, the whole country – will have to reap the whirlwind”.

This is a pattern of opposition politics which remains particularly prescient today for as Puthucheary feared, a meaningful left-wing nationalism wasn’t produced and the problem of cultural autonomy became more and more important to opposition politics which, particularly in the period after 1969, grew reliant upon non-Malay votes. What this failure meant was that the problem of the national question, as the production of national unity, became the prerogative of the government and that in the aftermath of 1969, the restructuring of the social and economic systems which produced communal difference was undertaken by the State and the NEP, which it is believed Puthucheary consulted on, emerged as a solution to the problem of capital and nation allowing the BN coalition to assume the mantle of Malaysian nationalism.

Nevertheless against the state-led NEP, Puthucheary continually promoted a socialist and not racial response to the problem of national disunity. What this meant for socialist practice is important, it meant that socialist thinking must take into account the problem and reality of race but that the solution to the problems of race and division must lie in a socialist party which, without a communal basis can begin the basis of forming a national unity. Communal parties Puthucheary argued reinforce communal lines and thus attempts to produce out of communalism a non-communal outcome are destined to fail. What was required for Puthucheary was the conversion of problems of race into problems of class in order to liberate them from the dead end of communalism.

“Socialists are the only people who can end the exploitation of peasants by traders without making it a communal issue. Only we can effectively present exploitation and poverty as class problems, which they are and not as communal problems”.

In this case Puthucheary argued that a purely race based or purely class based approach to the problem of economic divisions based upon community would fail. On the one hand, to only target the Malay community, through more inclusion within the existing system of development would be to accentuate within the Malay community the kinds of class divisions present in the Chinese community, it would not do away with inequalities but simply racial divisions of economic function and wouldn’t resolve the problem of rural poverty. Thus as he would argue “those who think that the economic position of the Malays can be improved by creating a few Malay capitalists, thus making a few Malays well-to-do will have to think again”. Similarly he would argue an approach which aimed to resolve rural poverty irregardless of race through the existing market system would in the end allow for a strong domestic capitalist class to grow which would, based on current ownership, be predominantly Chinese. “The problems which would come from a powerful capitalist class almost wholly Chinese should be taken into consideration in any discussion of Malaya’s political development.”

Puthucheary thus argued that what was required to resolve this dilemma was a challenge to the existing structures of ownership and control and the system of free market capitalism which reinforced existing divisions of race and class. It was to be a restructuring of the economy in a manner which would both restructure control and ownership at its highest levels as well fundamentally challenge the problem of rural poverty, the combination of which would allow for the overcoming of communal divisions and economic inequality. This was the idea eventually taken up after the 1969 riots. The NEP challenged both the laissez-faire system of economic organisation and sought to resolve the problem of rural poverty and communalism, it both undertook a massive transfer of foreign ownership of capital into the hands of the state and sought to develop a Malay capitalist class whilst also undertaking extensive rural development schemes and intensified industrialisation which opened opportunities for rural peasants to migrate to urban spaces in search of work. Yet in the long term it can be seen that the promises of the NEP haven’t been fulfilled. For whilst a massive reduction in real poverty has occurred, problems of rural (and urban) poverty, unemployment and precarity have continued, and whilst there has been a significant change in the ownership of the Malaysian economy, this has occurred at the elite level.

Much of this it could be argued has to do with the fact that the NEP was a state-capitalist project and not a socialist-nationalist project, thus rather than economic transformation being aimed towards the production of a unified nation and subordinated to the demands of the People, it remained subordinated to demands of capitalist accumulation and thus to processes of proletarianization, accumulation by dispossession and profit-maximisation. What this entailed then was, broadly, a process of national unification met simultaneously with fractures between class and race which unevenly distributed the benefits of the NEP and didn’t overturn existing forms of privilege. As such Puthucheary’s fear came true, the NEP came to establish an elite class of Bumiputera capitalists and entrepreneurs and a Malay middle-class and yet a whole class of particularly rural Malays, Orang Asli, non-Malay Bumiputera, Indian estate workers and urban poor, not to mention the foreign workers who are by definition excluded from the project of national unity, and who sit uncomfortably in the frame of the Malaysian nation. Bangsa Malaysia has in this sense been a largely urban middle-class project.

Today then the problem of the production of national unity persists and continues to be the challenge of a meaningful political opposition. The need for the support of the majority of Malays, and particularly today the majority of Malays who live outside of urban areas and whose votes enjoy a greater weight, is as true as ever. The need then to produce an alliance between urban and rural voters to effect progressive political change equally remains important and as Puthucheary and others would argue this is perhaps best resolved through socialist and not culturalist politics. Through as Jeyakumar would argue, addressing the question of Malay poverty.

We return then to Jeyakumar Devaraj’s support for the Merdeka consensus. How is this to be understood? Is it to be understood as simply an endorsement of existing power relations and a call for a socialist transformation to conform to the natural order of things? Or is it rather a commentary on the production of the nation. Here it would appear that what is advised isn’t the separation of the figure of the nation from that of socialist politics but rather a particular way of achieving the nation. The nation is to be achieved here not through its conceptualisation in cultural terms but through a principally economic unification. Yet in order to achieve this economic unification what is required is to prevent the cultural oppositions over the space of the nation. What is required is to prevent the politicization of the cultural sphere, thus preventing the political process from going down the road of open cultural antagonism in order that national unification can be achieved, it entails accepting a broad cultural compact in order to open up space for economic struggle.

Theoretically Partha Chatterjee has described the way in which, faced by the overwhelming power of the coloniser, anti-Colonialist nationalism first defined its sphere of sovereignty within the inner domain of culture and custom and thus as opposed to the modern sphere of technology and capitalist development. Post-Colonial nationalism has in this reading developed under conditions of passive revolution to reproduce this distinction between the inner and outer domain and thus organise the post-Colonial nation as an opposition between the sphere of economic modernity and cultural tradition, enabling he argues the reproduction of the rule of capital and Western modernity through the binary distinction between cultural politics and the modern state. For Chatterjee this was principally marked by the failure for civil society to attain hegemony and by the continued split between the domain of the elite and sub-altern classes, the sub-altern were those outside of the sphere of economic modernity and contained within the sphere of culture, albeit traditional culture. The nation continued to contain within in it then an alien body.

The attempt then to produce the nation through socialism is the attempt to overcome this distinction between the cultural and economic and thus to overcome the split that has divided the nation. It offers against the passive revolution of post-Colonial nationalism active process of socialism. Central here to a socialist politics will be the ability to produce solidarity between rural and urban spheres and thus a functional solidarity between a variety of groups. The terms and form of this solidarity will come to define the nation itself, or whether or not a nation is possible at all, and the problem of solidarity is key then to understand the potentiality for a Malaysian nationalism in years to come.

According to Former Prime Minister David Cameron:

Corruption is the cancer at the heart of so many of our problems in the world today. It destroys jobs and holds back growth, costing the world economy billions of pounds every year. It traps the poorest in the most desperate poverty as corrupt governments around the world syphon off funds and prevent hard-working people from getting the revenues and benefits of growth that are rightfully theirs. It steals vital resources from our schools and hospitals as corrupt individuals and companies evade the taxes they owe. It can even undermine our security…

Later in the same volume Francis Fukuyama would argue that,

Corruption hurts life outcomes in a variety of ways. Economically, it diverts resources away from their most productive uses and acts like a regressive tax that supports the lifestyles of elites at the expense of everyone else. Corruption incentivises the best and the brightest to spend their time gaming the system, rather than innovating or creating new wealth. Politically, corruption undermines the legitimacy of political systems by giving elites alternative ways of holding onto power other than genuine democratic choice.

One can here see that corruption, and its companion clientelism, are said to be at the centre of a variety of social ills. The producers of poverty, underdevelopment and oppression. Yet what corruption and clientelism are also said to produce is exploitation. They are said to produce a poor and immiserated population who are dependent upon clientelistic structures of power and governmental handouts, and they are said to produce elites who can maintain their power and wealth through the concession of small benefits to their clients who then labour and work so that their patrons might stay rich.

Many discourses on corruption and clientelism are discourses on exploitation and this is particular evident in the work of Malaysian political cartoonist Zunar. Zunar’s cartoons represent, in a variety of guises, the relationship between patron and client, kleptocrat and people, which juxtaposes an oppressed and immiserated people against a lavish elite who maintain their lifestyle through the provision of minor cash benefits only to take back what they have given through a variety of any other means.

What is being critiqued in such displays is an inequality of exchange. The poor are oppressed it is argued and inspite of what they receive they are forced to give more in return to their patrons such that they emerge as servants to a system of clientelism and corruption over which they have no power. Key here are forms of vote-buying, patronage and the provision of developmental goods.

Yet whilst this is for many a persuasive narrative, it has little to say about the kinds of transformations undergone in post-Colonial states in the last decades and fails to acknowledge that whilst in such states discourses of clientelism remain prevalent, the material base on which they were built has fundamentally altered. To focus on Southeast Asia, its major economies, Malaysia, Thailand, Philippines and Indonesia at the time of the end of the Second World War were largely rural agricultural economies with a limited capitalism typically linked to extractive industries and the major urban centres. What the next few decades brought was an intensification of such capitalist development which saw post-Colonial states challenge their economic dependency and develop national capitalisms which aimed to more broadly and equally institute the processes and benefits of capitalist production and on this basis in Malaysia under the New Economic Policy, Thailand under the Generals, Indonesia under Sukarno and then Suharto and the Philippines under Marcos, there was witnessed a major transformation in social and economic forms..

On the one hand this was to be through the development of capitalist relations of production through: agriculture becoming mechanized, the development of industrialisation and of a manufacturing base which saw mass migration to urban areas to work in factories, the growth of autochthonous corporations and the growth of a local business-class, mass privatisation, the growing financialization of economic life and the growing neoliberalisation of the state (as the subjection of the state to market logic). On the other hand it was to occur through processes of accumulation by dispossession and proletarianization which broke apart existing modes of production through the appropriation of indigenous lands, the enclosure of the commons, the closure of traditional industries, the consolidation of land and the production of a reserve army of labour. Processes described by Tania Murray Li as the production of permanent surplus populations.

What this also meant however is a major transformation in the kinds of political subjects present within Southeast Asian societies. They have transformed from rural peasants, subordinate to local landholders, contained within rural localities, often largely disconnected from urban metropolises and still in possession of land or a means of production, towards subjects who migrate between the urban and rural in search of work, who work for major corporations in technology driven industries or service industries, who increasingly inhabit urban spaces or migrate between urban and rural spaces as Eric Thompson has described, outside the direct control of local power-brokers and who rely directly on central government for the provision of welfare and development opportunities and on large corporations for the provision of basic services from healthcare to communications. What this entails is both a process of abstraction away from embedded local relations of power to more distanciated and abstracted relations of power, and the transformation from subjects caught in a binary divide between patron and client, between an individual capable of providing loyalty and labour, and an individual capable of providing material benefits and security, towards the production of individuals separated from their means of production and rendered precarious and subject to the whims of the market-place through which individuals enter into a multiplicity of relations.

This of course isn’t to deny the presence of a prominent informal economy in many Southeast Asian countries within which personalised relationships continue to dominate. Nor does it deny the presence of pre-capitalist modes of production or communities in which relations between patrons and clients similarly remain important, though these are all the time diminished through processes of accumulation by dispossession. But what it does imply is a fundamental transformation in the overall dynamics of power which should necessitate a transformation in the discourse of power, something which has seemingly been lacking.

In this vein when approaching discourses of exploitation it is necessary to confront these new realities. In particular in the age of advanced capitalist development, exploitation occurs typically not on the basis of personal relationships between economic agents but occurs on the basis of impersonal relationships between individuals and the relations of production or the marketplace. To understand this it is worth highlighting the difference between clientelism and capitalism.

As James Scott has argued, clientelism can be defined by three fundamental features. The first an inequality between the client and patron, the second, the presence of a face-to-face relationship, often mediated by trust and affection, and finally the flexibility of the relationship or the fact that it covers a many areas of social, economic and political life. Yet what is important to note about the clientelistic relationship is that exploitation isn’t an inherent element within it. Whilst there is inequality of exchange, insofar as it is based upon an exchange, often an explicit exchange, clientelism ensures that both parties benefit. Thus for Scott insofar as clientelism is a face-to-face relationship defined by a relationship of trust and affection, the relationship of the patron to the client is one of care, the relationship of the client to the patron one of loyalty. This of course doesn’t rule out the idea that clientelism can enable exploitation, certainly in certain circumstances, bosses and big men have been able to rule their regions through fear and threat and have extracted from their client loyalty with little exchange. Yet such exploitation should be seen as secondary to and not inherent within clientelistic exchange.

