The Pointless Debate over Bumiputera Quotas Between Racists and Meritocrats

“Time to move beyond race? Rethinking education quota in Malaysia” stood as the order of the day. We shall return to the question of race below, but for starters, what precisely is it about the education quota that such liberal outlets as Malaysiakini seriously think needs “rethinking”? Is it the quota itself? Or is it the basis on which this quota emerged and attains legitimacy in the first place? While the moderator was as clueless about the scope of the motion as anyone might guess, fortunately for us, the panelists were less so.

In fact, one need not brace through the whole ordeal just to get at what each party and its spokespeople think about this issue, or nonissue. The entire debate essentially boils down to a merely apparent contrast. To barely varying degrees, the conservatives cowered behind a constitution they see as immutable, thus also behind a national history they think of as infallible; whereas the liberals stopped short of adopting a class position in arguing for meritocracy, hence meandering about on the moral plane.

With ethical preferences out of the way, however, it becomes clear that the two are but one and the same. Any reasonably rational Malaysian, as the liberals who were made to sit on the left (ironically, only from the spectator’s perspective) by and large concurred, would agree that help should of course be given to those who actually need it, rather than those from a particular ethnic group. This, we certainly do not disagree with. But the question is not whether it is morally right or wrong to do so. The question is if it is feasible at all — that is, if meritocracy (if that is what we must settle for) would even be possible within the current economic and political system, i.e., capitalism, whose exploitative nature takes no genius to grasp.

According to the conservatives, who were of course made to sit on our perceived right, the answer is a solemn but resolute no. This, we also do not disagree with, though for reasons diametrically opposite to theirs. All throughout the show, self-described book-loving introvert and constitutional specialist Aidil Khalid hustled to hammer it repeatedly in his opponents’ heads that they would be wise to reckon with our national forefathers’ deliberate choice of the word “shall” over “may”, as well as “position” over “rights”, on the first line of Article 153 of the federal constitution. “Can’t you even understand the clear wordings of the constitution?” was perhaps the most memeable moment in the debate.

Like it or not, Khalid and his fellow defenders of the constitution were absolutely right on this count — so absolutely right, in fact, that none of the trio on the other side was able, or for that matter willing, to mount any meaningful challenge. The special position of bumiputeras and the responsibility of the royal court to safeguard it — these are not suggestions after all, nor are they up for interpretation. So it is that no amount of moralizing on the part of even the most progressive of liberals will ever come close to tearing down this historical bulwark.

Smoke and mirrors

Let us for a moment assume that all the panelists do very much want real social justice for a change, including those ardent defenders of the “social contract”^[1] conveniently seated on the right. Next we must attend in passing to the question of what it means to be racist. For I have been calling those on the right racist, but what is my earthly basis for such characterization? Indeed when I call these mouthpieces racist, I do not call them as such in isolation — that is, as individual racists. Rather, they are but cogs in a racist machine we call the nation-state.

When Gabungan Pelajar Melayu Semenanjung (GPMS) leader Mohd Wafiyuddin Al-Awal Musa, one of said cogs, urged toward the end of the debate that we ought to prioritize “solving the sins of the colonizers”, that this was the wisdom imparted by the founders of this country as per the federal constitution, he did not say so lightheartedly, as many liberal critics in the comment section have been led to believe. Neither was this the case in the dozen or so instances when Gabungan NGO Belia Islam’s spokesman Ustaz Faizzuddin Zai wielded “national identity” in justifying race-based affirmative action — even for non-bumiputeras — whose usefulness against liberal logic was quickly picked up by the other two. 

Without a doubt, that which was wrought by Imperial Britain’s “signature” divide-and-rule approach to colonialism, for which generations of Malaysians have since been footing the bill, was at the same time highly uneven in the distribution of its incurment, just as intended. Wafi stood out as the one who best delivered this point across; indeed, the majority of the victims of this British sin were, and still very much are, the Malays; and that of its “lesser” victims, or relative benefactors, the Chinese. As of April 2024 Forbes showed that 86% of the 50 wealthiest Malaysians remained to be Chinese, and perhaps not so coincidentally, 86% of them were past 60 years old. But also this nugget: “Although there are many reasons for this, genetics is not necessarily one of them. Entrepreneurial success is poorly correlated with ethnicity, as millions of low-income people in China will testify.” On the other hand, “among those below 60 the majority have inherited rather than created their wealth.”

