Monopolies, Capital and Monopoly-capitalism

28/03/2023

1] INTRODUCTION

TnG is currently the only contactless and cashless method of payment at highway tolls and for public transport in the country. Prime Minister Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim said on 19th March 2023 the monopoly of TnG would be reviewed so that other forms of toll payments could also be used.

On the following day, Transport Minister Anthony Loke said an open payment system for transport services under Prasarana Malaysia Berhad would be implemented soon to give public transport users other choices besides TnG.

Aside from TnG, there is a monopoly for motor vehicle inspection (Puspakom Sdn Bhd), landline telecommunications (Telekom Malaysia Bhd or TM), electricity supply (Tenaga Nasional Bhd or TNB), SYABAS Selangor sole water supplier, and the medical supplies to government hospitals,  (Pharmaniaga Bhd), and Bernas – the rice importing entity controlled by Syed Mokhtar Albukhary, preceeding regimes’ profit-gaining prodigy.

Then, there is at least one case of a very limited competition – that of the import of sugar. The business is controlled by only two companies, namely, MSM Malaysia Holdings Bhd and Central Sugars Refinery Sdn Bhd. Individually, the market capitalisation of these companies ranges from RM$629 million to RM$19.95 billion.

Geoffrey Williams of the Malaysia University of Science and Technology had said monopolies in food production, especially in the import of rice and other staples, that should also be dismantled as they led to higher prices for consumer besides introducing food insecurity in the country.

Those are positive suggestions in breaking commodity and service monopolies in Malaysia. The dismantling of the monopoly in the food and essentials sectors to ensure competition is a good direction to end ruthless profiteering through sheer capital accumulation in clientel-rentier capitalism that reeks of inequality and marginalisation, (read  STORM, March 2023, Structuring Sustainability in Economic Development).

It has reached a phase whereby capitalism genesis new formation in search of economic exploitative relations, subjecting exploited labour to monopoly-capitalised control. The terrains of economic territory that are increasingly subject to capitalist organisation and monopolistic penetration are in basic amenities and social services that used to be the sole preserve of public provision. However, the generation and distribution of knowledge under the dominant domain of infrastructural platforming ecosystems, (read  STORM 2023, Techno-feudalism), has induced the gig-economy labour dimension as digitised digits, (STORM 10/03/2023, Short-circuiting the Rakyat).

2] CAPITALISATION OF CONTROLLED RESOURCES

A major feature of our times is the privatisation of much of what were generally accepted as basic responsibilities of public provision. Basic amenities like electricity, water and transportation infrastructure, and social services like health, education, water and sewerage sanitation used to slot into this category. Of course, the fact that these were seen as public duties does not mean that they were always fulfilled – just look at the slacking educational segment with its inadequate deliverance, (csloh, Sabah – a state underdevelopment).

That private provision has increasingly opened up huge new markets for potentially profit-making – and capital accumulation to clientel-capitals’ related activities. Given the saturation of markets in many mature economies, and the inadequate growth of markets in poorer societies, and the intrusion of  global institutions such as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organization (WTO), as well as more informal bodies such as the World Economic Forum that have actively encouraged private investment in formerly public sectors.

Simplified, these entities are more an expression of the modern imperialistic drive for control over economic territory than the neocolonial direct annexation of geographic territory, but that does not make it any less consequential.

As an instance, the privatisation of knowledge and its concentration in fewer and fewer hands – especially through the creation and enforcement of new ‘intellectual property rights’ – have become significant barriers to technology transfer and social recognition of traditional knowledge. This is clearly evident in the case of access to medicines whose prices have been hiked up by patents that reward multinational companies and allow them to monopolise production and set high prices or demand very high royalties.

Similarly, control over seed patents, which are overwhelmingly held by TNCs (transnational corporations), have enabled Big Agribusiness monopoly control over crucial technologies for food cultivation across the world, even in the poorest societies, (STORM 2023, Agribusiness and food insecurity).

Further, for industrial technologies, as well as knowledge for mitigating and adapting to adverse environmental changes – they are all grave ecological disasters from the production systems created by global capitalism.

Meanwhile, at the production phase, from which workers and small producers like SMEs mainly derive their incomes, is exposed to cut-throat competition between different production sites across the world in the globalisation trend to “liberalise trade”.  Consequently, incomes generated in this stage of the value chain are kept low through the mechanism in global labour arbitrage.