Such relations change with the onset of capitalism. Capitalism as defined by Marx is “an immense accumulation of commodities” and it is commodities which for Marx come to mediate between the relations of individuals. As Marx will argue in his famous definition of commodity fetishism capital is a relation between people expressed as a relation between things. Yet insofar as the commodity sits at the heart of capitalism it isn’t static but rather Marx argues only a moment in the circulation of capital. The commodity is important for capital insofar as it is a means through which money can valorized into more money, as Marx will write it M-C-M’, more then than just a relation between individuals and things, capital is for Marx a process, it is circulation. Yet the secret by which money can beget more money (M-C-M’ ) lies for Marx in labour. To realise this circulation Marx argues the commodity owner must meet in the market place the free labourer to purchase their labour-power which is sold as any other commodity, they do so as equals. Yet labour he argues is a commodity unlike other commodities, it is “a source not only of value, but of more value than it has itself” and can thus be employed to increase the value of commodities. Yet labour, as all commodities has two different forms of value, its exchange-value and its use-value. For Marx the exchange-value of labour is defined by the cost required to reproduce such labour (housing, healthcare, nutrition etc.) whilst the use-value is defined by the quantity of labour which can be gotten out of the labourer in a given time period. The labourer Marx argues sells their exchange-value but cannot help but also give their use-value which is what the capitalist puts to work to valorize his commodities. Thus whilst the capitalist pays for the reproduction of the labourers labour, he takes from the labourer their capacity to valorize commodities at the highest rate of valorization possible. Thus the capitalist can get the greatest use-value out of the labourer by ensuring the intensification of the use of labour through the extension of the work day and the division of labour. Marx comes to describe the process as such:

By turning his money into commodities that serve as the material elements of a new product, and as factors in the labour-process, by incorporating living labour with their dead substance, the capitalist at the same time converts value, i.e., past, materialised, and dead labour into capital, into value big with value, a live monster that is fruitful and multiplies.

What emerges then between the exchange-value and use-value of labour-power is what Marx terms surplus-value as the value produced over and above the value purchased from the labourer. And whilst for Marx the production of surplus-value has been common to all modes of production, it is with capitalism that it emerges as absolute, as the fundamental object of social organisation. And linked then to surplus-value is the problem of exploitation. Exploitation is defined by Marx as the difference between the exchange-value of labour power and the value extracted from this labour-power in its use in the production process. Exploitation isn’t then simply an inequality but a structural distinction between the market-value of labour and its capacity for producing value and historically exploitation is then a fundamental point of struggle between the capitalist who wishes to increase the distinction between use and exchange value through the lengthening of the working day, “capital has one single life impulse, the tendency to create value and surplus-value”, and the worker who wishes to contain the working day within the limits of what is required to reproduce their own labour.

Yet in its practice exploitation expresses something fundamental of the hidden working of capital, a tendency towards constant valorization of commodities and thus the need to increase capital’s circulation through the intensification of the extraction of use-value from labour. As Marx would poetically describe:

Capital is dead labour, that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks. The time during which the labourer works, is the time during which the capitalist consumes the labour-power he has purchased of him.

Yet how then does capitalist exploitation differ from clientelist modes of exploitation?

To begin with it could be argued that exploitation under capitalism is normalised. In pre-capitalist economic formations, labour for subsistence predominates and whilst the appropriation of surplus-value occurs, this is often undertaken through force, through direct appropriation of products or through forced labour, for example corvee labour. Similarly whilst local landlords, feudal chiefs or bosses might live off of the surplus-labour of their clients or subjects, such exploitation is open to contestation or negotiation in which concessions can be gained and were often gained. See for example E.P. Thompson’s account of food riots in 18^th century England, aimed against profiteering. Under capitalism on the other hand exploitation becomes fundamental to the economic process, the labourer, stripped of possession of the means of production must sell their labour on the market to the commodity owner who aims for the valorization of their commodity in a process aimed towards the production of profit and not subsistence. Exploitation isn’t here direct but implicit in the process of the sale of labour and whilst the terms of ones exploitation can be contested, through challenging the length of work, the intensity of work, through strikes, machine breaking and working to rule, the ability of capital to isolate labour and separate it from a means of resistance and any legal protections has meant that exploitation has become consistently normalised in capitalist societies.

Equally under capitalism, exploitation isn’t the direct effect of a personal relationship but is the outcome of an abstract market exchange. This means two things, on the one hand that capitalism doesn’t require exploitation to occur on the basis of a face-to-face relationship, but occurs rather through the exchange of labour on a market-place which can be particular, indirect and depersonalised. Whilst similarly, exploitation cannot be seen as the outcome of particular actions within a face-to-face relationship, for example the direct appropriation of economic product but rather the abstract rules of market exchange, and the economic laws of value. Thus as Engels framed the problem of understand the source of surplus-value:

Whence comes this surplus-value? It cannot come either from the buyer buying the commodities under their value, or from the seller selling them above their value. For in both cases the gains and the losses of each individual cancel each other, as each individual is in turn buyer and seller. Nor can it come from cheating, for though cheating can enrich one person at the expense of another, it cannot increase the total sum possessed by both, and therefore cannot augment the sum of the values in circulation. (...) This problem must be solved, and it must be solved in a purely economic way, excluding all cheating and the intervention of any force — the problem being: how is it possible constantly to sell dearer than one has bought, even on the hypothesis that equal values are always exchanged for equal values?

the laws that regulate the exchange of commodities, have been in no way violated. Equivalent has been exchanged for equivalent. For the capitalist as buyer paid for each commodity, for the cotton, the spindle and the labour-power, its full value. He then did what is done by every purchaser of commodities; he consumed their use-value.

And what this means in the end is that exploitation under capitalism isn’t an abheration nor an exceptional moment, it isn’t bad people doing bad things, but is the normal functioning of the system. It is the way in which poverty, inequality, deprivation and over-work are produced not through bad actions but through the mundane and banal operation of the market-place. It occurs even with the best intention of all actors involved.

This is where the critique of capitalism differs from the critique of clientelism and corruption. For if both are accused of producing the same effects, the way in which they do this is diameterically opposed. Thus the critique of clientelism focuses upon the personalities, the instances of wrong-doing and the wider effects this produces. It focuses on the hidden and secretive world of illegal dealings which fall outside of the formal economy and which enable economic and political elites to obtain power. Yet what these discourses are missing is a critique of capitalism. A critique of the systemic ways in which poverty and inequality are produced and maintained, and a critique of the way in which citizens are disarmed and dominated by a system which subordinates them to the power of capital. Political discourses of exploitation then focus upon the personal and direct expressions of exploitation but leave completely uncritiqued the indirect and systemic forms of corruption. They are concerned with the political importance of corruption, the production of clientelistic vote-banks and the production of economic dependency, but ignore the political effects of processes of proletarianization, accumulation by dispossession and the subordination of labour to capital. Whilst the first can be said to have deleterious consequences for democratic governance and social and economic life, so do processes of capitalism which are increasingly much more fundamental in transforming societies in Southeast Asia.

The neoliberalisation of the state, the growth of economic precarity and the production of inequality remains however under explored as matters of fundamental political and economic importance. Whilst in Western democracies under the sway of a neoliberal consensus a critique of capital has rememerged in opposition to a contemporary political and economic crisis, in the newly developed states of Southeast Asia with some exceptions, a critique of capital and a critique of capital in the role of producing poverty, inequality and deprivation is missing, both at the level of popular discourse and intellectual discourse. The focus remains on clientelism and corruption as the fundamental ills of the nation and the fundamental restraints on the realisation of democratic modernity.

This of course implies ignoring the transformative role of capitalism in Southeast Asian societies, yet it also implies a misrecognition of the problem of exploitation. It roots capitalist exploitation in individual actions, in bad people and non-transparent governance systems, and are the targets for overcoming exploitation. Linked to this the rooting of exploitation within particular relations instead of systemic structures entails the idea, popular within middle-class political discourses, that the ills of society reside not in the system of capitalist accumulation but in the particular elites and governance systems imposed upon national capitalisms, which subvert its revolutionary potentials. It removes exploitation from the province of capitalism and renders it the fault of some alien body grafted onto it. If only this alien body was removed the argue, all could experience prosperity and development. The idea here remains that exploitation and corruption take place in an opposition between a capitalism, which aims towards open and free competition, and systems of governance, which aim towards closure and secrecy. It leads then only to the idea that capitalism itself can be perfected through the removal of such systems of governance and that what should be aimed for is a well regulated and well governed capitalism.

Yet this binary division between clientelistic exploitation and capitalism isn’t unique to newly industrialised countries. From the early 1960s two British thinkers, Tom Nairn and Perry Anderson in a series of critiques of the British model of national development, which became the basis of the Nairn-Anderson thesis, argued that compared to its European counterparts, British capitalism had remained underdeveloped on the basis of early emergence within the structures of European politics, its failure to overthrow the key institutions of the feudal state, the monarchy, the aristocracy, the established church and its production of an immature and archaic capitalism which was soon outstripped by other emerging capitalisms in central Europe, North America or East Asia. This entailed they argued a failure to modernize British society which was at the root of the failure of the British left to produce a revolutionary situation, Britain had rather remained a fundamentally conservative country. The failure that Nairn and Anderson highlighted was then the failure of Britain to undergo a true capitalist revolution, preferring to retain fundamentally pre-capitalist institutions of governance which had held back the revolutionary tendencies of capital. Such a thesis is today the same thesis reproduced by the middle-classes and many intellectuals of developing and recently developed countries. The failure of such states they argue is to have not undergone a meaningful capitalist revolution, what has been produced they argue is a partial capitalism which has nevertheless retained pre-capitalist systems of governance and production which have fundamentally limited the capacity of capitalism to impose itself on social and political life and produced then a litany of social ills defined not by development but underdevelopment. Within such a reading which talks of Southeast Asian “ersatz capitalism” these states are not true capitalist states and therefore to analyse their politics one cannot simply focus on capitalism but on the relationship between the capitalist economy and non-capitalist formations, upon political business.

Is this however to misunderstand the true nature of capitalism? For Ellen Woods the Narin-Anderson thesis was based upon an idealised image of capitalism which was itself immanent its functioning. It was an expression of the “pristine culture of capitalism” which viewed capitalism as linked to economic and political modernization. Yet Woods would argue for a need to focus on upon the real historical functioning of capitalism which aside from this ideal developed unevenly and in circumstances not of its own making.

As Woods argues the British experience of early industrialisation and later industrial decline doesn’t contradict the logic of capitalism. Capitalism she argues has no connection with the logic of continuous production nor of continuous progress. Capitalism is as Marx pointed out simply the wish to increase the rate of exploitation, to increase the difference between the exchange-rate paid for labour and the use-value obtained from it. Capitalism can in this reading tolerate a variety of social and economic realities so long as this maximisation can occur and for Woods then capitalism has been able to function immanently to archaic forms on the one hand because of its lack of concern for the form of institutional arrangements as against their functioning (do they impede capitalist development?), allowing for the gradual transformation of archaic institutions in line with capitalist demands, as Woods terms it “old wine in new bottles”, and on the other hand because archaic forms are not inherently an impediment to a dynamic capitalism, capitalism has been able to function dynamically alongside a variety of archaic forms and these forms have also been capable of resolving the functional contradictions of pure capitalism, think of the legitimising role of traditonal forms of authority in reproducing the deference of labour against capital. Woods would then paradoxically argue that “Britain may even be the most thoroughly capitalist culture in Europe”, not because it was closest to the model of pure capitalism but because without fundamentally changing its governing institutions it was nevertheless fundamentally transformed by capitalism. It is the economy in which capitalism organically developed earliest and at its most developed and which transformed not only British society but the world around it. Woods comes then to describe the difference as such “What England lacked in political discourse it possessed in historical reality”.

What is produced is an intellectual binary between capitalism and non-capitalism, undermining the real lived practice of capitalism.

It could be argued that what is present today in the analysis of Southeast Asian states which have been transformed by processes of capitalist accumulation is such a disjuncture between political discourse and historical reality, and thus a lack of concern for the real process of capitalist accumulation alongside archaic political and social forms. Similarly with popular and scholarly discourses of exploitation, at the level of political discourse there has largely been an absence of discussion of capitalist forms of exploitation, preferring instead to discuss clientelism and corruption, yet and the level of historical reality there has been a whole series of struggles and contestations over such a concept. Meaningful critique will then have to bridge this gap if it is to have anything of fundamental political importance to say.

With another budget in Malaysia came the announcement of another increase in BR1M payments. BR1M (Bantuan Rakyat 1Malaysia) was established in 2012 as a cash handout to the lowest 40 per cent of earners in Malaysia, and forms part of a wider collection of pro-poor welfare polices under the 1Malaysia "brand", which also includes 1Malaysia Clinics, budget grocery stores (Kedai Rakyat 1Malaysia), community internet programmes, 1Malaysia Book Vouchers, PR1MA homes, as well as social development foundations such as Yayasan 1Malaysia. Starting out as a one off cash payment of RM500 to households with a net income of below RM3000 per month, BR1M is set in 2017 to pay out RM1200 to those households earning RM3000 or less, RM450 to single households earning RM2000 or less and RM900 to households with a net income of between RM3000-4000 per month.