That these facts point immediately to the failure of the New Economic Policy (NEP) certainly goes without question, right? Be that the case, then why has it failed? According to the panelists restlessly edging on the right, not really, they don’t, as in Wafi’s illustrious words: “Belum sampai masa pokok berbuah lagi.” But even then, even if the NEP had turned out disastrous, it could only be a disaster of execution, never of intention. Owing to perhaps unforeseen challenges both internal and external, “niat nenek moyang masih belum dicapai.” Under no circumstance would faulty implementation of an intentionally correct policy disprove its correctness. In strikingly apparent contrast, among those hunkering down on the left came a resounding yes from Malaysian Academic Movement’s deputy chair and cultural “sociologist” Zaharom Nain, but unironically for the exact same reason as his opponent’s, as one labors to watch him bemoan the NEP’s failure to achieve its — wait for it — “real aim” of poverty eradication.

Here be erected the first major hurdle in the liberal ascent to freedom. Race is as perplexing an ontology to the liberals as equality is to the conservatives. When in their statistical volley was fired at the former such dead-factual ammunitions as the overwhelming majority of poor Malaysians still being bumiputeras, without a material basis on which to pick apart the latter’s “niat nenek moyang” defense of race-based affirmative action, they can only roll inward in their moral assertion and drop down on all fours before moot talks of incremental reforms. This much is clear when the audience was served a full plate of nothingburger as community lawyer and social justice believer Arun Doraisamy relented less than ten minutes into the debate: “Quota[s] and meritocracy need to be handled side by side. Kalau takde kuota, social justice will not happen.”

It cannot be denied, as Arun highlighted, that after all these years the Indian community remains far less developed than its Malay and Chinese counterparts. But to take that as proof that racial quotas should stay “for the time being”, until such time when some progressive, morally righteous statesmen have it in their hearts to usher in a brand new era of meritocracy — or, even better, until such time when the ruling class turns around and decides that it is progressive, morally righteous of them to willingly surrender their own constitutionally special position, is one of those delusions that only a suit and tie guy like Arun can and will afford. As for how on this side of the planet should racial quotas and meritocracy be “handled side by side”, one finds in Arun not even a shred of serious assessment as to whether it would be possible at all to carve out, regardless of race, a “needs-based quota system” in a profit-based economic system.

As mentioned earlier, idealizing on a moral plane is all that progressive liberals (and social democrats) ever have in their reformist toolkit when forced into a run on the national question. Where history runs counter to their moral intuition, the state in which they gained this rather rebellious intuition in the first place necessarily comes around and bites them back, blinding them to the class character of this intuition, thus binding their morals to the “social contract”. As the debate neared its end, Arun was visibly shaken by the irreconcilability between a national identity he held as historically arbitrary and open to interpretation, and that which his fellow countrymen on the other side held as unquestionable — otherwise seditious. Zaharom on the other hand, while having mildly alluded to “class” twice, did not however bother himself to elaborate it any further. This commonsense intellectual thus fared no better than his lawyer ally.

In a similar vein, the uncanny morals of such liberal thinkers as John Rawls certainly did not come in handy for the president of UM Association of New Youth (UMANY) Lim Jing Jet, who for the time being, in his own struggle against his liberal conditioning, understandably seeks reason in modern liberal works such as Rawls’s A Theory of Justice. In this sell-fulfilling work of his, Rawls essentially posits that “justice as fairness” as a liberal rationale for an ideal society, or “pure” justice, should be achievable if decisions pertaining to the design of this future society are supposedly made without bias and self-interest — that is, behind a “veil of ignorance” where no one is to have knowledge of their own destiny in said future society. From this “original position”, Rawls imagines these members of a constitutional convention as inevitably rational and impartial. 

The sterility of such copium-filled thought experiments carried out just for thought’s sake necessarily goes hand in hand with the longstanding liberal intellectual tradition of indulging themselves with inconsequential what-ifs and calling those imagination before patting themselves on the shoulders for a good day’s work and then going gentle into that good night dreaming for their moral musings to be vindicated. Sidestepping the underlying class contradictions that shape our society and the power dynamics entrenched in it, Rawls’s thought experiment would have us imagine away the realities of class exploitation, colonial legacies, and uneven development from an “original position”, decreeing fairness in an intellectual vacuum and at the same time bestowing it with a mythical quality perhaps unparalleled even by the papacy in its heyday. It is little wonder that these Rawlsian intellectuals end up bogged down in procedural, quantitative back-and-forths such as those with Khalid and friends throughout the debate. 