The overall result is twofold.

First, this situation results in an increase in the supply of the ‘global’ labour force (workers and small producers who are directly engaged in production of goods and services).

Second, the power of corporations to capture rents – from control of knowledge, from oligopolistic or monopolistic market structures, and from the power of finance capital over state policy – has greatly increased, (STORM, 2021, Dominance of financial monopoly capitalism).

Overall, this has meant a dramatic increase in the bargaining power of capital relative to labour, which in turn has resulted in declining wage shares (as a percentage of national income) in both developed and developing countries. These processes have only worsening material conditions for many workers in both the periphery and the core.

Imperialism has inadvently weakened the capacity for autonomous development in the Global South, and worsened economic conditions for workers and small producers in the emerging and low-income countries.

In April 2022, Oxfam reported that more than a quarter of a billion people falling into extreme levels of poverty in 2022 alone.    

In its January 2021 Report, ‘The Inequality Virus’, Oxfam stated that the wealth of the world’s billionaires increased by US$3.9tn between 18 March and 31 December 2020 when their total wealth stood at US$11.95tn, a 50 per cent increase in just 9.5 months.

Further, according to Oxfam’s analysis, 13 out of the 15 IMF loan programmes negotiated during the second year of COVID required new austerity measures such as taxes on food and fuel or spending cuts that could put vital public services at risk. Indeed, Oxfam and the Development Finance International (DFI) had revealed that 43 out of 55 African Union member states face public expenditure cuts totalling US$183 billion over the next five years.

The world’s poorest countries were due to pay $43 billion in debt repayments in 2022, which could otherwise cover the costs of their food imports.

Remembering that beneficiaries had intensified during the global boom of the 2000s, when median workers’ wages stagnated and even declined in the Global North metropolitans even as per capita incomes soared. However, those increases in income were only captured by  stockholders, corporate barons and financial rentiers and capital vultures.

Therefore, from a bigger picture perspective, we are witnessing even in the rich countries with glaring evidence, increasing inequality, stagnant real incomes of working people, and the increasing material fragility of daily life have all contributed to a deep dissatisfaction among ordinary people, (Oxfam Report 2022).

3] MONOPOLY-CAPITALISM

Monopolies do not exist by themselves. These entities existence owes systemic institutionalisation of politico-economic policies of preceeding regimes that introduced ethnocratic kleptocrats’ practices which encouraged illegal trading and odious transactions.

As part of the neoliberal globalised economy – where 40% of labour are involved in international trade –  the country spawns intermediaries as comprador capitalists to cooperate, collaborate and collude with Global North monopoly-capital mission objectives.

Monopolies technology founded by the infrastructural platforms of the imperialist centres; the monopoly of access to natural resources like those in the Big Agribusiness sector; the monopoly over finance as dominated by foreign banks; the monopoly over international communication and the multimedia in fibre optics installation and maintainable by the infrastructural platforms monopoly-capital – all these demons affect a national economic development.

These monopolies tend to be regionally concentrated in the countries of the Global North, but since the globalisation trend in the 1970s also persist in a more multipolar world with peripheral subsidies emerging in the Asia-Pacific, South America and Middle East and North Africa (MENA) regions.

The resultant image of monopoly-capital is
identifiable according to Samir Amin and Jayati Ghosh in Interpreting contemporary imperialism: lessons from Samir Amin,

to six significance categories:

(1) the imperialist bourgeoisie at the centre or core, to which accrues most of the global economic surplus value;

(2) the proletariat at the centre, which earlier benefited from being a labour aristocracy that could enjoy real wage increases broadly in line with labour productivity, but which was now more threatened and experiencing falling wage shares and more insecure employment conditions;

(4) the dependent bourgeoisie of the periphery, which exists in what he saw as an essentially comprador relationship with multinational capital based in the core; possible a higher rate ofaccumulation.

(5) On the demand side of the accumulation equation, monopolistic industries adopt a policy of slowing down and carefully regulating the expansion of productive capacity in order to maintain their higher rates of profit.

The consequences of monopoly mean that the savings potential of the system is increased, while the opportunities for profitable investment are reduced. Other things being equal, therefore, the level of income and employment under monopoly capitalism is lower than it would be in a more competitive environment.