BR1M has however from the start been divisive. Former Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad has termed it "dedak" (animal feed) and argued that it inculcates a spirit of welfare dependency. Whilst it was repeatedly highlighted in the 2013 General Election as a form of vote buying amongst poor rural voters and as an expression of populist economics which attempts to trade "goodies" in the budget for electoral loyalty.

And yet BR1M isn't in reality so unique. There has been a growing tendency within the Global South towards pro-poor welfare policies which seek to provide for the masses of urban and rural poor who in many cases have previously been excluded outside of the gains of development.  Thaksin Shinawatra rose to power in Thailand in the early 2000's on a platform which sought to appeal to the rural poor and which offered a series of microcredit loans, cash handouts to villages (SML) and launched the One Tambon, One Product scheme. On the other hand in Latin America the Oportunidades programme provided cash assistance to poor families in return for school attendance and healthcare checkups. Such a programme would then serve as inspiration for a series of cash transfer programmes, from Bolsa Familia in Brazil to the  Pantawid Pamilyang Pilipino Program in Philipines, Indonesia's Program Keluarga Harapan and many others.  More radically in Latin America populists such as Hugo Chavez rose to power on the basis of a series of pro-poor policies, implemented through Bolivarian Missions which sought to assist the poor through free healthcare and education provision and a series of food and housing subsidies.

Many of these programmes have faced the charges made against BR1M, that they are a form of vote-buying in which the poor are made dependent upon the charity of incumbent political parties, and a means through which the poor become a dependable vote-bloc for incumbent political parties. And yet at the centre of this critique isn't simply a critique surrounding  the development of "electoral authoritarianism" but also a liberal, or rather decidedly neo-liberal economic vision which seeks to challenge pro-poor economic policies as something  which is inimical to real (capitalist)l development, an argument which has been evident in continuing the debates around BR1M.

Thus Dr Muhammed Abdul Khalid, author of The Colour of Inequality, has argued for BR1M to become a conditional benefit to avoid the overreliance of families on the benefit. It should he argued be tied to factors such as school attendance, citing the example of the Philipines. "We don’t want them to be on BR1M forever".

Similarly Wong Chen the PKR member for Kelana Jaya has endorsed the idea of BR1M but talked of the need to incentivise the benefit. “It is not" he argued, "sufficient to give money to people just because they are poor, there should be some form of incentive". Rather he pointed towards the Brazilian Bolsa Familia, as an example of appropriate conditionalities, or the Austalian system of in-work benefits in which cash handouts would be paid through an individuals employer to incentivise work.

Whilst economist Datuk Dr Zakariah Abdul Rashid  of MIER, highlighting the importance of BR1M in increasing the income levels of the bottom 40% of Malaysian earners, has also argued that  "there are also many complaints about unproductive spending (using BR1M aid)", focusing on the need to regulate pro-poor cash handouts.

Whilst IDEAS CEO Wan Saiful Wan Jan has spoken out about the expansion of the numbers of those receiving BR1M and talked of the possibility of BR1M becoming a "permanent entitlement", arguing that the government should not be seeking to expand a programme such as BR1M but rather seeking to eradicate the need for it.

Yet what is missing in these neo-liberal critiques is an idea of the real role played by welfare and pro-poor economic policies in the politics of developing nations. Within such critiques welfare is read in opposition to capitalism, as a process of decommodification which ensures the security of the individual outside of the market place and ensures a buffer between the individual and the rampant competition of the market. Welfare is thus seen as a challenge to continuous capitalist accumulation and for the poor as a short term fix which compromises their long term inclusion within processes of development. Yet what such critiques ignore is the way in which, particularly in the new welfare models prevalent in the Global South, such pro-poor policies confuse any neat distinction between welfare and development, capitalism and non-capitalism and thus expose an altogether new logic.

To make sense of this it is first crucial to understand that the new welfare models occur on the basis of a very different relationship between welfare and development from that which was seen in the classic European welfare state. For if European welfare states emerged within developed and industrialised economies in which the role of welfare was to provide temporary relief from those excluded from the results of development, within the Global South welfare is emerging within still developing states and thus has the task of both providing for those excluded from development (the underdeveloped, the marginalised or the informalised poor) but also of assisting in the management of the process of development itself. This is a transformation of welfare from provision to governance.

Fundamental to understanding this transformation is the analysis of Kalyan Sanyal, particularly in his Rethinking Capitalist Development: Primitive Accumulation, Governmentality and Post-Colonial Capitalism which problematises the contemporary relationship between capitalism, development and the welfare and within which Sanyal argues that within post-Colonial economies new forms of capitalism and ideologies of development have brought the management of the poor (welfare) simultaneously within the remit of capitalist governance whilst nevertheless ensuring the reproduction of their exclusion outside of it, a logic which fundamentally challenges neoliberal critiques of welfare.

Yet what are the transformations in capitalism and development which Sanyal notes? Fundamental here is the emergence of continuing processes of accumulation through dispossession which have seen both pre-capitalist social and economic formations brought within the remit of capital accumulation (land enclosure, resource extraction, challenges to customary rights, intellectual property, financializaiton) whilst vast populations have been left outside (or cast outside) processes of capitalist development. This has come to challenge both the progressivist notions of capitalist accumulation which view capitalism as the progenitor of a general trend of growth and economic development, as well as the view of capitalism as driven by what Marx termed "freedom, equality, property and Bentham" (liberalism), thus rather than accumulation through disposession forming a moment in the prehistory of capital, processes of dispossession and uneven development have increasingly appeared coterminous with capitalism.

This, Sanyal argues, has fundamentally altered notions and practices of development in the Global South. Within the era of post-Colonial nationalism the state took up the development of its populations through the accumulation of capital and economic growth as a means to raise the welfare standards of the urban and rural poor (as evidenced by Nehruvian socialism, Marhenism in Indonesia, the New Economic Policy in Malaysia) and in turn emphasised modernisation and industrialisation as means by which the nation could attain power over its future. Yet by the late 1970s Sanyal argued the realisation that state-led industrialisation strategies in countries such as India were unable to full absorb the mass reserve army of labour saw a transformation in the goals of development from an attempt to empower the nation to a more modest attempts at poverty alleviation which didn't target the nation but targeted the poor. With welfare then becoming concerned with the governance of poverty and the poor welfare what occurred was then a governmentalisation of state institutions in which it was no longer the collective body of the nation but the individualized bodies of the poor which became the object of government policy and of development institutions which were now tasked not with the eradication of poverty but with its regulation.

This produced, Sanyal argues, a split between capitalism and development. Capitalism was no longer as such a means of development, rather it was the place in which the resources for development (as poverty alleviation) were produced, whilst development wasn't itself a means of increasing capital, rather it took the results of capital and  redistributed them in the form of microfinance or state welfare in order to maintain those thrown outside of the formal economy. Sanyal thus talks of a binary machinery which has emerged in the Global South in which processes of capital accumulation, which imply the production of exclusion and dispossession, continue, whilst their other hand, development, through the governance of the poor legitimises the rule of capital. This is a logic which includes that which has been excluded and maintains the exclusion of that which is included, it is as Maurice Blanchot said of the establishment of the asylum in 17th century France an attempt by society to "confine the outside" and thus conforms to Giorgio Agamben's theorisation of homo sacer as the result of an inclusive exclusion. It is in this sense that we can understand his comment that development today "not only reproduces within itself the people that is excluded but also transforms the entire population of the Third World into bare life".

Yet for the politics of contemporary welfare what is the reality of this space simultaneously inside and outside of capitalism? For Kalyan it is the space of the need economy, of economic activity defined by the meeting of basic needs rather than by systematic capital accumulation. The need economy is then the space of the informal economy, the space of hawkers, petty commodity producers, in which production is driven for the end not of economic expansion (M-C-M') but of consumption. Development within the bounds then of the need economy doesn't take the form of economic growth, but rather meeting the needs of the urban and rural poor, outside of the real economy but still within the bounds of capitalism. Thus as Sanyal highlights welfare initiatives such as microcredit which have provided the poor of the Global South with cash loans in order to be able to establish their own micro-enterprises in which small scale production is aimed toward individual consumption. Similarly Lena Lavinas has argued Conditional Cash Transfers in Latin America have paired basic social provision with the expansion of networks of debt and finance which are in turn commoditised to the benefit of capital. Thus welfare today is increasingly the provision of basic need within a need economy which is nevertheless subject to the dicates of capitalism and which, paradoxically, capitalism can benefit from.

In Malaysia this has been evident not only in the package of welfare measures contained in the 1Malaysia programme, but also in the announcement in the aftermath of the last budget to assist members of the Bottom 40 group of earners to participate in ride sharing apps such as Uber or other expressions of the sharing economy in order to unlock other sources of income amongst a group who suffer with the high cost of living, promising also funding to assist individuals to buy cars to participate in such an economy. Similarly such a philosophy was expressed by Ahok, the underfire Mayor of Jakarta who, commenting on a failed attempt to evict slum dwellers, bemoaned the fact that some dwellers had certificates of ownership over their land because of previous programmes which "let the poor easily gain things". As he went onto say:

"Everything is for the poor. Well, the implementation is wrong. For me they need affordable commodities, school fees, and medical expenses, housing, transportation, access to work, but not provide them with land. I have conveyed that with an ideology from the French Revolution, people don't need wheat fields, they need bread. Don't spoil them by giving them land with illegal certificates, that was a mistake".

In both instances we see something of the transformation highlighted by Sanyal in which provision for the poor is increasingly measured by its ability to assist the poor in their activity within the need economy and not by their ability to enter into processes of capital accumulation. Not by their ability to own capital goods but by their ability to consume goods made by capital.

As Sanyal argues this goes to the heart certain post-Colonial modes of accumulation which whilst seeking to take control of processes of capitalist accumulation largely ended up distributing the goods generated through capitalist accumulation. Thus if the Indian nationalist project initially placed its faith in industrialization and modernization to uplift the nation, the realization of persistent poverty in the face of healthy levels of industrial growth led analysts to question the ability of industrial growth to reduce poverty, which led to the development of poverty alleviation as a key goal in Indian economic development and as series of anti-poverty programmes to this end such as the  Rural Development Income Scheme and the Rural Employment Programme.

In Malaya independence was granted upon a conciliatory basis which saw the maintainence of the colonial economy as the price for the handing over of political control.Thus in the aftermath of independence the Malayan and later Malaysian government sought to correct the economic and racialized inequalities which emerged under colonial capitalism, within the economic confines of the colonial economy. Thus whilst developmentalism was important to the post-colonial state, realised through the pastoral role of the major political parties and through the creation of the Rural Industrial Development Authority (RIDA) and later through land redistribution under FELDA, the creation of MARA to advance rural Malay interests and the creation of JKK's to coordinate rural development, it remained limited in scope and inequalities between rural Malays and other groups continued to grow and poverty worsened. The tumults of 1969 saw then the abandonment of such a model and the attempt by the state to direct the process of capitalist accumulation towards the eradication of poverty and the eradication of racial divisions. This programme envisaged a transformation in the ownership of capital away from British interests and towards Bumiputera ownership, as well as an intensification of export-oriented industrialisation and of rural development initiatives which would see an increase in Malay participation in the economy. And yet the nature of these policies in the end ensured that the benefit of intensive economic modernization and wealth redistribution benefited a small elite of land owners and businessmen whilst leaving many outside of the process of intensive capitalist development, both in the rural and urban areas. In the aftermath then of the NEP there has been an increasing state focus on the management of poverty, through the establishment of microcredit loans via Amanah Ikhtiar Malaysia and welfare foundations such as YPEIM, various subsidies and increasingly direct forms of welfare such as BR1M.

Yet if this has been true of post-Colonial capitalist states is has also been true of more contemporary attempts to produce 21st century socialism. Thus in Chavez's Venezuela, his socialist model was premised upon a radicalization of the idea of development described by Sanyal whereby, dependent upon large surpluses gained through petroleum production, Chavez could embark upon a series of pro-poor welfare policies which sought to empower the poor. Yet in so far as Chavez didn't fundamentally challenge the rentier nature of Venezuelan capitalism  he could only effect a transfer of wealth and not a transfer of power, when the oil price collapsed so did, by and large, Chavismo.

What they above examples then show us is that at the root of contemporary pro-poor policies isn't a rejection of capitalist accumulation, but by and large a failure to master such accumulation, which then, to keep capitalist accumulation going requires the intervention of the state to manage those who fall outside of it. In this sense it becomes necessary to read welfare and pro-poor policies as central to the stabilisation and reproduction of capitalism and as a means through which the unruly outside of the excluded and marginalised can, instead of being left to generate excessive resentment outside of the system be pacified within it. This logic can of course be stretched by Leftist governments into an anti-capitalist direction and yet through reproducing the division described by Kalyan Sanyal they are in truth only repeating the failure to fully come to terms with the contemporary form of capitalist accumulation.

