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The Political Economy of Social Control in Singapore
`The thesis presented here will not only change the way in which we understand contemporary Singaporean society and the relationship between the state and its citizens, but will also provoke a debate about the social costs of economic development in other parts of the world, and the future security of the island republic - increasingly a Chinese enclave in a Malay sea - in the twenty-first century.' - Peter Carey, Trinity College, Oxford This study examines the development of Singapore's complex system of social regulation in relation to the phases of its economic strategy and political transition. It focuses on the way social control works through public housing and welfare, education, parliamentary politics and the law. It draws out the implications of such comprehensive control for political conflict. Popular explanations for Singapore's success and its status as a model for other developing countries are brought into question.
264 pages, Paperback
First published June 1, 1994
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May 29, 2023
I was gonna read Rachel Heng’s The Great Reclamation, but the epigraph was a quote from S. Rajaratnam and turns out it’s all historical fiction so I figured I should first probably get a handle on some Singaporean twentieth-century history besides that Sonny Liew graphic novel. I also haven't picked up a history book in awhile—and who exactly is this silly-looking Lee Kuan Yew guy, y’know?
Tremewan published the book in 1994, so unfortunately it ends around before the 1997 crisis and whatever, but we take what we can get. The thesis is that the ‘PAP-state' in Singapore is the political form of the politico-economic alliance of the Singapore capitalist class (itself rather weak) with ‘foreign capital’ (read: global imperialism). This is the alliance that maintains the direction of Singapore’s political economy and the ‘social control’ entrenched in Singaporean society through its repressive and ideological state apparatuses. Singapore itself is valuable to imperialism for its longtime role as an entrepôt and its exploitation of its peripheral ASEAN neighbors on behalf of foreign MNCs (not dissimilar from the mediating roles played by other NICs like Taiwan and Hong Kong). Its militantly disciplined labor force is not unattractive as well, which today is bolstered by a massive shackled migrant population from India, Bangladesh, China, and elsewhere (representing 20% of the resident population).*
Though the writing is unapologetically Marxist**, anti-communist superfans of bourgeois liberal democracy and diffused capitalist state repression will find a lot to grind their teeth on in Tremewan’s politico-economic history of the city-state (unless they find Singapore's national mythology of necessary evils convincing). Election rigging, gerrymandering, detentions without trial, capital punishment, brute lawmaking, beholden judiciaries, extreme executive powers–it’s all here! Similar to Hong Kong and elsewhere, the British state apparatus has been efficiently appropriated by the bourgeois nationalist PAP-state towards entrenching itself in society and producing a compliant and atomized workforce as an effect. (This is visible in the Internal Security Department and the Internal Security Act, which are artifacts of the colonial Special Branch and the Emergency-era 1948 Emergency Regulations Ordinance (ERO) and 1955 Preservation of Public Security Ordinance (PPSO).) I don’t want to drone on about ‘human rights abuses’ and ‘lack of democracy’, which isn’t exactly an interesting terrain to tread and risks apologism for liberal democracy's own crimes—what’s more useful how we can historicize the discourse of ‘Asian values’ (‘Confucian values’, as Lee Kuan Yew puts it; ‘Chinese characteristics’, as the modern CPC puts it, to what is ultimately a postcolonial justification for fascism in India as the Maoists identify (though postcolonial relativism seems much more benign to us here in the West)) as well as the discourse of liberal democrats contesting the PAP in Singapore in the 80s to now. The PAP’s in-practice rather illiberal liberalism is owed to the underdevelopment of Singapore compared to the centuries of accumulation, technological advancement, and class rule in its Western partners, as well as the PAP’s insecurity in its very own class.