(6) the proletariat of the periphery, which is subject to super-exploitation, and for whom there is a huge disconnect between wages and actual productivity because of unequal exchange;

(5) the peasantries of the periphery, who also suffer similarly, and are oppressed in dual manner by pre-capitalist and capitalist forms of production; and

(6) the oppressive classes of the non-capitalist modes (such as traditional oligarchs, warlords and power brokers).

While the global supply chains represent the integrative structure of contemporary global capitalism, and any disruption to them potentially threatens the functioning of the system itself, present discourses from policymakers seem to be, and keen, to promote their purported benefits, that is, proposing multifaceted ways to increase supply chain “resilience.” (IMF 2023).

This articulated notion has been defined by the World Trade Organization and Asian Development Bank as “the ability of these chains to anticipate and prepare for severe disruptions in a way that maximizes capacity to absorb shocks, adapt to new realities, and re-establish optimized operations in the shortest possible time.”  

While global supply chains are promoted as generating positive gains for firms and workers, North and South there is mounting evidence to suggest that they represent organizational forms of capitalism designed to raise the rate of surplus value extraction from labour by capital and facilitate its geographic transfer from the Global South to the Global North.

As global supply chains have contributed to dynamics of concentration in leading firms, there is emerging a marked shift in national income from labour to capital across much of the world, (read Monthly Review, 2021, Breaking the Glass Screen – Framing Monopoly Capitalism in Global Commodity Chains.

Capitalism, as Karl Marx observed, is rooted in the exploitation of labour by capital through the latter’s ability to extract surplus value from the former.

It is characterized by dynamics of concentration and centralization of capital, where fewer and larger firms increasingly dominate each economic sector.

These dynamics are intrinsically related to capitalism’s uneven geographical development and the reproduction of geopolitical tensions and geoeconomic disruptions.

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References

An overall excursion with a better understanding of monopoly-capital and capitalism can be acquired through these related readings:

Benjamin Selwyn and Dara Leyden, “World Development under Monopoly Capitalism,” Monthly Review 73, no. 6 (November 2021): 15–28.

Intan Suwandi, Value Chains: The New Economic Imperialism (New York: Monthly Review , 2019).

John Smith, “The GDP Illusion,” Monthly Review 64, no. 3 (July–August 2012): 86–102.

John Bellamy Foster, Robert W. McChesney, and R. Jamil Jonna, “The Internationalization of Monopoly Capital,”  Monthly Review 63, no. 2 (June 2011): 1.

John Bellamy Foster, and Intan Suwandi, “COVID-19 and Catastrophe Capitalism,” Monthly Review 72, no. 2 (June 2020): 1–20.

and

STORM, 01/06/2021 Framing Monopoly-Capitalism

STORM, 05/03/2021 Capitalism

Digitalising an economy : short-circuiting the rakyat

10th March 2023

1] INTRODUCTION

Since the inception of the Multimedia Super Corridor (MSC) in 1996, succeeding regimes in governance have been persistently promoting the digital agenda through multiple initiatives such as the National Strategic ICT Roadmap and Digital Malaysia (2008-2012), National eCommerce Strategic Roadmap (2017), Industry4WRD (2018) and the latest National  Fiberisation and Connectivity Plan (2019-2023). 

The nation has a total workforce of 15.1 million. More than a quarter of this — 26% or a huge 3.9 million people to be exact — are participating in the gig economy: such as ride-hailing, e-commerce delivery, and computer programming.

The country’s digital economy is even estimated to be worth over RM$ 270 billion, which equates to nearly 18% of Malaysia’s gross domestic product, (YCP Solidiance, 2020).

Wow! At their peaks, SIA constituted only 4% of the Singapore economy, and Walmart dominated 10% of Mexico economy.

2] WORLD BANK DIGITALISATION FRONTIERS

On the Malaysia Economic Monitor, February 2023, the World Bank is rather persistence in advocating the advancement towards a digital economy.  Though while advocating Big IT development as a means of continuing capital employment, and consequential deployment of monopoly-capital to own and control infrastructural platforms, this organised entity of US imperialism is only encouraging capital accumulation with extracted value from states – to ensure Global North Big Tech infrastructural platforms shall continue benefiting on expansive exploitation, through global labour arbitrage where underemployed labour is truly exploitated, (read  STORM, 2022, Big Tech Large Gig), and STORM 2023, Big Tech in Marine Cabotage where such transnational (TNCs) infrastructural platforms would even dare to hold our nation in a technical ransom on undersea communication cabling installation and maintenance.