This is what a critique of welfare today will need to do. It will have to be alive to the kind of dynamics that welfare functions within and to understand the way in which neoliberal governments in the Global South can propose a series of pro-poor policies not in spite of their neoliberalism but because of it, and that welfare, far from decommodifiying social life, is itself increasingly an expression of capitalist accumulation. It will have then also to understand a new form of subjection of the urban and rural poor which doesn't occur through deprivation and exclusion but through governance and regulation. It will have to be a critique which understands capitalism in the way it really functions and not in its ideal form.

The Pristine Culture of Capitalism Wood's refers to in her title is the idealised notion of capitalism which is all that English capitalism has failed to achieve. This ideal capitalism is the idea of a true capitalism, an urban and bourgeois capitalism in which all that is rural, agrarian and  that is aristocratic or emanates from the peasantry appears as underdeveloped and backwards. Against this, English capitalism which began precisely in the countryside and was dominated by an agrarian aristocracy has always appeared as a "bastard capitalism" which maintained its ancient traditions and pre-modern origins.

Central then to Wood's investigation is the relationship between capitalism and modernity and the question of whether capitalism is fundamentally linked to modernism or whether or not modernism can be realised outside of the pristine notion of capitalism. This is fundamental today to debates surrounding authoritarian capitalism and conservative modernisation.

For Wood in the context of debates over British capitalism such a question necessarily implies a critique of what is commonly known as the Nairn-Anderson Thesis which emerged out of the writings in the New Left Review of Perry Anderson and Tom Nairn on the crisis of British capitalism in the 1960's and 70's. For Narin and Anderson the crisis had its origins in the underdeveloped nature of British capitalism, it was, they argued, prematurely born and incompletely developed leading both to a focus upon primitive commercial and financial capitalism and to the maintenance of archaic institutions and cultural forms and thus a failure of the middle classes to full realise the capitalist ideal. Fundamental here to Nairn and Anderson was the British state and the entire superstructure of British life which supposedly restrained the advance of capitalist modernisation.

The British state, according to the ‘Nairn-Anderson theses’, has hardly evolved beyond its peak of development in 1688. Never swept away by the complete series of ‘bourgeois revolutions’ that modernized the other major states of Europe, the dead hand of antiquity, and especially a backward state and dominant culture, left the British economy without resources of renovation when its first precocious spurt of growth and early leadership had been exhausted.

In short then what appeared to hold back the advance of modernity within Britain was the failure of a bourgeois revolution to revolutionise the state-form and, as happened on the continent, to rationalize its key institutions.(It has always seemed to me that at the heart of this thesis was a very typical wish of the British left to have the French experience of politics which appears more revolutionary and directly antagonistic).

As Arno Mayer would argue in "The Persistence of the Old Regime", in truth the maintenance of ancien regimes in the face of bourgeois revolutions wasn't merely a British experience but was fundamentally a European problem which became increasingly exposed with the crisis of global capitalism within the 1970s. As Wood argues this global crisis which particularly hit American and European capital quickly undermined the unique nature of Britain's economic decline and exposed more universal questions about the relationship between capitalism and modernity.

As the Nairn-Anderson thesis began to grapple with problems of capitalist crisis two dominant theses began to emerge.

Thesis 1: English capitalism as stunted by its precocious origins and held back by its "agrarian and aristocratic origins".

Thesis 2: Rather than English capitalism being held back by external forces imposed upon it, it has been held back by its own immanent development, which being essentially organic and slow in progression meant that it didn't face the obstacles faced by other developing states in particular the need to stimulate and manage short-term capitalist development which implied state rationalisation. Here the very advantage of English capitalism in its early stages in the long term comes to weaken its ability to handle the onset of decline.

As Woods then argues if Thesis 1 posits a progressive modernizing capitalism restrained from expansion by the archaic and constituted then Thesis 2 is able to explain the way in which "archaic forms are not necessarily incompatible with a dynamic capitalism" as many other states have shown. Here the archaic doesn't function as a restraint to captalist development but appears as immanent to its development and integral to its functioning.

Within this topology Thesis 1 views British decline as the failure of capitalism to overcome its external limitations whilst Thesis 2 views this decline on the basis of contradictions of capitalism itself which produces within itself its own conditions of underdevelopment which appear necessary up until the onset of crisis at which point it capital finds itself having to do its own uneven form of development.

Far then from British capitalism being under the yolk of an archaic state, the history of modern Britain is one of intense capitalist development which if it wasn't present in political discourse was present in lived reality. Paradoxically for all of its attachment to pre-capitalist culture,

Britain may even be the most thoroughly capitalist culture in Europe

The British State

What relationship was there then between the state form and capitalist modernization?

Where as the continental absolutist state was required as a mechanism for the appropriation of surplus labour, in which sense it played the same role as the feudal lord, in England where capitalist relations were more developed this appropriation of surplus labour occurred in the economic sphere where the English ruling class were able to appropriate labour through economic relations without the political intervention of the state. Whilst Old Corruption certainly took the form of an appropriation of surplus as Wood maintains this wasn't the primary means of appropriation but was rather a method of creaming off surpluses made within the private sphere. In this sense for Wood the English state has historically been defined by  the domination of the state by civil society. Yet in this case the failure to develop an absolutist state in the continental sense wasn't a failure of modernizing capitalism, but was an outcome of its very development.

Fundamental argues Wood is the differential experiences of feudalism which governed the transition to capitalism. Thus whilst the French absolutist state emerged as an opposition to the Feudal parcelisation of sovereignty and as a positing of a single overriding authority English feudalism developed along different lines. When French capitalism began to develop in response to developments in England, the Napoleonic state took up as its duty the destruction of the parcelized remnants of French feudalism which allied the centralized nation-state to capitalist development. Yet in England a different model prevailed, feudal parcelization was never so extreme with the imposition of a unitary political class during the Norman conquest and from early on formed national institutions in particular a Parliament whilst the relative weakness of the Aristocracy ensured that they reverted to economic power as against the local sovereignty of French lords.When the State then entered into English vocabulary its European absolute ideal was quickly quashed in the revolutions of the 17th centuries and terms such as civil society or commonwealth appeared more common. The centralization of the British state was then a far more drawn out and older process than those realised on the continent.

It was then out  of this tradition Wood argues that a different form of British nationalism emerged. Where as within the French model nationalism was mobilised by the centralising state, within Britain it became mobilised in the interest of the crown and established order. Equally insofar as British nationalism couldn't rely on the identity of a single ethnic group or regional identity its only real identity became an identity with state structures and the monarchy who came to symbolise British culture through their associated traditions. What this produced then wasn't an egalitarian form of nationalism which emphasised the equally of rights and status but rather a traditional nationalism which imposed back upon society a heirarchical pre-modern class system which was in stark contrast to the understandings of class that emerged in continental states.

What Wood then calls the "cult of the monarchy" in Britain is the combination of a weak state with an "artificial symbol" of statehood which stands in its place. The monarchy becomes the source of national unity and identity because the state is unable to, thus where as in France the identity with the absolutist state has remained strong within Britain it was the monarchy and it traditions which provided British society with its self-understanding.

As Wood argues,  British politics has been suffused not only then with a economic struggle between classes but also a cultural politics between classes based upon language and style. What this has meant in the end is that what appears as politics within the UK, its formal institutions and the State have more often than not been overcoded with the symbolism and traditionalism of British national identity. Thus whilst the Left have always assumed that at the heart of government they were engaged within a struggle over power, what they have often failed to realise is that more than anything they were participating in a symbolic economy in which the problems of class, language, style and tradition were just as important as political considerations. When they have then thought that they were simply doing politics is has more often than not turned out that they were particpating in the unpolitical and restrained under the sheer weight of tradition.

The problem of the Left has then been that is has perceived the field as politics as no different to that in other continental states and as amenable to modernist and modernizing tendencies. Yet when John Major argued that Britain was a Conservative country which voted Labour from time to time he was of course correct, the "sheer weight" of tradition continues to crush political action in Britain today which is more often than not obsessed with precedent, history, procedure and the politics of appearance over all else. What the British Left then has to grapple with is the legacy of a developmental process which produced a particularly unique form of national politics and this would imply I think a critique of all of the existing institutions and political culture that survives today.

Whilst it might also appear that this problem has in the post-War years given way to real processes of modernization which has broken up traditional culture and the class system in fact this problem is more contemporary than ever. If there was a crisis of the pillars the British state-system it emerged in the 1970s when a global capitalist crisis was confronted by both increased labour radicalisation and a neo-liberal policy response. In this scenario out and out class struggle came to over turn the traditional codings of the British class hierarchy, whilst the deindustrialisation of the British economy led to a break up of traditional forms of work and thus a break up of traditional class hierarchies. Similarly capital became increasingly freed from this system, and with the rise of yuppie culture and the globalization of economic life alongside an ideology of equality of opportunity led to the idea of the breakdown of class. Similarly Thatcherism with its modernizing tendency began to attack many of the institutions of the State from the House of Lords to the judiciary and the Church of England. Not surprisingly then under the sustained against British identity it was the monarchy that came increasingly under attack and appeared as an increasingly archaic and parasitic institution. After the death of Princess Diana it was severely under attack  and yet emerged in the next decade to become the symbol of a newly emergent British or rather English identity which was once again in touch with its past, in which a newly emerging class system whose ideals are represented by the British Bakeoff, Downton Abbey, the family values of Wills & Kate and the British Army.

Today then this very symbol of Britain's very conservative modernity has once again become resurgent and is reconstituting itself again on the basis of a politics of culture, language and status. Unless the Left in Britain is able to confront this new order then the rain of Conservatism will go on unchallenged and the traditional structure of British capitalism will continue to operate.

An Absence of Sovereignty

What has marked then Britain's problematic relationship with modernization has been the absence of any clear idea of sovereignty, or of any absolute and indivisible notion of political authority within its political discourse. Britain is, Wood argues, a place of mixed constitutions and mixed monarchies which have eventually coalesced into something like a coherent ruling order. The early emergence of an assertive Parliament ensured that within English discourse there was never any single and absolute source of legislative power.

Yet as Wood argues, paradoxically the French development of an absolutist notion of sovereignty was a response to the very absence of a unified and consolidated form of power within the French experience. On the other hand the very fact that within England and centralised and organised state arose far earlier, it required to a much lesser degree this idealisation of absolute sovereignty. In England it was rather the experience of real and lived forms of power which coalesced into something like a stable political order, in France it was necessary to overcome the real and lived forms of feudal fragmented power in order to realise such a political order.

This distinction is also capable of being made in relation to English and French approaches to the law. If for the French, the creation of a centralized state entailed the overcoming of medieval law, the return to Roman law and the idea of sovereignty as law making based on the will of a sovereign then for the English law still remained largely customary law. The common law system wasn't however fragmented, it was universal insofar as it was applicable all over the realm but it wasn't united from above but formed through a process of translation and evolution. Importantly this meant that whereas in France the centralization of law was antagonistic to the parcelization of sovereignty in England monarchical and feudal power could coexist side by side because if in France feudal lords had little direct control over land and required their public jurisdictional powers to extract surplus English lords who possessed more direct control tended to be less antagonistic to royal power whilst the development of Parliament produced a point of mediation between these two forces.

Its wrong then to merely see, argues Wood, common law as a form of customary law or as a preservation of tradition, it may rely upon precedent but it was equally able to mobilise this precedent to override customary rights as it would with the enclosure of common land. Common law is in this sense not the reign of traditionalism but merely a particular form of mediation a particular way of solving legal problems which was equally as capable of adapting to capitalism.

Malaysia's Post-Colonial Capitalism

The above couldn't however merely be restricted to the development of British capitalism, whilst there is a element of this in all capitalist polities, it appears particular evident in the colonial and post-Colonial states of the developing world. Thus if colonialism tended to operate through the imposition of capitalist relations, a weak notion of sovereignty, a mixed constitution, a confusion between the political, economic and social domains and the maintenance of traditional and pre-capitalist forms of political and social life then post-Colonial states who attempted to navigate paths of capitalist modernization found themselves confronted by weak states, pre-capitalist social forms and cultures and weak or non-existent middle classes. The post-Colonial state has then nearly always been an anathema to the "pristine culture of capitalism" which is said to be modernist, bourgeois and urban, and it has been the constant call of modernization theory that in order to achieve full capitalist development it would have to overcome all of these so called deficiencies.

The problem then of conservative modernization or authoritarian capitalism is central to the post-Colonial state today particularly in states such as India and China. Yet it is equally as apparent in the development and contemporary politics of Malaysia a country which starkly represents the political and economic make-up which was the object of critique by the Nairn-Anderson theses.