While Britain intended to keep Singapore after World War II, the reality was that the sun had set on the empire and however history would wash out, it would be navigated on the terms set by popular decolonization. The anti-colonial Malayan People’s Anti-Japanese Army and the Malayan Communist Party were too powerful and popular amongst the masses, and this was grasped by both Britain and the faction of English-educated Chinese capitalists that would eventually become the PAP. Lee Kuan Yew emerges here as quite the cunning character. By co-opting the left opposition’s base while working in tandem with colonial Britain, the Lee faction played at bourgeois nationalism while cutting off the heads of the legal and trade union left in Singapore after they were no longer useful. With the merger with Malaysia in 1963, the Lee faction expected a comfortable arrangement of a common market for import-substitution industrialization (ISI) and power-sharing with the Malayan ruling class. But LKY got too ambitious for the Malayan aristocracy, and Singapore was ejected out of the federation in 1965. Without a robust domestic capitalist or working class in Singapore for an ISI strategy to pan out, the Lee faction worked with its remaining ally, foreign capital, through a strategy of almost exclusively FDI-based export-oriented industrialization (EOI) (unlike the other Asian Tigers), shaping a proletarian class of compliant workers and an English-educated capitalist class fit for rule. In this process, Tremewan focuses not just on the legal and military arms of the repressive state apparatuses, but on the interpellating arms of the ideological state apparatuses through the organization of education and public housing.*** (I thought Tremewan’s discussion on housing was really useful on illustrating that bourgeois state welfare is never benign. The organization and regulation of housing, from the initial resettlement programs to the present HDB system of the Central Provident Fund (CPF) pension constitute a policy of proletarianization and ideological-social confinement. It was to’ put people in their places’, as Tremewan puts it). With an increasingly militant workforce Singapore sought in the 80s to move up the value chain, switching foreign investment from from labor-intensive, intermediate technological processes to capital-intensive, advanced technological processes (Singapore’s “Second Industrial Revolution”).
This clearly didn’t pan out, since Singapore had essentially changed the terms of its alliance with foreign capital to extract better benefits and a higher position in the world hierarchy of labor processes (technological backwardness, protectionism, and rising wage costs were confronted by the other Asian Tigers as well). This coincided with a new wave of dissent, marked by the unexpected 1981 Anson by-election and 1984 general election victories of the WP’s J. B. Jeyaretnam (who would be joined by the more compliant SDP’s Chiam See Tong in 1984). The two served as the only opposition members in Parliament, and thus forced the PAP to stop ignoring parliament as it had for fifteen years as a site of political contestation. One need only to look at J. B. Jeyaretnam’s career woes to see how the PAP essentially pulverized the opposition, leading up to 1987’s ‘Marxist Conspiracy’ and Operation Spectrum which quelled middle and upper-class unrest (a farcical retread of 1963’s Operation Coldstore which had beheaded Barisan Sosialis (which was a farcical retread of the colonial Labour Front’s 1956 invocation of the PPSO… you get the idea)). If there’s one thing that can be said, Lee Kuan Yew was brilliant at recognizing the fundamental distinction between friend and enemy. The activation of the Singaporean’s RSAs and ISAs throughout its history speaks to that, though that brings us to the other side of the PAP’s equatorial coin.
This other side of the PAP’s success has been its weakness, for the contradiction of its repressive illiberalism and parliamentary liberalism has been exploited by elements from the working, middle, and even local capitalist class. The latter’s inclusion implies that the faction of the ruling class embedded in the PAP is no longer necessary for the foundational partnership between Singapore and global imperialism—another sect of the new local capitalist class would do just as well (though the importance of the centralization of the state towards producing a compliant work force will likely mean that not much will change, or at least that’s how Tremewan sees it. Considering the importance of the essentially enslaved migrant labor force in the Singaporean economy, it seems to me that what is necessary will be the exploitative immigration controls employed by the Western ‘liberal democratic’ countries). The PAP knows its weakness and has made sure that even if Singapore’s thinly-veiled excuse of a parliament is actually contested (the opposition will have to break through the barracks of the Non-Constituency and Nominated MPs to achieve a two-thirds majority—good luck), the 1990 executive powers wielded by the ‘elected’ ‘non-partisan’ president will ensure that the PAP will stay entrenched in the state. Tremewan points out this
This specific historical scenario has granted the PAP-state relative autonomy from local class forces, allowing it to 'to expropriate land, to finance industrial infrastructure, to organise the working class and to override the interests of local capital.' A weakness transforms into its opposite.
Anyways, there’s a lot more to talk about: Lim Chin Siong, the subjective or objective failure of the Singaporean left (circa 1950s it seems like PPW was probably the solution to kicking off Britain), the historical evolution of the RSAs and ISAs themselves, the discourse of ‘Asian values’ in Singapore, Malaysia, and elsewhere (which seems still relevant today). But I’m writing this to jog my memory and to hopefully endorse this book to anyone else as a pretty cool read. Unfortunately the MCP makes little appearance in Tremewan’s research (but there’s plenty elsewhere); the question of migrant labor and labor aristocracy is begged as well. If I end up attempting to ideology-critique the Heng book I apologize in advance. Kthnxbye
*The question of labor aristocracy is crucial here, but Tremewan doesn’t seem to have a concept of it. Maybe someone has done the empirical work by now.