Indeed, the large RM$1.5 billion IT allocation in the Revised Budget 2023 will benefit only wealthy and the well-connected companies – not our local SMEs entrepreneurs – with their huge expenditure for consultancy services, and perpetuating other cock-ups, (Hunter, March 2023).

A digital economy shall signal how infrastructural platforms are not only incrementally becoming invasive as techno-feudalism in the country, but once franchised by privatisation and outsourced to the Global North monopoly-capital that even local compradore capital shall collaborate to accumulate their capital by and functioning as intermediaries.

Take the National 5G case. Vested interests are calling the withdrawal from Swedish telecommunications giant Ericsson in the 5G network, (theedgemarkets, 10/3/23). The Financial Times on 6th March, 2023 reported that Huawei is lobbying for a role in country’s 5G roll-out. Then, Telekom Malaysia (TM), is also competing in this industry, too, and it is not considered a neutral entity in rolling out the network, but a national telecommunications monopoly.

Related Readings: Financialisation Capitalism; Digital Feudal Lords

3] THE DIGITAL ECONOMY

It is not just having multiple programs like eLadang, Pemangkin to Satellite Farms immersing in the metaverse world, any Digital Economy demands an assurance on buy-in from employees to lower resistance to change, and upskilling or reskilling existing talent within various companies through trainings, too.

And these constraints are not adequately nor appropriately attended, especially when the SMEs

are not well-funded nor properly supported by government agencies, as yet:

Compounding the productivity element, labour quality contributed only about 8% to real GDP growth over 2001-18, much lower than the OECD average.

Read also : Digitalisation, Capitalism and SMEs.

Combined comparatively with inadequate IT systems deployment and infrastructural projects implementation, there is still a long drive on our digital highway to cruise forth, and by.

Indeed, the World Bank Report, June 2022 stated the inadequacies of IT implementation in the Sabah state of Borneo (read also csloh:  Sabah – a state underdeveloped) is due to lagging in economic transformation:

Amplifying another factor is that our high-speed broadband accessibility is considerably more expensive compared to other countries, (read  STORM,  Digital Knights).

According to a study on internet access affordability in 2021, people in Malaysia had to pay 26.58 U.S. dollars per month on average for broadband internet access. Meanwhile, the cost of mobile data per 1GB was at 0.45 U.S. dollars per month, (data as released by Statista Research Department, 28/9/22).

Further, Malaysia ranked 74 out of 167 countries in terms of price per Mbps for fixed broadband services, and 64 out of 118 for fiber broadband services – way behind regional peers such as Singapore and even Vietnam.

Enmeshed within these Real Geoeconomics are the socio-economic factors of poverty and inequality that exist in a stark manner in the states of Perlis, Kelantan, Trengganu and Sabah

where there are high unemployment rates among the youth and the emergence and expansion of youth that can be termed as “the precariat” [Guy Standing’s definition (2011)] as the mass class characterized by unstable labour, low and unpredictable incomes, and loss of citizenship rights.

First used by French sociologists in the 1980s, the precariat describes persons “working precariously, usually in series of short-term jobs, without recourse to stable
occupational identities or careers, stable social protection or protective regulations relevant to
them”.

Then, there is the emergence of a “cybertariat” type of worker has created an awareness about the multilateral ways by which mutually reinforcing economic, political and technological factors are transforming not only the global economies, nature and application of work, but also each individual lives, (Ursula Huws, Labor in the Global Economy, 2014 and The Making of a Cybertariat: Virtual Work in a Real World, 2003).

Thus, this informal employment sector occupies a sizeable segment of the country’s workforce that inevitably is without adequate social security safety provisions in place, (read csloh, 2022: Workers; Emir Research: Brain Drain; bernama: gig-economy and Khazanah Research Institute 2020, Shrinking “Salariat” and Growing “Precariat”?):

4] DE-INDUSTRIALISATION AND DIGITALISATION

The present renewal objective in advocating the digital economy is no more than a bad decision in the premature de-industrialisation process during the 1990s.

In Malaysia case, though, the years since 1970, the lack of significant technological upgrading, and the required structural change as a follow-up, has caused the premature plateauing of manufacturing, stemming from failures to coordinate policies, enforce standards, sustain high productivity growth and stimulate transition to higher value-added activities.