Thus on the one hand  displays many of the landmarks of conservative modernization critiqued by Anderson and Nairn, it has maintained its monarchical system and many of the signifiers of feudal culture particularly in the political domain, it functions as both a consociational democracy or as William Case calls it a "semi-democracy" in which the rule by a grand coalition of elites prevails, supposedly pre-modern notions of race and religion reign, whilst traditionally the urban and mostly Chinese middle class found itself within a system which provided more power to rural constituencies and government bureaucracy. Yet within this make-up Malaysia still manage high level of economic growth and development in the years after the end of British colonisation.

Today however this development is increasingly seen as under threat and there is increasingly talk of a crisis or decline in what was once a Southeast Asian power-house. Within these co-ordinates then Malaysia appears today to share the same problems which Nairn and Anderson sought to diagnose in British post-War decline. For Malaysia this crisis appears more than anything rooted in a long term failure to recover from the 1997 financial crisis and the failure to return to the days of 8-9% growth and increasing living standards. Whilst the worry is now that Malaysia is being out-competed by other local economies such as Indonesia and Vietnam and thus faces falling behind or being stuck in a "middle income trap" which prevents the realisation of "high income status" and generalised prosperity.

In relation to this a discourse has emerged in Malaysia which mirrors the narrow version of the Nairn-Anderson thesis as represented by Wood. Here there is a dichotomy between on the one hand capitalist modernization and on the other the inertia of institutions and traditions in which it is argued that Malaysia's race and religious based politics, its corruption and lack of transparency, its "feudal values" and one party-rule, all restrain the good  kind of dynamic and urbanising middle-class capitalism. Similarly then to Nairn and Anderson they argue that what Malaysia has lacked is a bourgeois revolution capable of sweeping aside its traditional baggage and ensuring the reign of middle-class and secular European values, which is to say modern values which would enable and not restrain capitalist modernisation. Such a view then leads into a series of narratives of Malaysian development and its contemporary crisis:

1. Colonial capitalism: for some the contemporary crisis  begins with the very nature of capitalist development under British colonialism, here it is argued that British colonialism insofar as it, through policies of divide and rule, held the Malay's outside of the sphere of capitalist development, and purposefully produced forms of traditionalism which produced a distinctly anti-modernist outlook and propped up the monarchy, aristocratic rule and other forms of authority (the best book here is Donna Harraway's "Traditionalism and the Ascendency of the Malay Ruling Class in Colonial Malaya"). In the post-War years it was the Putera-AMCJA coalition who sought to resist divide and rule policies of the British and support of aristocratic elites in favour of a multi-racial democratic coalition who demanded a popularly elected government and equality of citizenship as the basis for a modern Malayan nation-state. Yet it was the British plans initially for a Malayan Union and later for the Federation of Malaya which won through and key within such arrangements was the maintainence of the "traditional" Malay ruling class, the development of United Malays National Organisation (UMNO) as the aristocratic point of mediations between the Malay rulers and monarchs and the development of the Alliance system as a means of mediations between the elites of the different ethnic groups which maintained the ethnic divisions within Malayan nationalism. From the very beginning then it is argued that Malayan and later Malaysian capitalism was burdened with this particular state-form which enabled predatory and corrupt elite practices and subordinated capitalst development to the conservatism of tradition and religion and racial divisions.
2. New Economic Policy & Mahathir: for others the crisis emerged with the advent of the New Economic Policy in the 1970s which through a programme of affirmative action sought to reduce rural poverty and sought to increase the participation of Malay's in business through the preferential opportunities in employment and in the ownership of share capital. Whilst under Mahathir Mohamad it is argued that the combination of the preferential policies of the NEP mixed with mass privatisation produced a symbiotic relationship between politics and business. Here it is argued that the preferential policies of the NEP restrained capitalist modernization insofar as it limited the place of competition and meritocracy within the economy, because it rewarded individuals on the basis of race and connections, because it cemented racial divisions,  because it enabled elite corruption and the extension of political power into the economy and finally because it entailed a redistribution of wealth not in favour of capital but in favour of particular groups.
3.  Post-1997 & Najib - A more short term perspective sees  Malaysia's contemporary crisis as having more recent roots in the fallout from the Asian Financial Crisis and the increasing tendency on the one hand for Malaysian capitalists to consolidate their control over the economy in the form of increasing corruption and exploitation of links to government, and on the other hand for the ruling coalition to maintain itself in power through the exploitation of religious and ethnic divisions and increasing manipulation of the electoral system and the rural poor through patronage. Here  we find a system which combines an increased exposure to global capitalism with the doctrine of Ketuanan Melayu and one party rule

Against this there today is a dominant liberal critique of Malaysian capitalism which argues that for Malaysia to become fully developed the restraining forces of authoritarianism, race, religion and corruption have to overcome in favour of a modernization which will render middle-class values hegemonic and thus open up new spheres to competition  etc.

Yet what if as Wood argues that problem isn't one of restraint, what if rather than an opposition between capital accumulation and pre-modern notions of tradition and authority, there is in fact a functional coherence between the two which makes it impossible to posit an opposition between a good, liberal, urban, bourgeois, meritocratic capitalism on the one hand and an authoritarian and corrupt capitalism on the other hand. What if in fact this liberal critique which draws on the "pristine culture of capitalism" draws upon an ideal which if undesirable is also perhaps unrealistic and that rather than in the end choosing capitalism as modernisation will be forced to choose between capitalism or modernisation.

To give the example then of the New Economic Policy we find that far from it opposing to raw capital accumulation the values of affirmative action and poverty reduction, these values were the engine through which capitalist relations were expanded into new areas. Thus if you take Gomez and Saravanamuttu's volume "The New Economic Policy in Malaysia: Affirmative Action, Ethnic Inequalities and Social Justice" you find that whilst the New Economic Policy did have a positive effect on poverty reduction and the reduction of "horizontal inequalities" you find it mode of development was particularly uneven, this has led to the emergence of new spatial inequalities such as between urban and rural spaces, new vertical inequalities particularly between those elite beneficiaries of the NEP and the rural poor and inequalities of political function in which certain forms of industrialisation and rural development particularly export oriented electronics manufacturing in the Free Economic Zones and oil production were were privileged over others. In this sense we find that many poor rural Malays, Indians, Orang Asli and Indigenous people in Sabah and Sarawak lost out under the NEP because of the kind of land distribution and urban industrialisation promoted, whilst insofar as it generally reduced poverty it also allowed some to accrue vast amounts of wealth and power and to spread relations of capital into the rural areas. Thus as Maznah Mohamad argues in her article if the NEP enabled development and poverty reduction it was equally the harbinger of dislocation, dispossession and dystopia as proletarianized individuals were subjected to the uneven development of capitalist accumulation.

Far then from the NEP appearing as a socialist restraint on capitalist development, we find that affirmative action and poverty reduction were able to function through capitalist development and that the NEP was able to provide for these alongside forms of proletarianization, uneven development and increasing forms of inequality. In this way the attempt of the NEP to assert Malay power and culture within the economic domain hasn't taken the form of imposing on capital a set of external norms but of reproducing these norms in ways which conform to the needs of capital accumulation.

In this sense it would be important to outline the ways in which the categories of race and religion have themselves been remodelled in response to changes in processes of capitalist accumulation. Historically for example ideas of Malayness emerged not only out of things such as British census classification and the construction of a bumiputera population, but through the construction of presupposed attributes of such a race, principally their refusal of labour and commerce which where also effects of the colonial economy which sought to reduce competition with colonial capitalism through the organisation of local Malays as small land owners and farmers organised within a Kampung economy. Through this process non-urban, cosmopolitan and commercial  ideas of Malayness became excluded. Similarly with the emergence of the NEP the typical distinctions of race were displaced and reformed along new lines as the narrative of the underdeveloped and helpless Malay was increasingly utilised to justify an alliance between Malay supremacy and capitalist development.

Similarly the processes of Islamisation of Malaysian society weren't simply the expression of the religious expression of the Malay-Muslim majority it was just as much a political and economic response to the dislocations of capitalist development. Increased Islamic consciousness emerged then with the growth of a Malay middle class and particularly on the university campuses through student movements. Equally as Aihwah Ong has argued, the increased regulation of womens bodies and the imposition of Islamic regulations of dress emerged out of the movement of women from the family life of the Kampung to the independence of the factories and the anxieties this produced over immoral behaviour. Similarly the governmental driven Islamisation of the 1980s wasn't simply the reflection of an already existing Islamic culture but was just as much the imposition of a particular form of Islam which promoted development initiatives. It should be remembered then that the first two major expressions of this state Islamisation project were the development of an Islamic University (International Islamic University Malaysia) and an Islamic Bank (Bank Islam Malaysia), whilst as Khoo Boo Teik argues the type of Islam promoted by Mahathir Mohamad was one which emphasised values such as hard work, enterprise and obedience.

We have to then read these forms of race and religion and not being constituted essences outside of capitalism but contested fields which have often evolved in relation to trends within capitalist development itself. In this sense the contemporary critique in Malaysia which opposes an "old politics" of race, religion and authoritarianism to a "new politics" which is democratic, liberal, middle class and secular, appears problematic. The argument that Malaysia is itself held back by the imposition of this old politics and traditional structures on its dynamic economy ignores the very way in which this dynamic economy reproduces and needs these factors to survive. Malaysia might, to paraphrase Wood, be the most thoroughly capitalist culture in Southeast Asia.

The cry you constantly hear, that the fundamental problem of Malaysia is the use of race and religion appears false. The problem of Malaysia isn't race and religion but its particular form of capitalist development which has often been uncritically accepted. Today then in what many Malaysians see as the prolonged crisis of the Malaysian state and economy it isn't sufficient to call for a modernization of Malaysian politics and society to coincide with its modern capitalist economy as Nairn and Anderson bemoaned the lack of a bourgois revolution in Great Britain. What has to be problematised is rather the very relationship between capitalist development and an autocratic, corrupt state which relies upon particular racial and religious doctrines. Here the aim has to be  but the politicization and the economy,  culture and the category of modernity itself, to encourage new conceptions of modernity and economic life which no longer reproduce this dichotomy between the weight of tradition and the dynamism of modernity, with its demand for liberalization which as Malaysia shows, in no way threatens authortarianism. This is rather a story that needs to be overcome.

Put simply what has to be challenged is the idea that it remains possible to produce a link between liberal democracy and capitalism. Rather what has to be exposed are the darker tendencies inherent in modern day capitalism which opens up the interdependencies between the economy, culture and modernization, which will require a move beyond the critique of liberalism.

In Customs in Common E.P. Thompson interprets the 18th century as an age of transition.The old world of feudal paternalism was beginning to polarize to the extremes of the mob and the ruling elite, whilst within this matrix a middle class began develop who would go on to challenge the logic of the established order of the 18th century with an altogether different logic, the logic of the market.  Thus in his essay "The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century"  he describes the emergent conflict over the grain trade between the proponents of the market economy and the proponents of the moral economy. For Thompson whilst within modern economics the triumph of the market economy has appeared inevitable and necessary, it was in reality a conflict of cultures which didn't necessarily tend towards the triumph of the market. Yet once the moral economy had been defeated the working poor had to adjust to the emergence of a new world and thus develop new methods of politics to confront such a reality which culminated in the emergence of working class institutions, trade unions and workers parties.

In a certain sense a similar narrative can be discerned in Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams's diagnosis of our contemporary political predicament. Today they argue we are in an age of transition, with regards not only to the transition between the Fordist and post-Fordist world but also with regards the relationship between technology and the economy, whereby differing logics are competing for control of the global economy left politics is today caught in this period of transition and thus has to become adequate to its new opponents if it is to avoid fighting ghosts and turning political action into ritual.

They begin with a critique of  what they term the "folk politics" of the left, and cover familiar ground, horizontalism is critiqued, the weaknesses of localism exposed, the reliance upon age old methods of occupation, rally, protest and direct action declared as nostalgic and perhaps most importantly the feel good and affective aim of most activism (the requirement to do something, anything! aslong as its action) is compared unfavouably with the strategic and measured politics of modernity. Yet their focus in the end is on the problem of transition and the way in which the transition from the Fordist welfare state to the age of neoliberalism and digital technology has on the one hand pulled from under the feet of the left the effectivity of their methods and on the other established new rules of the game to which the left has to adapt. For Srnicek and Williams the worst element of this folk politics, its regression into a fetishization of action, presence, doing something and enjoyment is a direct reaction to the increasing failure of the politics of the left which, seeing no hope in traditional organisational politics, reduces itself to instantaneous and localized forms of resistance.

Yet Srnicek and Williams in response to this don't simply establish an opposition between knowledge and ignorance, oppression and freedom in which it is the lefts inability to comprehend or understand how they are dominated which stymies their ability to resist. Rather as they note contemporary capitalism is subjected to a million individual mutinies, yet insofar as they are individual they place an emphasis on the affective, the bodily and the emotional forms of politics  which in the end prove capable of leading towards individualized forms of protest, a tendency towards moralism or as Franco Berardi points out the reactive turn of individuals against themselves. These are in the end they argue "survival mechanisms" through which individuals repond to the pressures of contemporary capitalism when what is required are more developed means to oppose it. This isn't then a return to the theory of ideology but an important tactical distinction between local and immediate forms of power, and their operation within an overall system of domination.