**I read a review by some dude who castigates and red-jackets Tremewan for this, and furthermore, for missing the incredibly important point that the “local capitalist class in Singapore” is actually “a function of the Singaporean technocracy.” These mofos have no shame.
***The matter of public housing is a source of pride in the Singaporean national mythology, and 80% of Singapore’s resident population lives in HDB housing right now (as one YDSA member of Singaporean origin proudly told me—huh).
Tremewan published the book in 1994, so unfortunately it ends around before the 1997 crisis and whatever, but we take what we can get. The thesis is that the ‘PAP-state' in Singapore is the political form of the politico-economic alliance of the Singapore capitalist class (itself rather weak) with ‘foreign capital’ (read: global imperialism). This is the alliance that maintains the direction of Singapore’s political economy and the ‘social control’ entrenched in Singaporean society through its repressive and ideological state apparatuses. Singapore itself is valuable to imperialism for its longtime role as an entrepôt and its exploitation of its peripheral ASEAN neighbors on behalf of foreign MNCs (not dissimilar from the mediating roles played by other NICs like Taiwan and Hong Kong). Its militantly disciplined labor force is not unattractive as well, which today is bolstered by a massive shackled migrant population from India, Bangladesh, China, and elsewhere (representing 20% of the resident population).*
Though the writing is unapologetically Marxist**, anti-communist superfans of bourgeois liberal democracy and diffused capitalist state repression will find a lot to grind their teeth on in Tremewan’s politico-economic history of the city-state (unless they find Singapore's national mythology of necessary evils convincing). Election rigging, gerrymandering, detentions without trial, capital punishment, brute lawmaking, beholden judiciaries, extreme executive powers–it’s all here! Similar to Hong Kong and elsewhere, the British state apparatus has been efficiently appropriated by the bourgeois nationalist PAP-state towards entrenching itself in society and producing a compliant and atomized workforce as an effect. (This is visible in the Internal Security Department and the Internal Security Act, which are artifacts of the colonial Special Branch and the Emergency-era 1948 Emergency Regulations Ordinance (ERO) and 1955 Preservation of Public Security Ordinance (PPSO).) I don’t want to drone on about ‘human rights abuses’ and ‘lack of democracy’, which isn’t exactly an interesting terrain to tread and risks apologism for liberal democracy's own crimes—what’s more useful how we can historicize the discourse of ‘Asian values’ (‘Confucian values’, as Lee Kuan Yew puts it; ‘Chinese characteristics’, as the modern CPC puts it, to what is ultimately a postcolonial justification for fascism in India as the Maoists identify (though postcolonial relativism seems much more benign to us here in the West)) as well as the discourse of liberal democrats contesting the PAP in Singapore in the 80s to now. The PAP’s in-practice rather illiberal liberalism is owed to the underdevelopment of Singapore compared to the centuries of accumulation, technological advancement, and class rule in its Western partners, as well as the PAP’s insecurity in its very own class.
While Britain intended to keep Singapore after World War II, the reality was that the sun had set on the empire and however history would wash out, it would be navigated on the terms set by popular decolonization. The anti-colonial Malayan People’s Anti-Japanese Army and the Malayan Communist Party were too powerful and popular amongst the masses, and this was grasped by both Britain and the faction of English-educated Chinese capitalists that would eventually become the PAP. Lee Kuan Yew emerges here as quite the cunning character. By co-opting the left opposition’s base while working in tandem with colonial Britain, the Lee faction played at bourgeois nationalism while cutting off the heads of the legal and trade union left in Singapore after they were no longer useful. With the merger with Malaysia in 1963, the Lee faction expected a comfortable arrangement of a common market for import-substitution industrialization (ISI) and power-sharing with the Malayan ruling class. But LKY got too ambitious for the Malayan aristocracy, and Singapore was ejected out of the federation in 1965. Without a robust domestic capitalist or working class in Singapore for an ISI strategy to pan out, the Lee faction worked with its remaining ally, foreign capital, through a strategy of almost exclusively FDI-based export-oriented industrialization (EOI) (unlike the other Asian Tigers), shaping a proletarian class of compliant workers and an English-educated capitalist class fit for rule. In this process, Tremewan focuses not just on the legal and military arms of the repressive state apparatuses, but on the interpellating arms of the ideological state apparatuses through the organization of education and public housing.*** (I thought Tremewan’s discussion on housing was really useful on illustrating that bourgeois state welfare is never benign. The organization and regulation of housing, from the initial resettlement programs to the present HDB system of the Central Provident Fund (CPF) pension constitute a policy of proletarianization and ideological-social confinement. It was to’ put people in their places’, as Tremewan puts it). With an increasingly militant workforce Singapore sought in the 80s to move up the value chain, switching foreign investment from from labor-intensive, intermediate technological processes to capital-intensive, advanced technological processes (Singapore’s “Second Industrial Revolution”).