By focusing on hypothetical egalitarianism in an imagined society, the discourse remains stalled in reformist appeals for superficial changes, leaving fundamental economic relations untouched. An inconveniently huge pill to swallow for the reform-minded, it sure is, but any reform-related discussion set conveniently without the material context that is the capitalist mode of production and the profit motive which drives it, from which stems the class struggle, is bound to lead to nothing more than virtue signaling, anecdote sharing, and statistical bickering, as we saw throughout the debate. It comes only as a bonus for the innocent yet curious that it is not as terribly complex as academics like Zaharom and his economist peers would have us warned. 

As for the rest of us, nothing of an essential, much less practical, nature can possibly emerge from such abstract prescriptions with little to no regard for the forces of history. But the other, significantly more tragic if not sinister ramification of treating justice as a matter of philosophical deliberation pure and simple, rather than as the historical product of social struggle and collective action, is that the energy of the masses ends up misdirected from meaningful action. To the powers that be, this be music to their ears.

Class, race, and the state

In order to be a capitalist at all, it is the duty of the capitalist to edge out his competitors at all costs. It is for him a perpetual elimination race where the only choice is to stay ahead of the other would-be losers. To do so, his enterprises have to keep growing, for which he has only to maximize his capital for investment, hence the insatiable passion for profits. And to maximize his profits, he buys his way into the invisible hand that grabs him by his tail and flings him all over the marketplace in constant search for the cheapest and most obedient workers he can possibly lay his hands on. 

The workers on the other hand, who in this marketplace have nothing to offer but their own labor power, hence no choice but to be exploited in the name of survival, find themselves wavering ever more between their individual and social instincts — that is, between competition, subjugation, and cynicism on the one hand; and on the other: solidarity, democracy, and socialism. While class exploitation and all the antagonisms that stem from it do not necessarily mean that struggle, let alone a socialist struggle, will always arise, they nevertheless do create the conditions necessary for it. And as this contradiction between the interest of the capitalist class and that of the working class sharpens, particularly in times of crisis as is now, increasingly more workers have less of themselves to lose and more to offer to their shared struggle. 

At the same time, the capitalist class, a growing minority, and never a united class, increasingly comes under threat of being usurped by the very power it nurtures against its own will yet by its own oppression. Neutralizing this permanent threat — this constant balancing act — thus becomes the sworn duty and unenviable responsibility of the state. It does so as the appointed enforcer of capitalism and enacts capitalist laws that protect the sanctity of its profit motive against its at times cantankerous subjects. It contrives an education that atomizes and pits future workers against one another, teaches them to be loyal only to their own needs and aspirations, and trains the uncritical to harbor no suspicion for the reality handed them. It reproduces morals where its masters see fit for their ruling purposes, and demonizes those that rise above to challenge its legitimacy. 

“While the state exists, there can be no freedom,” Lenin writes in The State and Revolution. “When there is freedom there will be no state.” The state is the defining expression of the agency of the ruling class, without whose material need to exploit the laboring masses there would certainly be no use for a state. In no way, therefore, is the state anywhere close to being a neutral or malleable entity, as is so widely fantasized by such “Marxist” groups as the “Socialist” Party of Malaysia (PSM). Besides, not only is the state not neutral, but it can also never be progressive. Instead, it is always reactionary, much more so in the middle of a crisis. This might perhaps shed light on why Anwar and his Reformasi clique, no matter how “progressive” they might have made themselves seem before their governing days, have since then reneged on one promise after another. Say, so much for abolishing the Sedition Act!

What better way could there be for the state to hamper the unity of its laboring subjects than to capitalize on resentments and hostilities inherited from the past? After all, taking the historical development of class society as a whole, the obvious solution that is divide and rule is far from being a capitalist inspiration, much like the concept of private property, only that behind the conquering Roman legions there were neither factories nor machines. “Capital,” explains Marx on the subject of primitive accumulation, “comes dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt.” 

When the East India Company set foot on the island of Penang in the late 18th century, the Sultanate of Kedah did not put up much of a resistance at all. Long steeped in crisis, not least perpetually under Siamese siege, the ruling feudal class was in fact the one who reached out to the EIC for military aid (which the latter promised and later reneged on). So protracted and intense had the crisis been, that as soon as the island was practically handed the British on a tin platter in 1786, migrants and refugees more than ever poured into its newly established labor market, while traders in the region rushed to the scene to access this vital node of global trade. Before long, a highly productive economy grew quickly alongside what was to be a bustling entrepôt.

