Remembering Lim Chin Siong and the Socialist Wave
in Malaya & Singapore in the 1950's and 60's

Hello everyone. My name is PJ Thum, I'm wearing… and standing in front of … and my pronouns are he/him. Thank you to Parti Sosialis Malaysia for inviting me to speak and thank you, all of you, for joining me today. Thank you to Dr Jeyakumar for the opening remarks, and thank you Dr Poh for your speech, it's great to be here today with one of the heroes of our anticolonial past.

I'm going to talk today about the Socialist Wave in Malaya in the 1950s and 60s, and instead of all the great success of Chin Siong, which I've written extensively about, instead I want to talk about one of the biggest failures of Malayan Socialists, particularly because, first, that failure is pretty much the exact same challenge facing socialists today, but also because we live in a world where socialism is returning to widespread acceptability. Not relevance – it was always relevant – but I think we recognize the importance of socialism again.

Today, we live in a world where inequality is higher than ever in human history. In 2019, according to Oxfam, 26 people controlled half of the world's wealth. Inc Magazine recently suggested that as few as 8 men control 50% of the world's wealth today! Today, we live in a world governed by three major ideologies, which are breaking down: Neoliberal capitalism; Liberal, or more accurately illiberal democracy; and nationalism, specifically the nation-state as its political expression. The challenge for our time is to reform all three ideologies simultaneously.

What role can socialists play in this world, and specifically, in Malaya? To answer this, it is instructive to look at the last time that we Malayans faced this challenge to reform our economic, political, and social lives simultaneously, and that was in the 1950s and 1960s.

How do we build a better world? If the force that led to the exploitation and subjugation of so many people was colonialism, then making a better world had to start with anti-colonialism. But what did that mean? For many in Malaya, like Lim Chin Siong, the Bandung Declaration gave them a new framework, a new vocabulary to deal with this. In summary, self-determination for all. But what does self-determination mean? And here is where things get complicated.

At the most conservative end of the spectrum, that simply meant transferring power from the British to Malayans but changing nothing else: not how our government was structure, not how our economy was run, and not how our societies were organised. Even the people at the top would be British educated locals who think like British and identify as British. Everything stays the same, only the colour of the skin of the people at the top of the ladder changes.

But most people in Malaya were further along towards the other end of the spectrum, they wanted more change. The question is, to what degree? What do we want to change? Our political structure? Our economic structure? Our social structure?

You see, post-war socialism emerged into a world where the ability of the human mind to rationally overcome nature and build a better world, seemed limitless. The 1950s is when antibiotics became widespread, when nuclear power became commercialised, when birth control became available, when we went to space for the first time. If we had the ability to almost destroy the world in World War II, then surely if we just get together and put our minds to it we can also rise above our narrow frail human nature to remake the world into something better.

That was the essence of socialism: collective action in pursuit of a better society.

And what was the most important problem facing Malaya?

In their very first issue of Fajar, the newsletter of Socialist Club of the University of Malaya, the editorial identified the two greatest challenges facing the creation of a socialist Malaya as both colonialism and communalism. You can't build a country, a nation, when the people are divided. Not only that, but communalism empowered colonialism by dividing the people against each other. Their fight was thus against both colonialism and communalism.

But how to overcome communalism and create a socialist Malaya with both political and economic self-determination? For this to be achieved, they proposed, class solidarity had to be created. Of greatest importance was the natural class alliance between the Chinese urban working poor and the Malay rural labourers. Writings by the Malayan Socialist intelligentsia emphasised this point, producing reams of analyses of the social and economic conditions of both groups, emphasising that both Malay and Chinese peasants are being exploited by colonial capital.

Yet they recognised the challenge: The Chinese working poor may perceived European capital as their exploiter, but to the Malay labourer, economic exploitation had a Chinese face. The Malay padi-planter was often at the mercy of the village Chinese shopkeeper who acted as his financier. The Chinese trader was just a middle man for European capital but to the Malay labourer, the face of exploitation was Chinese, a fact emphasised by Malay politicians.

To this end, James Puthucheary would research and write his groundbreaking analysis Ownership and Control in the Malayan Economy, which demonstrated that European capital continued to control Malaya's economy, and not, as popularly assumed, the Chinese trading class. It was the foreign-owned clearing houses which controlled the wealth and structure of the Malayan economy. Blaming the Chinese community for exploiting Malays, he argued, was misguided. By dividing Malaya communally, it reinforced European colonialism. As such, in order to uproot colonialism and create economic self-determination, the Malayan Left had to focus not on communal lines but on the division between the colonial power and the dependent colony, or between colonial capitalism, the domestic bourgeoisie, and the workers.