What Srnicek and Williams then describe is a familiar but nevertheless enigmatic political problem, that resistance to the contemporary order is on going all of the time but more often than not takes a limited form and fails to challenge the contemporary order as such. For Srnicek and Williams this is expressed more than anything by the co-optation of anti-capitalist struggles into reformist movements seeking merely better and more ethical capitalists, fairer rules to the game or local fixes to global problems, from saving a local hospital to increasing local government spending. Here they argue whilst  such acts display an antagonistic relationship with immediate forms of exploitation they leave untouched the more fundamental and systemic aspects of exploitation which are harder to pin down. Such a narrative is prefaced by E.P. Thompsons analysis of the class politics of the 18th century. For Thompson the 18th century was a period in which labour became increasingly assertive and unruly and began to break the old relations of bondage which had held it in the power of a Master, the heirarchical guild system etc. whilst the gentry began to move away from the direct daily management of the poor to their courts and manor houses. Yet nevertheless Thompson argued that a certain "cultural hegemony" was maintained in the face of a growing disorder which took the form of a respect for the basic institutions of government and the state and a deference to the higher order. He finds such an example in Defoe's

Justice: Come in Edmund I have talk'd with your master

Edmund: Not my Master, and't please your worship, I hop I am my own master

Justice: Well your Employer Mr E - , the clothier; will the word Employer do?

Edmund: Yes, yes, and't please your Worship, anything but Master

And goes on to assert the following,

The deference which he refuses to his employer overflows in the calculated obsequiousness to "your Worship" . He wishes to struggle free from the immediate, daily, humiliations of dependency. But the larger outlines of power, station in life, political authority, appear to be as inevitable and irreversible as the earth and the sky.

Parallels can certainly be drawn today. As Srnicek and Williams point out growing unemployment has led to increasing problems of both labour and social discipline. More and more individuals are thrown out of the system to be housed in the slums, banlieues and sink estates to form a reserve army of labour who are increasingly subjected to the direct supervision of the police and the military often with whom they are in direct conflict without bringing themselves into conflict with the system as such. In this way we find that once again the exclusion of populations can coincide with a resistance against local forms of power without bringing organised pressure to bear on the system as such, and in certain circumstances directly appealing to its goodwill to resolve their immediate grievances. Here we find in operation Thompsons "cultural hegemony" as the way in which in giving up its direct contact with individuals the system nevertheless remains legitimate as such. In the end then as Thompson notes the problem of resistance has to take into account the problem of resistance to such cultural hegemony itself which has to understand not only local and immediate struggles over power, but also the operation of overall systems of domination. For Thompson this was undertaken by the development of working class consciousness in the early 19th century, yet how are we to think of such an agent today?

For Srnicek and Williams the first step in overcoming the contemporary form of folk politics is to reclaim the future, which means for them to reclaim the space of modernity. The turn within folk politics towards horizontalism and localism is, they argue, a fetishism for immediacy for they rely no longer upon a concept of politics as process but believe only in immediate responses to concrete problems, in immanent decision making or changing what is possible around you. What is needed they argue is a notion of politics as construction capable of developing local struggles into a more general antagonism, and thus opposing the contemporary capitalist system with a fundamentally different form of organisation. To Srnicek and Williams this must imply a return to modernity.

For the last few decades we have increasingly taken modernity to be process which happened to us, which we were subjected to and which, as it goes, processes of rationalization, commodification and normalization led to the total domination of man. In its most extreme form this discourse sees modernity as culminating in the gas-chambers and the Totalitarian states of the 20th century, in other forms however it sees in modernity the domination of the commodity society, the development of "one-dimensional man", the subordination of man to technology and so forth. Post-Modernity which is to say the victory of horizonalism and particularity over transcendence and universalism appears as a liberation from this infernal trajectory which it is argues leads only to domination.

Srnicek and Williams however turn to another tradition which takes modernity not as a singular narrative which was imposed upon us but as a contested field which contains within it a series competing tendencies. This of course recalls Foucault's return to the concept of modernity in which he argued that the process of Enlightenment could take two forms, either the discovery of limits to what we can know, do or hope or the act of limit crossing which can unearth new potentialities. The first of these tends towards the perfection of reason and the end of history, the second tends towards a proliferation of creativity which defines any constituted order and which enables the becoming-other of humanity. It is this power then to contest and create a future, to create an other space, that Srnicek and Williams recall when they talk of a contemporary return to modernity which made political struggle not subordinate to the reign of reason but rather central to the constitution of society in the name of democracy.

A Post-Work Society

Fundamental then to the argument of "Inventing the Future" is the belief that what is required more than anything today is another idea of social organisation capable of imagining a different form of social organisation outside of the confines of capital. For Srnicek and Williams this is to occur through the positing of a post-work society as a different logic which competes on the same ground as capitalism but offers radically different solutions. The post-work society has four major pillars:

1. Full automation
2. The reduction of the working week
3. The provision of a basic income
4. The diminishment of the work ethic

For Srnicek and Williams contemporary capitalism is currently at an impasse for whilst it has moved beyond its Fordist dependence upon full employment, full time permanent employees, the nuclear family and the welfare state it nevertheless continues to rely upon the individuals ethic of hard work. This ethic is increasingly demanded in an environment of high unemployment,  mechanization of labour, job insecurity, and flexible and non-permanent work arrangements which has increasingly exposed it to a series of contradictions.

What is forgotten today is the ways in which the Fordist organisation of society was fundamental to the reproduction of this work ethic, thus the nuclear family operated as a means to inculcate certain approaches to work which would then be re-enforced in the disciplinary school systems, the solidarity between labourers, and the collective organisation of labour and their negotiation with capital could provide labour with a certain interest in productivity whilst the loyalty towards companies in which individuals had jobs for life ensured an acceptance of labour discipline and hard work. Such a work ethic wasn't of course resisted uncritically, and was of course the object of a whole series of struggles, from the slacking off of workers on the production line to demands for autogestion and workers self-management. Yet at times of heightened struggle it was possible to see labour argue from the opposing perspective. Thus during the British Miners Strike of the 1980s the reaction of the miners to the initial threats of the Conservative government to close the mines was to accept the higher productivity targets and the new labour conditions and when the pits were finally earmarked for closure their response was to oppose the hard working miners who had been willing to sacrifice to keep the collieries open, with the mismanagement of the directors of the mines and the government who had ensured they remained unprofitable.

Today the ultimate hope of business and government is that the sacrifice of labour can be maintained outside of this costly apparatus which was required to produce it. Yet in reality this has led to is far more coercive attempts to reap productivity out of labour. Thus as workers increasingly find, technology serves as a means to rigidly monitor and enforce labour discipline in a system in which only targets and measurements matter. The unemployed on the other hand are increasingly exposed to regimes of sanctions in order to coerce them into being active job seekers, whilst the inhabitants of the slums, projects, estates and banlieus that surround major urban centres are increasingly living under the constant surveillance of armed police whose aim is merely prevent the outbreak of mass disorder.

Within this scenario in which the ideal of hard work remains hegemonic the changes advocated by Srnicek and Williams seem unable to offer a different mode of social organisation. Thus contemporary automization of labour hasn't served to liberate labour from the demands of capital but has complimented the continued domination of labour. Thus within many contemporary production processes automization occurs where there are immediate benefits in terms of cost and productivity, but a cheap and large supply of easily disciplinable labour ensures that many of the menial tasks of what David Graeber calls "bullshit jobs" continue to be filled by human labour. In the same way the struggles to limit the working week have been able to coincide with the continuing domination of labour by capital. Thus in France where the 35-hour working week was passed by the centre-left government the main aims were to produce a reduction in unemployment and an increase in leisure time. Yet what in fact happened was that rather than take on more workers to replace the lost working hours, employers merely increased the per hour production quotas to intensify the required labour. Equally as is shown by many European welfare states today a concept like a basic income is in no way inherently anti-capitalist. Rather the functioning of many welfare systems and particularly many in-work welfare systems in the last decades has slowly allowed for the burden of wages to be passed from big business to the state, who increasingly subsidises a series of low paid low quality jobs, and through systems such as workfare provides free tax payer subsidised labour often with inbuilt disciplinary mechanisms subjecting labour to the whims of capital even further.

Key then to effect a systemic change is a focus on Srnicek and Williams final demand, a diminishment in the work ethic. What all of the above have in common is a dependence on the ideal of work and yet if you take this necessity away these forms of organising labour quickly fall apart. If you begin from the perspective of producing the cheapest means for capital to operate then certainly it will be necessary to force labour into meaningless jobs top squeeze out every element of productivity possible, but if you begin from the wish to minimize the amount of necessary labour worked then new solutions are required. Rather than rely on labour for menial tasks, automization becomes tasked with eliminating as far as possible the need for human input, the reduction in the working week becomes tasked not just in a reduction in work but in its absolute minimization, whilst the minimum basic income becomes tasked not with supporting those who fall out of work but enabling an existence for all outside of work.

The movement is here simple. If the nature of contemporary capitalism relies on the contradiction between the simultaneous destruction of Fordism and the attempt to maintain its domination of labour without the social costs of doing so then what we should do today isn't to resolve this contradiction by placing work back within a totalising system of meaning byincreasing the power of labour and ensuring a return to full employment, the security of the welfare state and labour rights, but rather take this contemporary contradiction to its logical conclusion. To complete the historical destruction of Fordism through a refusal to fetishise its remannts, the individualised jobs, the work ethic and the life time of labour by challenging the need for work as such.

Towards Left Populism

To achieve this Srnicek and Williams argue that what is required is to revolutionise the perspective of those who are currently thrown outside of the system. For if at the moment they are engaged within a constant competition to move into the inside of global capitalism their exclusion equally for the basis for collective wish to undermine the system as it stands. Srnicek and Williams here give the examples of the masses of unemployed increasingly confined to slums, estates and projects. Whilst they remain attached to the Fordist ideal they exist in a permanent state of competition and are subjected a permanent need to make themselves available to and amenable to the marketplace Yet once they realise that the system is stacked against them and that they are unable en masse to attain the future promised to them, then the very reason for this permanent state of competition is lost, and the appeal of another form of social organsation is implanted. Similarly, Unions currently continue to fight for labour security but they may soon realise that they have to work with those excluded from the labour market to realise security outside of work, that is to say to move from attempting to resolve the contradiction between capital and labour to destroying this relationship as such. For Srnicek and Williams then what the Left needs to focus upon is the mass mobilisation of those groups currently excluded from the benefits of global capitalism to turn their exclusion into the positive basis on which capitalism can be excluded from a future society.

To build such a mass movement they turn to Ernesto Laclau's theorization of left populism as a way through which the interests of various groups can be mobilized coherently together within an anti-capitalist narrative. They wish to found under the concept of the People a coalition of groups who realise a collective identity in anti-capitalist terms, against a collective enemy, with a coherence and power capable of overcoming the hegemony of contemporary capitalism. It might however at this juncture be worth noting the difference between the work and the post-work society. The work society functions on the basis of a fundamental compulsion that all must work in order to finance their life styles, and that all must work to grow and develop the societies they live in. Its enemy is therefore the refusal to work and the refusal to productively contribute both to the society one forms a part of and to ones own life. The post-work society on the other hand isn't based on any such compulsion but is rather the negation of any such compulsion. Rather than demanding that individuals perform certain tasks or fulfil certain functions it doesn't provide individuals with a particular place or function but provides them with the power to be functionless and to play no role, to do nothing in the form of a right to be lazy and the polar opposite of the right to work. Thus whilst the work-society functions on the basis of a fundamental conditionality which enables ones entrance into its remit the post work society functions on the basis of a fundamental unconditionality in which existence is decoupled from work and guaranteed in and of itself, not in the form of a reserve army of labour but in the form of freedom. Here freedom isn't merely the freedom to be this or that but also the freedom not to be these things. Freedom is here in a certain sense a freedom from debt, because if the work-society has been premised upon the prior debt of individuals to the society of which they form a part and which it is the purpose of their existence to repay, the post-work society takes the form of a release from any such debt, and rather the provision of a certain amount of wealth without the requirement to take on a reciprocal responsibility.

