I think “Dari Jelebu – Melayu Bersatulah” is a good analysis, but it still remains unfinished. To be complete it needs to be explained how the economic interests of the various groupings are advanced and how they clash with each other as well as how one group triumphed against others.
I do not think it is enough to assign class background to individuals to be analytically convincing. To be fair, analysis developed in such a manner would properly occupy a whole book and not just a short article.
For example, what class was Onn Jaafar? What class was Tunku Abdul Rahman? Why did Tunku triumph instead of Onn Jaafar? What class was Tun Razak? Tun Hussein Onn? What class forces achieved enough power, and how, to push out Hussein Onn in favour of Mahathir? How did policies affect the development of various class forces? How did the class forces develop, starting with the newly formed and fresh UMNO to current day UMNO?
What was the role of the old MCA. What is its role now? What class does the PAP represent? What class rules Singapore? What class does the DAP represent? Is the political struggle in Malaysia limited to changing government and national policies and practices, or does it also require a class struggle as well?
Is Anwar Ibrahim a comprador and national bourgeois who was kicked out of UMNO? Or does he truly and honestly represent small capitalists and peasants? How do the policies of PKR advance the class interests of the members it represents?
What classes do RPK and Hishamuddin Rais represent? And how do their individual and personal struggles advance the interests of the classes they represent?
My understanding is that the basis of the “Dari Jelebu” analysis is absolutely true – each individual acts in his own economic interests. This after all is the basic assumption of ALL economic theories.
In the case of Malaysia, contending individuals act our their economic interests, but the class movements are still immature and not fully formed and each political party contains a gamut of different individual and class interests which may not be fully class conscious yet. These individuals and weakly formed, not fully conscious classes compete and contend with each other for power within the political parties themselves as well as with other political parties.
Political parties are therefore not fully pure and homogeneous in their class content. At least not one single class wholly and completely dominates each political party in Malaysia. The rulers or government of Malaysia, therefore, like rulers in other new states and countries are still wholly tribally or racially-based political parties, not class-based rule. Even in China and Vietnam, the state is ruled by a tribe called “communists” and the government is monopolised by a political party called the communist party.
Even though communist parties started off as representing revolutionary workers almost purely, different class interests crept into these parties and their character changed as a result of internal contention and struggles with revolutionary workers losing out in almost all communist parties. Rule by the majority is still not a realisable reality compared to rule by a small, powerful and well-organised minority.
I think it is purely because it is easier to have a small disciplined minority which can cooperate within themselves and thus organise themselves as a formidable force than a large nebulous mass cooperating and organising themselves to form a government.
The same thing happens in Malaysian political parties too, with the difference that they are still very much in the early and immature stages of class development and have not advanced much due to the wide use of racial and religious divisive factors. The only classes that have advanced their class interests with great strides are those of the comprador, bureaucrats and bourgeoisie (in that order) while even the feudal classes have slipped in competition against these classes. Feudal traditions now only provide a veneer of respectability for the compradors.
In this sense, UMNO is the most well-developed class-based party. It is probably already conscious of its class background and class interests but hides it even from its own rank and file members.. It is therefore good that UMNO is exposed as a comprador, bureaucrat and bourgeois party which does not have at heart the interests of the majority of the people in Malaysia.
This does not mean however that the policies UMNO follows will not serve the interests of the majority of the people well. It is completely possible that the leadership of the comprador under current global conditions may well serve the interest of the majority of people in Malaysia well (besides the interests of UMNO cronies). Criticism of UMNO therefore also has to be targeted at how its policies go against the both individual and national economic interests as well as the whole national well-being of the majority of Malaysians.
I do not write this to negate Hishamuddin Rais’s article which I think is excellent, but hope to advance the arguments and debate on what the actual conditions in Malaysia are. I myself do not have the answers to many of the questions I have posed and am desperately seeking answers. I do not even know whether these questions have answers or that they are the right questions in the first place.
By batsman
No comments:
Post a Comment