But the overturning of a deeply entrenched political, social, and economic order, naturally faced stiff resistance from the colonial and Malay establishment, and by the late 1950s, socialist discourse had shifted from the inevitability of class solidarity to a much more sober and pessimistic view. A lengthy analysis from Lim Kean Siew, Kean Chye's brother, in Fajar laid out all the challenges facing the development of class solidarity, including the deep fears on all sides which were quick to be exploited by feudal, colonial, and anti-socialist elements. Cultures, languages, and religions were difficult divisions to overcome. Even a simple suggestion as “Let's all learn the National Language (Malay) so that the whole country speaks the same language” led to fears from Chinese and English speakers of discrimination against them. Yet you could not have a united Malayan nation without developing unity between the peasantry and the proletariat. He said ‘To walk, we must use both feet.'

Privately, leading Socialists intellectuals were beginning to despair of resolving this contradiction. People were too attached to their ethnic identities. They also had come to realise that logically, the only way to achieve true national unity and class consciousness was to also ‘struggle against Chinese capitalists, and particularly the capital that exploits Malays directly.' James Puthucheary said this privately but never said it publicly, because the Chinese cultural and educational movement, funded by Chinese capitalists, were their main allies in the anticolonial movement; and because to Chinese workers, it was European capital, not Chinese capital, who were their exploiters. It would have been too radical, especially in the Chinese-dominated city of Singapore, and might have split their anti-colonial coalition at a time when unity was paramount.

Furthermore, how to eventually overcome group loyalties and forge a unified Malayan identity? This was perhaps the most crucial dividing line within the Malayan Left, for it touched on the very meaning of self-determination itself. For socialist leaders who had experienced a lifetime of discrimination based on race, language, and class, self-determination lay in strong protections against discrimination, allowing the individual groups to flourish under an overarching Malayan framework with a common language of Malay, with a common Malayan culture evolving out of shared experience and understanding. Chin Siong drew upon the experience of Afro-Asia and argued that a shared anti-colonial struggle would not only drive the British out, but the practice of struggle could itself form the basis for a new Malayan nationalism by creating solidarity between the different racial, linguistic, and even class groups as they worked together and negotiated their differences in the face of a common enemy.

Others, however, were fearful of the disruptions of the anti-colonial struggle and argued for a more statist approach, with a common Malayan identity shaped or even imposed from the top down. This was the position of Lee Kuan Yew and his group. The creation of the Ministry of Culture, explained Rajaratnam, was precisely to forge a new Malayan culture which could overcome communal divides. Imposing culture, however, also undermined self-determination and this approach was criticised in particular for its elitism and perpetuation of colonialism both in its top-down approach and by using colonial forms of culture as part of the basis for Malayan culture.

Disagreeing with this ‘fusion' basis for Malayan nationalism were those, such as UMNO's leadership, who unsurprisingly argued for assimilation to a national culture, the Malay culture. This would then lead to anti-colonial unity between the people. This sacrificed equality and self-determination in the present for its (potential) realisation in the future.

But some leaders of the Left, however, also argued that focusing on racial and linguistic issues, such as vernacular education and language, would only serve to exacerbate the difference between the racial/linguistic groups, and would instead prevent the formation of Malayan nationalism. These were fears shared in particular by the non-Chinese non-Malay leaders of the Malayan Left, including Devan Nair, S Woodhull, and James Puthucheary, who as Indians feared both the dominance of the Chinese or Malays in a future Malaya.

Puthucheary argued that ‘cultural autonomy, meaning that diverse communities should be allowed to maintain and perpetuate cultural and linguistic differences, is pernicious because it seeks to perpetuate communal fragmentation of a country. It is pernicious because it seeks to perpetuate communal loyalties and communal politics.' He argued that mobilising people around self-determination for cultural and linguistic issues was well intentioned, he argued, but it would exacerbate communal antagonisms.

This problem can also be seen in the debates over Nanyang University, which taught a Malaya-centric curriculum in Chinese with the goal of decolonising university education while protecting the rights of Chinese to vernacular education. Even if we assume this approach worked, which is not proven, the crux of the issue was whether this helped to build a shared Malayan consciousness by creating graduates who were Malayan in their loyalty and outlook, or increasing divisions by creating Malayans who continued to live primarily in Chinese and therefore separate from those who did not speak Chinese.

Yet even between the three comrades– Nair, Woodhull, and Puthucheary – agreed on the problem, they would ultimately find themselves in three different camps for the solution, with Nair siding with Lee Kuan Yew, Woodhull siding with the Barisan Sosialis, and Puthucheary trying to bridge the two camps and attempting to remain neutral. Puthucheary actually advocated for using the power of capitalism to destroy – to use the destructive force of capitalism to tear down old forms of nationalism to remake society and create a new Malayan identity. His ideas gained currency in the 1980s with both Mahathir's and Lee Kuan Yew's governments, but he would ultimately be disappointed because even as they used the power of capitalism to remake society, they would both preserve and even emphasise ethnic nationalism for political purposes.