At the same time, the abundance of wealth in its periphery inland was now ripe for the taking, not least those primitive Chinese kongsi-operated tin mines scattering about just a little over Kedah’s southeastern border. The technical prerequisites to the commercial viability of tin mining were beyond the feudal mode of production, hence up until that point monopolized by the primitive Chinese capitalist class, whom the Sultanate of Perak had only been able to tax as the landlord. But the owners of these kongsis, which had largely relied on manual labor, were of course no match against British steam power. Above all, their rather feudal, clannish ways of conducting business were a far cry from the remarkable efficiency of free labor. Capital, having already gained its bespoke, industrial character, had dawned on these outmoded propertied classes, and their no longer creative property relations, before they even saw it coming. 

For the propertyless, on the other hand, the fact that this division — between the Malay peasantry and the budding Chinese proletariat — very much predated British imperialism brought dire implications on which it had merely to cash in. Surely the xenophobia once by and large compatible with the mostly self-sustaining and necessarily protectionist feudal mode of production now found itself faltering in a fast-growing commodity market and its fast-spreading blight over the surface of this planet. However, while upon capitalism’s coming of age in Europe did racism kneel right then and there in broad daylight savoring its final moments before the meritocrats were to escort it to the guillotine and bless it with a touch of new civilization, elsewhere was this historic transition much less straightforward, and much less complete. In our case, Britain entered the scene not only as the arbiter between the archaic feudal Malay economy and the burgeoning Chinese capitalist economy, but also as the ultimate beneficiary of this uneven development. Unlike much of Europe, the arrival of capitalism in Malaya was not marked by bloody expropriations of the feudal class and bourgeois revolutions that freed (read: proletarianized) the peasantry. Instead, given the colonial nature of the business and its lucrative potentials, while anchored halfway around the planet and having to deal with not one but two enemies on this alien front, cool heads were to prevail this time around.

In other words, this potent combination of class and racial distinctions meant that from the British perspective, the preexisting fissure between the Malays and the Chinese was more than a convenient tool for maintaining order; it was indeed fundamental to the functioning of the colonial economy itself. By institutionalizing racial hierarchies through laws, quotas, and economic policies, the British ensured that both groups remained fragmented and systematically dependent on the colonial apparatus. The Malay peasantry, shielded from direct capitalist exploitation but subjugated under a dying feudal order, was effectively kept loyal to the colonial state. The nascent Chinese and later also Indian proletariat, bound to the old feudal outlook yet at the same time subjected to brutal capitalist discipline, was pitted against their Malay counterparts as rivals for resources and power. 

Similarly pitted against each other, though for a completely different reason, were the outgoing ruling classes on both sides. Both, of course, had been lost to time. The Malay peasantry, as well as the non-Malay semi-proletariat, could have been fully expropriated by neither the as yet nonexistent Malay bourgeoisie, nor the as yet embryonic Chinese bourgeoisie. As for the British Empire, who came swooping in for the catch and took on the historic role as the real original expropriator, who better to enlist to stand guard over its newfound treasure trove, and in so doing also over the antagonized classes, than these untimely losers rounded off by Lenin as themselves “a product and a manifestation of the irreconcilability of class antagonisms”? After all, given their fear of missing out, and above all their disdain for their own untimeliness, there could not have been better candidates out of whose flickering spirits to furnish some serious capitalist agency.

By now it will also have been crystal clear, on Wafi’s aforementioned memo on prioritizing “solving the sins of the colonizers”, that in no way was the original expropriator close to being the original sinner as the gentleman low-key implied toward the end of the debate. We trust the progressive reader’s rawest scientific instinct to leave such senile matters as sin in the safe hands of those among the more nostalgic factions on the right. At the same time, one can only hope that this young lawyer’s priority did not actually presuppose an indefinite moratorium on the state’s moral judgment with respect to the not-so-original sin of our nation’s forefathers when it came to, say, the fact that they merrily collaborated with the British in the name of Malay bourgeois nationalism, at the great expense, and not in spite, but precisely because, of the once-massive all-Malayan labor movement! 