Yet who in this case is the enemy capable of functioning as the basis for a politicized people? Today for large swathes of the populist left the enemy is the 1%. Yet far from functioning as the enemy of a society beyond the work ethic and the creditor-debtor relationship it is an enmity which appears stuck within traditional confines. For it is an emnity which is in the end saturated with the ideology of work. It is the 1% who profit from our work, it is they who undertake unproductive labour and then financially speculate on the productive economy, it is they who are bailed out on the basis of the collective wealth of the people, a collective wealth derived from sweat nd toil. It could of course also be argued that the critique of the 1% is based not only on an ethic of work but also an ethic of welfare which is equally capable of being mobilized in a post-work society. This critique is then begins from the fact that it is the 1% who accrue excess wealth which could be used for collective purposes, that they refuse to contribute to society in the form of taxation which leads to welfare retrenchment and that their ability to move wealth and business around the world has led to a race to the bottom in terms of welfare spending and labour rights which has entrenched social precarity and the necessity of labour. That is to say that in the end the highly individualist and unequal approach to wealth opposes the possibility of a collective and social approach to wealth which might form the basis of a post-work society.

Yet if we are to take the conception of a post-work society seriously such a critique still appears strongly within the horizon of the work-society. It argues that wealth is the collective outcome of the labour of millions of people and that rather than being appropriated by a few individuals it should be appropriated for the social good to reduce the necessity of work. Yet far from moving beyond work such a conception still makes it central to the organisation of society, it is still through labour that wealth will be produced in order to be distributed and such a society will certainly remain within the morality of work and debt and may be able then to think of the minimization of work, but not its abolition.

The post-work society as outlined by Srnicek and Williams on the other hand doesn't see labour as the source of wealth but technology (as Marx foresaw in his Fragment on Machines). The aim here isn't to redistribute the proceeds of human labour but to collectively appropriate the power of labour and use it to replace the pointless labour which today functions instead of or as an assistant to machines. Withint he confines of the post-work society then the aim isn't to perfect the relationship between labour and capital to form the basis of a community beyond class struggle but rather to liberate humanity from the neccessities of economic life allowing them to live freely outside of economic necessity.

Within the post-work society then the problem isn't the construction of something like a unifying political identity but the problem of a practice of politics which doesn't require such an identity. For if traditional notions of a post-capitalist society have relied upon the collective identity of a 'we' which stands against capital and enforced a collective sense of solidarity, the post-capitalist society as described by Srnicek and Williams proposes a form of collective action (in the form of the appropriation of the means of production) which precisely doesn't lead to a collective identity to which all individuals return, but rather forms the basis on which individuals can freely flourish.

Certainly today such a problem of identity forms the backbone of Agamben's theorization of community based on the "whatever singularity" as a community based neither on any condition of belonging (being French, being communist) nor an absence of such conditions but rather a community of belonging itself without conditions (neither of work nor contribution), whilst similarly Ranciere's denunciation of the politics of the people in favour of the politics of dissensus refuses the construction of politics on the basis of a common collective identity, but rather on the refusal of all such identities. Yet hidden here is in many ways Marx's much older definition of the proletariat as that class of "radical chains" who denied any part in civil society are done no particular wrong but a general wrong and who thus claim no historical right but a general right in the name of humanity, It is to think this idea of humanity today, not as a particular identity but as a generic right that is fundamental to the notion of a post-work society, and it is the construction of a politics on this basis that requires building to realise the abolition of work.

Yet if we can't rely upon identarian-populism to construct such a society then the task that Srnicek and Williams don't think is the need to think new forms of solidarity and political organisation which precisely can't rely upon the morality of debt and work but have to oppose to it an altogether different logic such that maybe one day we will look back at the logic of work inherent to post-Fordist capitalism in the same way as the industrialists of the 19th century looked back upon the moral economy of the 18th, with a sense of looking back to a completely alien world.

It’s rare to hear unhappiness talked of much anymore. In personal relations admitting to most people to being unhappy at best produces an awkward silence in conversation and at worst is a source of personal shame and social judgement. Whilst politically unhappiness is a redundant currency, it no longer matters that changes to welfare, unemployment policies or immigration policies might induce a great deal of hardship, suffering depression or even suicide. Those who are sad are increasingly represented as being insistent upon dwelling on their hardship and point blank refusing to open their eyes to the world of potential and opportunity around them. They are at odds with a prevailing ideology of both personal and social relations which advocates that individuals be “go getters” and will their way to success, wealth and happiness. Because, of course, they are only ever around the corner.

Bifo Berardi's work and particularly his new work the charmingly titled Heroes: Mass Murder and Suicide enacts is a sort of great revolt against the ideology of happiness and pleasure which has crossed the political divide and is evidenced both in contemporary communicative capitalism and Left-wing activism, with their emphasis on productivity, communication, affirmation, positivity and enjoyment.

These changes can be traced back to a multitude of sources, from the revolution in values after 1968, to the collapse of Fordism, the rise of finance capitalism and the increased importance of technology within social and economic life.  Yet politically these changes were perhaps most significantly asserted in Michel Foucault's introduction to Deleuze & Guattari's "Anti-Oedipus". Anti-Oedipus, was not a new grand theory he argued, but more modest than this an art which tied politics not to science but to the art of the possible or as Foucault put made politics "less concerned with why this or that than with how to proceed".  Anti-Oedipus therefore took aim at those practitioners of politics who sought to place political action within a totalising and scientific ideology who ranged from the "sad militant" to those "Bureaucrats of the revolution and civil servants of Truth" and took aim at both the Liberal political order and the mass communist parties of the 20th century. Foucault went on to draw out of the conclusions of Anti-Oedipus a new manual for political action. Yet perhaps the most notorious maxim to emerge from this the the following:

Do not think that one has to be sad in order to be militant, even though the thing one is fighting is abominable. It is the connection of desire to reality (and not its retreat into the forms of representation) that possesses revolutionary force."

With this declaration Foucault rallied against a very particular form of political practice which bound up in the seriousness of its own aim and the absolute necessity of its cause called political subjects towards self-sacrifice, denial and absolute commitment and associated pleasure with frivolity, waste and self-indulgence. This attitude was certainly fundamental to the experience of 20th century Communism beginning with the experience of Leninism and soon spreading to the emerging national Communist Parties. Take this quote from Eric Hobsbawm concerning the British Communist Party:

The Party (we always thought of it in capital letters) had the first, or more precisely the only real claim on our lives. Its demands had absolute priority. We accepted its discipline and hierarchy. We accepted the absolute obligation to follow 'the lines' it proposed to us, even when we disagreed with it . . . We did what it ordered us to do....Whatever it had ordered, we would have obeyed....If the Party ordered you to abandon your lover or spouse, you did so."

Foucault as a short-lived member of the French Communist Party had experience of this, and left on the basis of some combination of the anti-Semitism he observed, the sexual ethics or homophobia he was subjected to and what he viewed as the sterile discipline and hierarchy of the party machine. Foucault could besaid to be well aware of how the disciplinary and sacrificial attitudes of grand causes could coalesce in the production of authoritarian political subjects. The aim of returning desire and happiness to militancy can therefore be said to be aimed at freeing individuals from the need to deny themselves or surrender their individuality to a greater cause, which coincided with the production of a sort of creepy authoritarianism (obsessed with private life and ones secret thoughts).

Gone today are the mass political parties and their cadres, today political action occurs almost completely under the slogan of “activism”, with, as it hints, the focus on the active and productive. Fundamental to the notion of activism is the idea that today power and authority will not be brought down through struggle and the production of a new constituted order, but through a constant activity capable of deposing every attempt of a constituted power to rule. The focus then becomes on the ability of activists to produce and create, and to affirm all that is positive, happy and enjoyable against all that deprives us of this. As comment on the Occupy movement has often shown, the ability of protestors to be creative and happy in their protest has assumed the place of a cardinal principle. One is no longer here faced with the blackmail of self-sacrifice but perhaps its opposite, the blackmail of enjoyment. If power is that which is always represented as repressive and requiring self-denial then the struggle against it must necessarily be enjoyable and positive. One could perhaps first say that this produces a thoroughly sterilised view of happiness, aren’t all happinesses in the end at the expense of someone or something? And secondly what of those who cannot participate in this carnival of happiness those who experience suffering, depression, pain and loss?

Franco Berardi's book is fundamental therefore in taking as its starting point matters of mass murder, suicide, terrorism, fundamentalism and depression in order to analyse contemporary capitalist from its bleaker and more extreme points. His aim here is of course not to return to politics the figure of the sad militant, receptive only to the suffering in a world which can only be saved through his sacrifice but to make politics face up to the very fact of suffering and anguish, and make itself fit to deal with them.

Panic, Paranoia, Depression

We reserve the term Orwellian for that range of emotions and psychological processes proper to the age of mass societies and Totalitarian state structures. Yet with the collapse of this form of historical experience it is increasingly evident that societies today experience a new range of emotions and forms of psychological processes that propose fundamentally different problems. Berardi's work is an attempt to take seriously this shift, and make the analysis of the emotional and psychological topography of contemporary capitalism as important as any other.

This new experience is built around perhaps 3 fundamental axes, firstly the maintainence of a fundamental goal or aim towards which everything is directed, secondly precarity as the experience of an absence of a fixed place in the world or solid limits and thirdly deterritorialization as the preference for that which is ephemeral and liquid over that which is permanent and solid.

This fundamental aim or goal of contemporary existence is of course success. Everyone is now included in a race to the top which is increasingly taken to be the only legitimate form of existence, the idea that people used to have of absolving themselves from such a race, being a deadbeat, a failed writer or drunk, no longer has currency unless it to can be monetized and commercialised as a form of entrepreneurialism. As Berardi notes however this overarching goal has a fundamental flaw, only a few can ever make it, the race to the top can only ever be won by some otherwise it wouldn't be a race at all. The more generalised feeling felt by most is therefore failure. This is perhaps evidenced more than anything by the increased reliance upon testing and formal qualifications, children are tested more and more and told at each hurdle that failure to succeed will be the end of everything, they won’t get into the right schools, get the required GCSE’s, won’t be viewed by employers as employable. At each stage a new batch of failures are cast off until even most graduates come to find their educational achievements insuffient and useful for nothing. And what it ends up is a great weight of personal responsibility placed upon individuals to assume a failure as being their own which is statistically just the result of a bottle neck effect. Only a few can ever “win” according to the rule of the game, most are only ever destined to play minor roles. As Berardi notes this is of course unhealthy, to have the majority of populations busy reproaching themselves and feeling lacking and inferior might make for a competitive job market, but doesn’t perhaps produce the kind of well-rounded individuals capable of producing a satisfied society. What is occurring is rather a build-up of resentment in the system.

Fundamental to this experience is the problem of precarity. If individuals used to have other sources of measure from which to evaluate their existence, be they family ties, political ideologies, or social groupings, the dissolution (or rather mutation) or traditional groupings has ensured that today one form of measurement is completely dominant, that of the market and it is this today that people appeal for a sense of belonging, self-worth and achievement. Yet what this means is that individuals are simultaneously exposed to the infinity of possibilities within the global marketplace but at the same time are robbed of a shelter or base from which to begin their approach out into the market or weather the storms it throws at them from time to time.  Increasingly there is nothing to fall back on. As Mrs Thatcher quite rightly knew, there is no alternative.

Berardi’s book notes that the phenomenon of panic attacks is a relatively new and undiagnosed phenomenon. Returning to the etymological root of panic the Greek word “Pan”, he notes that pan originally defines “everything existing”. Panic, Berardi argues, is related to the experience of “everything existing”. If previously the limitations and shelters possessed by individuals were capable of producing a sort of membrane which could filter contact with the outside world, or perhaps blinkers capable of concentrating ones vision individuals increasingly have to do without such filters. The emphasis then becomes on the now, if in the past our understanding of time was able to differentiate between past, present and future, increasingly we are less capable of  living with time. Take investment, if within the Fordist economy investment had its end in the anticipation of future productive rewards which implied losses in the present for future rewards within contemporary finance capital the anticipation of profits is no longer sufficient, profitability has to be realised immediately in the form of shareholder value, even if through asset stripping or an attack on labour. Yet this is part of a more general trend, if success becomes the supreme and only real value, notions of success become devalued and underdeveloped. Success is no longer something that can be charted over 20-30 years but is a constant demand that one has to actualise each day in every way possible. Success no longer becomes an end goal but rather a way of life or attitude. Yet the antithesis of the constant drive for success is the overwhelming exposure to a whole world of opportunities, all of which possess comparative levels of risk and success and all of which need to be seized. Faced however with limited time, the need to constantly choose and distinguish opportunities becomes increasingly intense. The same has occurred at the level of information, through the internet we have created the possibility of a constant and nearly infinite information flow and the constant availability to connect to work and others. And yet far from empowering this is equally capable of overwhelming individuals who are confronted with the constant ability to be engaged or productive, but simultaneously need to rest, disconnect or be reflective.

You can do a few things in the face of this, you can accept the challenge, and permanently plug yourself into the network, living off little sleep, Red Bull and caffeine pills, you can fail to live up to this ideal and feel the guilty for indulging in rest and reflection, or you can panic. You can freeze in the face of so much pressure and become unable to do anything. Here hyper-mobility is resolved into a complete immobility.

