Focus on Trengganu: Socialism for the rich or " atap genting, atap rembia..." phenomena

EXCERPT FROM AN EARLIER ESSAY ON CLASS DIVISION IN SOCIETY


We have authored yet another Malaysia Plan. This is one is based on plutocracy, or the rule of the wealthy. Race-based political-economy will still guide us till 2020, the year we achieve clear vision in a world of the blind in which many one-eyed men want to become king.

Robust growth, inspired by Sun Tze’s maxim of the art of war, guided by economic liberalism of a newer version of race-based policy, synthesised with a new keris-wielding philosophy of globalisation, and finally graced with the language of love and care and benevolence of a religiously-puritanic government - this is the new Malaysian deal of which Roosevelt’s America of the 1950s would have envied. The global economy is a mahabharatha or the great war into which we want to be sucked.

What are the assumptions of human nature on which the new deal of the 9th Malaysia Plan are based? How is race crystallised as a newer dynamics? Where is this government taking us in this turbulent economic waves of an oligopolic-capitalistic globalised world? Will we become happier and more sophisticated slaves in the global economy? Will we be able to get out of this new madness of a new economic piracy?

Will this nation - in its race to compete globally with the global economic giants - speed up the throttle of the human conveyer belt so that its citizen-slaves will work harder and faster until it suffers a massive heart attack borne out of the stresses of wanting to emerge triumphant as a global player?

Who will benefit from all this then? Is this the final solution to the pain we have inflicted upon ourselves from the liberal economic polices base on race-based ideology not longer in synchrony with the refreshing view of the anti-globalisation movement?

"Utilitarian view"

The newly unveiled NEP is such as case in point - it is still based on a utilitarian view of human nature and still crunches humanity by the numbers. Our ‘developmental' path continues to head in the wrong direction. We need to gostan as the old Johoreans would say - ‘go as you turn’ to de-evolve. Our notion of progress continue to be uni-linear and emphasises this poorly-misunderstood notion of human capital.

See...we cannot even escape from using the word ‘capital’ to stay in tune and in perpetual confusion of what ‘capitalism’ entails. Like our misconstrued notion of ‘feminism’, it is all a linguistic game. We will be continually trapped in this prison-house of language. It is a mélange and microbe of confusion based on a poor understanding of the philology of developmentalism. We have been so bought over by the shibboleth of developmentalism that we now only speak the language of cut-throat competition laced ‘confusingly’ with terminology such as Islam Hadhari.

Must we compete, among ethnic groups, among nations? Or is there a better lens we can use to craft a more liberating philosophy of development; one based on the development of the people, by the people, for the people, and one based on social-democratic principles of co-operation? This is our national dilemma which will continue to plague us as long as those who speak the language of national development have the mind of a parochialism unable to see the larger picture of dehumanisation unfolding. Cui bono - who benefits? - will be the guiding question in this NEP as a philosophy we borrow perhaps from Stalinism.

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