Or, again, what about the many horrific failures of the NEP? As discussed above, these were not bugs but rather, much like Wafi himself, inherent features of a racist policy designed very much in line with the capitalist profit motive, and implemented, whether rightly or wrongly, very much in favor of the ruling class. Like any other capitalist policies, the NEP was, as Yuva Balan puts it succinctly in 55 Years After the May 13 Incident, “used to maintain divisions among different races, as desired by the capitalists. Allegedly, this would create social stability for the continuity of capitalism. In reality, the much praised stability is an illusion to protect capitalist interests.” Or else did Wafi, not unlike Lim, unironically provide us with what turned out above to be a coincidentally useful starting point for our analysis, by pointing us to the wisdom of such original sinners as Rawls? The entire schtick of his “original position”, as we attempted to peruse earlier, might very well be one of the most literally original expropriators of original thought!

For Marxists like us, even the basest sin had first to be conditioned, much like the entire concept of sinning. Now should this forbidden fruit be taken in the context of class society as a gentle nod to private property, and knowing what we already know about the far more egalitarian nature of primitive societies prior to the historic emergence of civilization upon which a handful of previously unheard-of private idlers came about possessing all of human wealth and the power to shape human thought in their own images, such wealth and power as had never been conceived by any human being just a little shy of ten millennia ago, and which has till this day remained under the exclusive custody of an ultra-privileged few — knowing all of this, then, into our sinning hands must fall the historic task of going far beyond the mere acknowledgment and retrospect of this social memory gifted us by our savage ancestors, that is, of finding out for ourselves our objective limiting factors that we must overcome to wage what can only be a subjective, conscious struggle against capitalism and its state machinery. No “original position” or “veil of ignorance”, as we shall see, is ever required of this struggle for democratic socialism.

Transitional program

Armed with the knowledge of the class character of the state, and that also of the racism it is tasked to wield, let us now return to the debate and “imagine” a way out of this kerfuffle. We begin afresh with the liberal obsession with merit. In a planned economy that serves the material and social needs of human beings, there would be no use for such moralistic concepts as merit, which presupposes in the first place a competitive economy that ultimately serves the profit motive of the wealthy and powerful. At best it is a coping mechanism on the part of the petty bourgeois who have had trouble dealing with the myth of upward mobility all crumbling down on them at once; at worst it is a cruel insult callously thrown at the workers of the world who feed, clothe, and shelter all of us, and who have brought us all the technological wonders of the world not because, but in spite, of their exploitation.

Even when forced to compete, and especially in times of crisis, the material fact remains that the laboring class thrives not on merit, but on solidarity. One need not go into any of the millions of examples out there to prove to the meritocrats such an obvious yet unpalatable piece of reality, for instance the incredible solidarity mustered by undocumented migrants in Malaysia, who protected and took care of one another despite being forcibly and brutally broken up by the police during the miserable days of Covid lockdown.

While we are still on the subject of imagination, at this point there ought to be those still fidgeting in protest: “But — but — but what about reforming capitalism? Surely even the most sociopathic capitalists can be disciplined, right?” Right, here we go again: The entire notion of reforming capitalism is based on two faulty premises. First it mistakes, as discussed earlier, the exploiting class for the exploiters, hence the necessity of exploitation for its preferability. Secondly it presupposes working through the state machine, which we have established is never neutral, never malleable.

As against these highfalutin assertions and opulent imaginings, scientific socialists view the history of civilization as a product of class struggle and, therefore, a matter of life and death. To this end we do not dream as the reformists do of betting the hard-earned aspirations of the battle-hardened proletariat all on some utopian fantasies. We do not dare as these utopians do to subjugate the political agency of the working class under the whims of a section of the bourgeoisie supposedly capable of moral enlightenment. And not for one moment do we wish as these ethical optimists do for this historical struggle to be reduced into a perpetual grind for concessions only to have the most downtrodden among us thrown under the bus no sooner than their moral yearnings once again fall through and come to nothing. How cleverly pompous of their morals, and how immensely thick their “veil of ignorance”, to use the toiling masses as cannon fodder for their imagined justice!

But as Marxists we place our unwavering trust in the truth that capitalism, much like slavery and feudalism from which it was derived, can ultimately never escape from the grave it has since dug for itself — as the Marxist saying goes: “The capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them.” Capital’s incessant drive to make a free laborer out of everyone other than those blessed with its possession — regardless of race, gender, culture, nationality — is such that it must annihilate all these remnants of the old, conservative social order if it was to realize its economic potential to the fullest. In the name of productivity, hence profitability, capital must undertake the task of unifying all of humanity’s labor power. 