Equally at the level of knowledge the problem of precarity is reflected in a contemporary growth of paranoia. Paranoia is at first perhaps in the face of a continuous demand to succeed a form of over thinking, a knowledge that everything is connected to everything else and thus a knowledge that every action is capable of producing unknowable ripple effects, and that at the root of everything around us is an irreducibly complex series of causes. It hinges therefore on our inability to reduce the event around us to a comprehensible narrative. One is never able to be intellectually satisfied, one is continuously worried that things might be other than they seem, that other things might be behind events. Paranoia is in someways the opposite of panic, for if panic immobilizes, paranoia intensifies and pushes one into overaction. It becomes then all too possible for such a paranoiac mindset to resolve itself into a fear of others or an overaggressive rejection of others.

This as Berardi notes is at the root at a contemporary inversion of the "survival of the fittest" evidenced in most movements of the political Right. We the paranoiacs cry out are the fittest, but the weakest continually attempt to usurp our power not through strength but by subversion, our fitness and strength is therefore what requires protecting through positive discrimination, or the security of closed borders, gated communities and serviced apartment blocks. The constant threat of vulnerabilility leads even those convinced of their own superioirty and success to a constant overaction to protect thesmelves by whatever means such that the survival of the fittest becomes no longer oriented towards success but defensive measures.

What this all comes down to in the last instance is a feeling of weakness. In the end many people come to experience themselves as powerless in the face of this onslaught and yet worse than this they perceive their powerlessness as the fault of others. They know how bad things are and how unsustainable the pressures upon them are, and yet they also know that others know this as well. And yet others in spite of this knowledge continue to participate in the rules of the game and choose not to resist which has the effect of forcing us to play along with this game as well. As such we become alienated and angry at those around us for their failure to act. What we of course forget is that we are perceived by others as those conformists who reproduce the pressure to conform. What this amounts to in the end is a tremendous misunderstanding or a failure to communicate. If previously solidarity and community ensured that individuals possessed a certain inter-subjectivity, the increased individualization of society makes us poorer at understanding the motives and thought process of others, and thus poorer in trying to recognise in others that which is in ourselves.

Why don't we then resist? One of Berardi's fundamental arguments is that resistance is today abundant but more often than not expressed in pathological forms. Within Industrial capitalism the division between work and life ensured that individuals were able to seek meaning outside of the sphere of work and thus resist to the tendency of work to colonise life, by limiting and regulating the sphere of work. Today however work and life are increasingly confused categories and work as service work allows no such rigid divisions between the two, if work increasingly involves developing ones social, communicative and emotional skills, alongside relying upon ones existential choices it therefore coincides with the self such that ones choice of work coincides with ones choice of personality, and ones failings at work constitute a personal failing or defect. More than this as Berardi argues that we increasingly view work as possessing the power to provide meaning and purpose in our lives but this is only possible on the basis of the impoverishment of our ability to find both individual and collective worth in and of themselves, and not as matters of utility. Thus as Berardi expresses it:

We invest or psychic energies and our expectations into work because our intellectual and affective life are so poor because we are depressed, anxious and insecure.

On this basis it becomes increasingly hard to gain that external perspective on work that individuals gained within the age of Industrial capitalism because not only do we identify work we come to be emotionally invested in it and require it to cover the absence that is experienced in other areas of life. And in the same way it becomes increasingly hard for resistance to locate and isolate that object that it opposes because if work used to be the arena of necessity, discipline and need it is today capable of being for us the space of friendship, creativity and happiness. In the same way therefore resistance to work comes to express this confusion of categories whereby individuals who wish to resist the precarity, isolation and vacuity of contemporary work, end up seeing the fault as residing in their own inability to conform.

One fact that Berardi highlights is startling, in the era of Industrial capitalism there was a very limited relationship between work and suicide, more than anything because work imposed less of individuals sense of self, and individuals were able to develop perspectives outside of the sphere of work. Today work-place suicides are on the rise, from Foxconn in China to French Telecom, from high-flying bankers (quite literally..) to the unemployed. Whilst depression has become a normalized cultural problem. The problem is increasingly perceived as being with us, as opposed to in the world out there.

An Ethics of Irony

Why write a book on pessimism?  The writer Christopher Hitchens once said of Ayn Rand's books "I dont think theres any need to have essays advocating selfishness amongst human beings... Somethings require no further reinforcement". Similarly today we perhaps don't require new books to tell us that things are bad, our outlook bleak. We are able to be pessimistic enough without it codified in book form.

Yet Berardi does this because he really has another end in mind, the development of a thinking of ethics that escapes from the two major tendencies in political thinking in modern times, either an ethics pegged to the production of happiness or an ethics tied to the production of truth. The first of these is most fundamentally represented by George Orwell who in his essays and novels catalogued the myths, lies and double-think fundamental to operations of power and advocated for the clear declarations of truths unhindered by obsfuscatory language. This is clear in a quote often attributed to Orwell but for which no source can be found, and therefore is likely to represent more the general reception of his work, "In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act". The second is more often that not attributed to writers associated with the post-Structuralist tradition such as Michel Foucault (as a thinker of hedonistic pleasure) and Jacques Lacan ("do not compromise on your desire") but is in reality more in keeping with a political Spinozism in which that which increases my power to act is the Good and that which increases my power to act is pleasurable to me.

What Berardi advocates is an ethics based upon irony which challenges the limitations we experience when trying to undertake action from the perspective of Truth or Happiness.

Today I think clear and truthful statements couldn't be in a weaker position. Contemporary news media and the ability to manipulate 24 hour news cycles can ensure that any truth pronounced can be managed and neutralised through any number of methods yet at the same time the truth is more than ever under attack not just from obfuscation but also a complete absurdity. As Peter Pomerantsev argues in relation to Putin's control of Russian politics, the aim is no longer to produce a single and totalising narrative and to suppress all others, but rather to allownarratives to proliferate whilst ensuring their co-option by a ruling order that is capable of saying and being anything, on the basis of its complete detachment from any particular form or ideological government because all it stands for in the end is bare power. The absurdity here emerges when a government with openly authoritarian actions talks the language of rights and the rule of law, and encourages opposition only to co-opt it for its own ends, creates grass roots campaigns and launches anti-corruption campaigns  for its own elite ends, and in which base vulgarity can sit side by side with formal authority.

This isn't however serious, the reversals that take place here aren't real but an open joke which are almost tongue-in-cheek in nature. What here becomes evident is that the truth value of the system becomes irrelevant. The subject addressed by the ideological posturings of the regime isn't required to truly believe that the Putin regime is a bastion of rights and modernity. Rather they are merely expected to percieve the arbitrary power of the regime to be anything that it wants to be which simultaneously attests to the magnificence of the regime, and closes the space for opposition in advance. This is perhaps no clearer than in how the regime comes to deal with those members who attempt a real opposition. As Pomerantsev argues:

The 2009 trial of non-conformist oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky and the 2013 trial of opposition leader Alexey Navalny were punctuated with absurdity. In both cases, the initial charges were nonsensical: Khodorokovsky was alleged to have stolen oil from himself, while Navalny was alleged to have taken part in corrupt business deals from which he extracted no profit. The testimony of defence witnesses was used as proof of guilt by the sentencing judge in both cases. But this absurdity appears to be deliberate. It proves to the public that the Kremlin can re-imagine reality at will, can say ‘black is white’ and ‘white is black’ with no one able to contradict.

Against the abitrary power of a government that can both do anything and be anything (take any form, shape or ideological position) the truth appears to be blunted beyond repair.

Yet if this is true of Putin's Russia as Berardi argues this is equally true of what he calls "absolute capitalism".  Absolute capitalism is the contemporary form of global capitalism which, liberated from all limits and values, becomes able to be and do anything and can therefore rein down upon human populations anything from the destruction of social-welfare (Greece) to the destruction of the environment at its own whim. As such from the perspective of absolute capitalism everything is possible, and yet from the position of opposition to global capitalism absolutely nothing appears possible.

What is the place of irony here? Primarily perhaps, it could be said, to respond to the suffocation truth experiences in the face of forms of power which purport to be absolute. If within such systems truth is no longer able to make any impact upon its target, but is always displaced and always-already co-opted by those in power then what space exists to step outside such systems and challenge their absolute and arbitrary power? For Berardi it is through irony it is possible to open up this space, for irony is the simultaneous non-engagement with that which is and the process of imagining that which is as being other. Irony has traditionally been placed on the side of cynicism and apolitical disengagement, as a refusal to take seriously political matters. Yet for Berardi precisely this necessity to take such matters seriously ensures that one remains in a struggle with a power that is elusive and cannot therefore be defeated. Irony is the process through which one is firstly able to gain a distance from that which currently 'is' whilst at the same time opening up a space in which one is confronted by the reality of the present, and the possibility of it being other.

A good example of this would be that given by Slavoj Zizek concerning Yugoslav elections.

in early 1980s, a half-dissident student weekly newspaper in ex-Yugoslavia wanted to protest the fake "free" elections; aware of the limitations of the the slogan "speak truth to power" ("The trouble with this slogan is that it ignores the fact that power will not listen and that the people already know the truth as they make clear in their jokes."), instead of directly denouncing the elections as un-free, they decided to treat them as if they are really free, as if their result really was undecided, so, on the elections eve, they printed an extra-edition of the journal with large headline: "Latest election results: it looks that Communists will remain in power!" This simple intervention broke the unwritten "habit" (we "all know" that elections are not free, we just do not talk publicly about it...): by way of treating elections as free, it reminded the people publicly of their non-freedom.

Elections here worked on a tried and tested model, the government and party rigged them and then the opposition denounced them for this, were brought into the offices of the party officials to be shouted at which both sides probably enjoyed (party officials were able to exercise their authority, and dissidents were able to feel validated, "we must be doing something important to get the attention of party officials!"). What this missed was that of course on a formal level everyone knew that elections were rigged they just had a certain interest in remaining silent about the matter, what such an act did was to create a space in which it was no longer possible to remain resigned or disconnected but in which one was confronted with a certain reality and forced to think.

Paolo Virno is also aware of this when he argues that the joke is the ultimate form of linguistic innovation insofar as it simultaneously signifies the disconnect between the world of linguistic rules and social reality and the infinite potentiality for creation that this harnesses. The joke is that disconnection which opens up a space for an innovation in reflection.

For Berardi’s part this comes down to the maxim that the only way to take the present crisis seriously is to not take it seriously, to gain that ironic disengagement from the crisis in order to be liberated from it and start to think the world anew. On this basis he is able to rewrite Foucault’s earlier maxim concerning militancy. For if Foucault decried the sad militant and advocated the linking of desire to revolutionary militancy Berardi can offer no such simply connection between happiness and politics. He rewrites Foucault’s thesis with the following:

Remember despair and joy are not incompatible. Despair is a consequence of understanding. Joy is a condition of the emotional mind. Despair is to acknowledge the truth of the present situation but the sceptical mind knows that the only truth is the shared imagination and shared projection . So do not be frightened by despair. It does not delimit the potential for joy. And joy is a condition for proving intellectual despair wrong.”

Here the relationship between happiness and politics becomes resolved into a  permanent dualism. Gone is the injunction to enjoy or be happy and in its place lies a division between the plane of knowledge in which we know very well how bad things are, and the plane of the emotional mind in which inspite of this, joy and collective happiness remain possible. As Berardi well knows, happiness isn’t that which it is possible to realise unconditionally in the present, no matter how much it is demanded of us, it will always be plagued by that nagging knowledge of crisis. This knowledge places the greatest pressures on individuals who, in the face of demands and expectations to be positive and productive turn in on themselves. Yet through developing an ironic distance from that which ‘is’ individuals can simultaneously face up to the conditions of despair and yet find outside of them the possibility of joy.

It is then neither truth nor happiness that are the source of political knowledge and means of political "activism" today. Irony is the terrain on which the political battles of the present take place, and political practice might do better to take up this fact.

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When Foucault wrote an Introduction to Anti-Oedipus he talked of it as a book of ethics or as a way of life itself, as an "Introduction to the Non-Fascist Life". Berardi's book is in the same way not only a manual of ethics but also something more akin to a self-help book. For a long time the self-help manual was a mainstay of philosophical writing but today it is almost wholly devalued. Self-help books can stop you smoking, help you lose weight, make you successful and rich, and even proffer to make you happy but if such writing isn't complete quackery, its inability to recognise the way in which our emotions and expectations of ourselves are moulded by the world around us leaves such writings impotent to provide any such help. Berardi's book is a self-help manual to weather the onslaught of demands and pressures placed on individuals today to be more successful, more communicative, more available and more adaptable and most of all more happy.

It offers no simple solutions however. It only offers the ability to set one upright against ones enemy, to perceive the contemporary traps and blackmails we are all faced with, and to rid us of our tendency to reproach ourselves or become overwhelmed by sorrow. It offers us therefore a window out of the stifling insularity and provincialism of a global world order, but what we do with this, that is our own problem.