The limits of state power and winning it within bourgeois democracy, and an accounting of the obstacles to parliamentary socialist aims in Malaysia.
Jeremy Lim
Having laid out the two common types of socialist parties to choose from, their flaws and tendencies, this article will deal with the attempt to use the party to carry out its objectives within the constraints of liberal democracy and advanced capitalism. With the reform agenda in mind, the possibility and limits on the reorientation of the state towards socialism are examined. Closing out, I will quickly lay out the conditions in Malaysia for building socialism through the state.
The desire to take the parliamentary road can be seen through the aim of achieving two broad objectives. The first would be, in a situation where parliamentary institutions are fairly stable, to use this national platform to amplify a socialist message, in the hope that it accelerates class consciousness among the masses. The second motivation would be that when the party takes state power, it has the access and political resources to enact a mobilisation of the state towards socialist ends. These two goals are not always separate and can be pursued one after the other — amplifying the socialist message before taking state power.
Arguably, attempting the first, gaining a national platform through the parliament, is relatively easier than the second. One would not need a majority or be in government but merely have an appreciable presence to garner national attention. The effectiveness of the strategy, however, would heavily depend on local and national circumstances being favourable. In most capitalist countries, media is either state-owned or in private hands, both of which would be hostile to the socialist message. What makes this worse is that in decayed democracies, where the public feels it has no control over the legislative process, and hence is disengaged and uninvested, little to no attention is paid to parliamentary sessions. In broad terms, the resources invested in winning a state-level or parliamentary seat for this purpose may not yield the intended returns if the aforementioned disadvantages are prevalent.
Winning office and taking state power will require the marshalling of much more resources, but this would represent the ultimate victory for socialist ‘reformists’. What the socialists in power will have to contend with is the leviathan of a state it now has to control, presumably leading to the long-debated question: can the state be used for socialist goals, or is it just an instrument of capitalist rule that cannot be reformed and must be destroyed? This, however, is not even on the table for most socialist parties — in many cases, social democratic parties — who have won power. The primary contradiction is that the party would be participating in, hence indirectly legitimizing, the institutions that are antagonistic towards the forces that seek to destabilise it, in this case, the forces of socialism. Thus, the socialist party would be left with the choice of a full assault on capital and bourgeois democracy — possibly setting the stage for revolutionary confrontation — or giving up the fight at the altar of corporatist social democracy, where capital and labour agree to a truce and cooperate. It is worth noting that this binary between full offensive and compromise appears to be a false one and I will elaborate on the possible alternative in my final article.
Despite the difference in scale of both aims, they nevertheless would mean a diversion of attention and resources towards the electoral platform. Important again to address what winning does to a party and what a party can do after winning, whether it wins small or wins big. The traps of institutionalisation and bureaucratisation, whether a mass party or vanguard party takes power, would still be present and potentially lead to a greater separation between the party leadership and the people who support it.
With all this in mind, what are the electoral and parliamentary prospects for socialism in Malaysia? The first strategy of using a parliamentary seat to amplify a socialist message has been tried by the Socialist Party of Malaysia in recent times to minimal effect if measured against the goal of generating greater class consciousness or developing a national base of support. Though the media does report on their admirable efforts to defend the marginalised and continues to do so even as they are no longer in office, the meagre coverage does not have the capacity to translate the people’s sympathy for their efforts into solidarity or support for the party.
The electoral strategy of taking power and wielding the state has not been successfully attempted by a socialist party. Despite having no historical Malaysian examples to draw upon, it would not be difficult to imagine the challenges of carrying out a socialist reorientation after winning. The current political landscape would suggest that any victory would probably be won with coalition partners who are likely to not be fully on board with a socialist vision. Having to please coalition partners to keep the party in government then limits the set of policy options available. The next most obvious obstacle would be the capitalist class, be they state-dependent or fully independent. Though Malaysia’s capitalist class is hardly cohesive, a large scale capital strike — a likely response to the strengthening of labour laws and redistributive fiscal policy — could prove fatal if the people are not fully behind the socialist party’s agenda and ready to take to the streets. The last and probably most challenging impediment is the state apparatus, particularly its ideologically-bound bureaucratic class. The shift in policy direction and focus are not likely to sit well with a class that has been indoctrinated on how things should be and how they should stay, leading to possible public clashes and even sabotage. A quick accounting of its adversaries thus suggests that a Malaysian party in power would find it a near-impossible task in using the state, as it stands, to achieve socialism.
Now, after basically eliminating the possibility, viability and desirability of the standard set of socialist binaries — revolution and reform, mass party and vanguard party, corporatism and confrontation — there seems to be nothing left to work with. However, what has been left out of the discussion so far has been the alternatives that are often not highlighted within mainstream Left discourse. The next and final article will attempt to sketch out the task ahead, discussing a redefined relationship between the party and its base through the principle of self-government, what genuine socialist state transformation could look like and some preliminary signposts on how to develop alternatives.
Info: The article was originally published here.