But in doing so all surviving shreds of locality and individuality in the labor process were at once thrown out the lord’s manor’s window. In comes the marvel of industrial machinery that, rather than liberate the laboring masses from labor, instead liberates the idler from having to place his means of production in labor’s hands, for it is now labor that is in the hands of his newfound machinery. All this while labor has become, like the means of production it once held, a means of production itself; and the laborer, as such, alienated from the labor process. Yet this historic progress of tearing down pre-capitalist barriers and centralizing the productive forces contains from the very beginning the seeds of its own undoing. The proletariat, alienated yet united, forges its collective force in the crucible of industry, promising to one day reclaim the means of production for itself. The grave being dug by capital for capital thus becomes not just its resting place, but above all the foundation of a new world built by the hands and minds it once sought to enslave.

The historic task of constructing this new world is however not for the faint-hearted reformist, nor is it for the simple-minded economist. It cannot settle at the level of dogfights for economic reform and trade unionism; its bearers must elevate themselves to the political plane, for any class struggle must resolve in either side seizing power over the other. Thus not only is this historic task a proletarian task; it is most importantly a revolutionary task. In other words, the workers’ recognition of their collective power must translate into the proletariat’s transformation from a class in itself to a class for itself. In all class societies it is the propertied minority that commands the propertyless majority, by means of its state apparatus. In a pre-socialist society, then, the exact opposite must be realized, by means of the proletariat’s own state apparatus — a democratic workers’ state.^[2]

No doubt this is easier said than done; it is in fact the most challenging, yet also most rewarding, task that all workers and oppressed peoples can and must undertake. It is not the intention of this essay to expound on the process of building the leadership and organization required of this task; suffice it to say that in order for the working masses to rise above and take active part in this process, revolutionary socialists must come to grips with and strive to run down all material barriers to this participation. It is one thing for the reformist to shy away from total transformation, but it is another for the “utopian revolutionary” to preach socialist ideals while blind to the most pertinent sufferings of the masses. PSM, case in point, is playing both roles at the same time, though this is hardly a deliberation on its part. Either way this party is only one among the many tendencies of “classical social democracy functioning in an epoch of progressive capitalism,” which as Trotsky astutely observes “divided its program into two parts independent of each other: the minimum program which limited itself to reforms within the framework of bourgeois society, and the maximum program which promised substitution of socialism for capitalism in the indefinite future. Between the minimum and the maximum program no bridge existed. And indeed social democracy has no need of such a bridge, since the word ‘socialism’ is used only for holiday speechifying.”

This “bridge between the minimum and the maximum program”, hence that also between reform and revolution, is a transitional program that comprises a list of transitional demands, “the essence of which,” Trotsky explains, “is contained in the fact that ever more openly and decisively they will be directed against the very bases of the bourgeois regime.” That is, it is the precise goal of a transitional program to prove the inherent inequality in the capitalist mode of production and thus the need for a socialist revolution. “The question is one of life or death of the only creative and progressive class, and by that token of the future of mankind. If capitalism is incapable of satisfying the demands inevitably arising from the calamities generated by itself, then let it perish.” After all, “‘realizability’ or ‘unrealizability’ is in the given instance a question of the relationship of forces, which can be decided only by the struggle. By means of this struggle, no matter what immediate practical successes may be, the workers will best come to understand the necessity of liquidating capitalist slavery.”

We must now turn our attention back home, for the transitional program finds its most relevant expression in the neocolonial world, in which the progress of democratization is naturally stunted owing to the fact that the national bourgeoisie — largely beholden to both local feudal relations and global capitalist forces — remains weak, fragile, vulnerable, thus reactionary from the outset, such that democracy will never be, as it has never been, in its interest whatsoever. The American bourgeois who abolished chattel slavery and, as we saw earlier, the European bourgeois who brought feudalism to its knees, were only revolutionary insofar as history demanded of them. No sooner had capitalism begun to take root in society than proletarian consciousness came into being. Neocolonial or not, all subsequent capitalist parties necessarily turned counterrevolutionary, which explained, for instance, the failure of the 1848 revolutions, and the timely birth of “classical social democracy” as embodied by, say, the SPD that till this day remains a proud class collaborationist in Germany. This reactionary nature of the modern bourgeoisie is only much more naked in the neocolonial world for two chief reasons. One, it is the historical expression of the colonial legacy of murder, pillage, and debt. Two, it is the necessary character of a powerless national bourgeoisie that has had no choice but to tread the fine line between its conservative obligations and the ever-growing mass movement for long-overdue democratic demands.