This clearly didn’t pan out, since Singapore had essentially changed the terms of its alliance with foreign capital to extract better benefits and a higher position in the world hierarchy of labor processes (technological backwardness, protectionism, and rising wage costs were confronted by the other Asian Tigers as well). This coincided with a new wave of dissent, marked by the unexpected 1981 Anson by-election and 1984 general election victories of the WP’s J. B. Jeyaretnam (who would be joined by the more compliant SDP’s Chiam See Tong in 1984). The two served as the only opposition members in Parliament, and thus forced the PAP to stop ignoring parliament as it had for fifteen years as a site of political contestation. One need only to look at J. B. Jeyaretnam’s career woes to see how the PAP essentially pulverized the opposition, leading up to 1987’s ‘Marxist Conspiracy’ and Operation Spectrum which quelled middle and upper-class unrest (a farcical retread of 1963’s Operation Coldstore which had beheaded Barisan Sosialis (which was a farcical retread of the colonial Labour Front’s 1956 invocation of the PPSO… you get the idea)). If there’s one thing that can be said, Lee Kuan Yew was brilliant at recognizing the fundamental distinction between friend and enemy. The activation of the Singaporean’s RSAs and ISAs throughout its history speaks to that, though that brings us to the other side of the PAP’s equatorial coin.
This other side of the PAP’s success has been its weakness, for the contradiction of its repressive illiberalism and parliamentary liberalism has been exploited by elements from the working, middle, and even local capitalist class. The latter’s inclusion implies that the faction of the ruling class embedded in the PAP is no longer necessary for the foundational partnership between Singapore and global imperialism—another sect of the new local capitalist class would do just as well (though the importance of the centralization of the state towards producing a compliant work force will likely mean that not much will change, or at least that’s how Tremewan sees it. Considering the importance of the essentially enslaved migrant labor force in the Singaporean economy, it seems to me that what is necessary will be the exploitative immigration controls employed by the Western ‘liberal democratic’ countries). The PAP knows its weakness and has made sure that even if Singapore’s thinly-veiled excuse of a parliament is actually contested (the opposition will have to break through the barracks of the Non-Constituency and Nominated MPs to achieve a two-thirds majority—good luck), the 1990 executive powers wielded by the ‘elected’ ‘non-partisan’ president will ensure that the PAP will stay entrenched in the state. Tremewan points out this
When the core of the capitalist class is not a strong national bourgeoisie but a party organisation which governs mainly through the state and only indirectly through the foreign-owned means of production, it is not possible to talk of a Singapore ruling class. The distinction between 'ruling' and 'governing' becomes crucial. The PAP-state governs alone but it does not rule alone. It does not con- stitute a local ruling class or rule on behalf of one. It has always ruled in an alliance with foreign capital and could not have survived to rule at all without this partnership with the ruling classes of the advanced industrialised countries.
This specific historical scenario has granted the PAP-state relative autonomy from local class forces, allowing it to 'to expropriate land, to finance industrial infrastructure, to organise the working class and to override the interests of local capital.' A weakness transforms into its opposite.
Anyways, there’s a lot more to talk about: Lim Chin Siong, the subjective or objective failure of the Singaporean left (circa 1950s it seems like PPW was probably the solution to kicking off Britain), the historical evolution of the RSAs and ISAs themselves, the discourse of ‘Asian values’ in Singapore, Malaysia, and elsewhere (which seems still relevant today). But I’m writing this to jog my memory and to hopefully endorse this book to anyone else as a pretty cool read. Unfortunately the MCP makes little appearance in Tremewan’s research (but there’s plenty elsewhere); the question of migrant labor and labor aristocracy is begged as well. If I end up attempting to ideology-critique the Heng book I apologize in advance. Kthnxbye
*The question of labor aristocracy is crucial here, but Tremewan doesn’t seem to have a concept of it. Maybe someone has done the empirical work by now.
**I read a review by some dude who castigates and red-jackets Tremewan for this, and furthermore, for missing the incredibly important point that the “local capitalist class in Singapore” is actually “a function of the Singaporean technocracy.” These mofos have no shame.
***The matter of public housing is a source of pride in the Singaporean national mythology, and 80% of Singapore’s resident population lives in HDB housing right now (as one YDSA member of Singaporean origin proudly told me—huh).
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