So you see the difficulty of socialists in approaching the national question. If you struggle for the rights of individuals or sub-groups, you undermine the unity of the group as a whole. If you seek to impose unity on the group as a whole, you undermine the self-determination of the sub-groups. If you wait for unity to evolve through shared experience, well, who knows if that will even happen or how long it will take.

Thus, there was never any clear socialist position on the national question. The priorities of endling colonialism and communalism remained clear, but there was no consensus on how this could be achieved.

And this is relevant because it remains the chief challenge for socialists around the world. Communalism continues to undermine class solidarity everywhere. Despite inequality and capitalist exploitation being at the highest point ever in all of human history, and that's not an exaggeration, autocrats and dictators are still able to use communalism, to manipulate ethnic nationalism, to turn people of the same class against each other.

And this is very hard for socialism to address. The fundamental rationality of socialism might be its greatest strength and its greatest weakness. But studies have repeatedly shown that people aren't rational beings. We're human! People identify with tribes, they instinctively categorise everyone they meet into groups. That's how our lizard brains work. So how to overcome this?

Now I'm not going to propose an answer to this. Far better minds than me, from Rosa Luxemburg to Lenin have written assiduously about socialism and nationalism. What I will do is make one observation, which is that previously, in the 1950s, Malayan socialists were locked into a nation-state paradigm. Partly because it did form part of their own assumptions – they did see themselves as Malayans first and foremost. But they didn't really have much choice because, second, of the broader context of decolonisation and the Cold War, which they had no control over. Attempts to transcend the nation-state, to act across artificial, colonially imposed national borders, were against the popular sentiment but also attacked as treasonous and used to silence and suppress socialists. But most of all because it was at the time next to impossible to truly conceptualise a globalised world and so struggles remained on a local and parochial level.

But that's not true today. The generation that is coming of age today is the first generation who have only ever experienced a globalised world. They are a generation who were bred from the beginning, because of the internet to image the world on a global scale. And right now, we have the first event in our lived history which is simultaneously affecting every single person on the globe. I am speaking from Singapore to a global audience. Globalism is normalised. And capital already knows this. Capital easily crosses borders to maximise its profitability, but labour cannot. So labour is trapped into increased exploitation in each country because capital has leverage that labour does not possess. So labour also needs to think and act on a globalised scale. Labour cannot move easily so labour must form international alliances. And today might be the first time that his is actually possible.

So I suggest that the challenge in front of socialists today is to break free from the nation-state paradigm, just as capital already has, to ask how we can operate on a scale which includes all humans. Rather than worry about whether capitalism in Malaysia has a Chinese or European or Malay face, socialists today have the opportunity to take collective action to address class exploitation globally, because unlike the people of the 1950s, people today are able to actually conceptualise the world as a single community. They understand the global flows of capital, labour, ideas, and disease, they understand that the person exploiting their labour can be American, or in the PRC, and that person does not care about the colour of your skin but about whether your labour is going to maximise the profitability of their capital.

This is already happening. Workers for Amazon in 15 countries last year organised against the company, to some success.

Nation-state nationalism is one of the last few permitted forms of discrimination remaining in the world and it's something that is ultimately irrational, making it difficult for socialism, a fundamentally rationalist ideology, to respond to. But if socialism is collective action to make a better society, then we must struggle against all forms of exploitation, all forms of discrimination, all forms of colonialism.

By operating on the only scale which includes all humans, socialists today have the chance to fulfil the internationalist promise of global action that the socialists of the 1950s aspired to but could never fulfil. Socialists can forge alliances against global capitalism and global oppression in ways that they could never do in the past. Trade unions in different countries can strike in solidarity with each other against the same capitalist. Workers in the same industry in different continents can collectively bargain against the same company. Groups fearful of self-determination may even be able to ease those pressures when you take away the zero sum game of group self-determination vs. nation-state self-determination, giving socialists an opportunity to sidestep nationalism and build class solidarity across national lines. There's an opportunity there, if we can just figure it out.

In Dec 1962, after the Brunei rebellion, the Barisan issued a statement in support of the Rebellion, as they had done so in the past as part of the PAP, when they issues statements in support of anticolonialism in Aden and Cyprus, along with Algeria, the Congo and other African states, and West Papua. Brunei was no different. Now, Chin Siong wasn't an idiot. He knew that supporting the Brunei Rebellion would be used against him by the pro-colonial forces. But there was a bigger principle at stake: in order to be truly socialist, we cannot, cannot be nationalist.

Chin Siong said: “It is our duty not only to fight against colonialism locally but also to support wholeheartedly the struggle against colonialism that is being waged in other regions. If we are not internationalists, then we would rightly be called chauvinists. We recognise that colonialism and imperialism respect no national boundaries.”

And the world we are now in is the first time that it may actually be possible to achieve the unfulfilled vision of Chin Siong and our socialist forebears.

Thank you.