This relative weakness of the capitalist class in the neocolonial world brings along with it immense implications; this much was clear from the experience of the Russian Revolution. Indeed the chain of imperialism was only as strong as its weakest link. The Russian bourgeoisie, tiny in scale and narrow in scope, its umbilical cord barely detached from the womb of the world market, thus had at the time the weakest hold on the working class, albeit also a nascent one. Concentrated in large factories and industries owned primarily by foreign capital, the workers were able to organize and radicalize rapidly, facing little of the entrenched political resistance or economic concessions characteristic of more developed capitalist states. This structural frailty of the Russian capitalist class allowed the working class to outflank it, seizing leadership of the broader social forces — including what was then a disproportionately larger peasantry (more than 80% of the population at the time) — that sought an end to oppression and exploitation. The October Revolution thus demonstrated how the weakness of the capitalist class in underdeveloped nations could in turn become a decisive factor in the victory of the proletariat, provided it is equipped with revolutionary leadership and armed with a clear fighting program. Such is the crux of Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution.

So also in such neocolonial countries as Malaysia is the capitalist class walking on especially thin ice. Considering this nation-state’s fairly short history, this “progressive” band of (neo)liberals that has only rather recently seized power from the conservative Malay bourgeois nationalists, as in Barisan Nasional, represents not a break with the capitalist system but a mere switch in management. The events following the Sheraton Move in 2020 exemplified this illusion; the collapse of the Pakatan Harapan coalition, not least led by Mahathir himself, briefly ended decades of BN hegemony only to end up exposing the fragility of liberal reform in Malaysia, and the power of conservative forces such as the Malaysian Islamic Party (PAS) deeply entrenched in less developed states particularly along the East Coast of the peninsula and the Borneo states. It was therefore little wonder, in the awkward aftermath of the 2022 elections, that these very liberals found themselves “compromised” into an unholy alliance with their ex-nemesis. 

Luckily for us, it is becoming more and more visible by the day that no matter how progressive and forward-looking Anwar and his admirers on the center and the “left” maneuver about presenting themselves, and no matter the gobbledygook flung at us by liberal think tanks and economic experts like Rafizi, it changes not one bit the fact that they have zero prospect of charting an independent path from the old ruling class and its ossified traditions. Thus in our context, it matters not at all whether or not Anwar, Rafizi, or just about anyone in PH want to abolish racism. Contrary to PSM’s entire belief system, they simply cannot do so.

This does not mean, however, that the “transition” from race- to needs-based affirmative action as envisioned by Zaharom and Arun is pointless — just the opposite, in fact. But of course “transition” means for them an ocean apart from what it does for us. They have not come this far as we have in deducing that there is no place for such a “transition” in the capitalist framework. They therefore fervently fondle the idea that real progress can somehow be realized by inherent reactionaries. For us, on the other hand, any “needs-based” affirmative action, or wealth redistribution more broadly, is no different from any other democratic demands in that they must in the first place be explicitly class-based, as Zaharom so reticently intimated. But above all they must be part of a transitional program, that is, as transitional demands, whose overarching purpose consists — as we have gone through at length — not in their realization as things currently stand, but precisely in their futility. It is through this futility that the struggle for transitional demands as such ultimately express a socialist, hence necessarily revolutionary character.

Still, liberals and social democrats are generally better learners than conservatives (don’t quote me on this) — well, at least the genuinely progressive ones. One finds kindred spirits as such in the myriad marketplaces of ideas where lukewarm virtue signals are eagerly bought and sold, more so in such times of crisis as ours. Many hop from one booth to the next, foraging for answers to long-dead questions. But every now and then as “stakeholder capitalism” loses its steam, we come across a scattered few who have grown disillusioned enough that the need for systemic transformation, for revolution, no longer seems far-fetched, and increasingly less intimidating than lived reality. This is precisely the time we intervene and assure each and every one of them, with full confidence, that the law-abiding likes of Khalid are only as cocky as the powers that be need them to be. From here on out, they have only to sign up for the class struggle.