The resultant outcomes are that in the Global Value Chains, the country’s attractiveness as an outsourcing base has weakened. Further, rhe contribution of foreign value-added in the manufacturing sector’s export growth has also declined. There is micro-level evidence pointing to weaknesses in terms of human capital and technology, too.

Compounding these situations, there was the often ‘stalling’ – temporarily or complete closure – of the many Malaysian industrial projects that weakened workers employment,
(Jeffrey Henderson et al., Capitalism and Industrialization in Malaysia in Economy and Society, Volume 36, 2007 – Issue 1). Manufacturing as a whole has began to register a slower wage growth since the late 1990s, with labour markets characterized by heavy presence of low-skilled foreign workers, increased contract labour and/or outsourcing and the subsequent declining worker organization. The focus on sweat-based low-skilled foreign labour rather than on expanding professional and skilled labour locally has driven Malaysia down the low industrialization road as a result, (see Rajah Rasiah, Vicki Crinis & Hwok-Aun Lee in Industrialization and Labour in Malaysia).

In fact, a number of Malaysian firms have even relocated their research facilities and/or manufacturing plants to Cambodia and Vietnam to access more developed and expanding markets according to Rasiah, whereas the poverty of Malaysian industrial workers has persisted, and the precarious labour has continued, exacerbated by the dependency on migrant labour that had inadveribly reduced national labour surplus value tremendously.

Then, the concurrent continual enforcement of colonial industrial legislations (see, STORM 2021, Union Busting) had suppressed any broad or even marginal salary gain through the decades.

in the case of Loh Guet Ching v Myteksi Sdn Bhd (berniaga atas nama Grab) e-drivers are considered “independent contractors” and do not have the right to be heard before the Industrial Court for the alleged unfair dismissal by Grab. In short, with digitisation of an economy, the gig-labour is considered a sui generis  class with different legal rights and obligations from 9-to-5 employees as a new dimension to the labour force without adequate social security nor workers rights as an employee of a corporate entity.

Whilst, corporate Malaysia has much to gain with merchandise sales through an e-commerce economy:

5] CONCLUSION

Labour, hence, becomes digital-dehumanised workers where they are mere inputs in an interfacing intermediaries loop as conduits to big data storage and retrieval. A gig-worker daily experience and personal assets are exposed to financialisation or value extraction.

The consequential manipulation of such raw data into timely, accurate, relevant and complete information – by infrastructural capitalism platforms that are so overwhelmingly powerful in exploiting not only surplus value of labour but in the regal accumulation of capital relentlessly, too, (Social Europe,  Gig Workers Guinea Pigs of the New World of Work, February, 2021, and to see Foundation for European Progressive Studies, Governing Online Gatekeepers: Taking Power Seriously, 2021).

In short, where the underemployed youthful and useful gig-labour is exploited to the finite digit.

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NEP INEQUALITY AND ETHNOCRATIC HEGEMONY UNDER MONOPOLY-CAPITALISM

1] INTRODUCTION

The New Economic Policy (NEP) – formulated in the May 13 1969 aftermath –  sought  to ‘eradicate poverty’ and ‘restructure society to eliminate the identification of race with economic function’ in order to create the conditions for national unity. However, ‘restructuring’ has, inadvertently and unfortunately, come to be associated with ‘positive discrimination’ or ‘affirmative action’ on behalf of the ethno-Malay Bumiputeras whereby state interventions have resulted in significantly greater bumiputera wealth ownership, business participation, education opportunities, public sector employment and promotion, as well as representation among professionals and managers/administrators.

2] The 2018 elections outcome had indicated what many Malays had felt, and that is, that the benefits from “economic development” and growth did not trickle down to everyone, and that only the well-connected capital cronies who, through rentier capitalism and clientele corruption, had enjoyed the immense wealth of development. Everyone had seen a marked rise in absolute inequality through the years:

Source: Martin Ravallion 15 April 2019

And, while acknowledging that these corrupted cronies are participating in the grand scheme in alliance with Global North monopoly-capital in maintaining a Neo-Imperialism penetration, and domination, in the country, some other existing problems need to be amplified.

3] The New Economic Model (2010-2020) becomes the successor to NEP, whereby the policy goal is for Malaysia to become a high-income country by 2020 as well as sustainable and inclusive where the latter is defined as “enabling all communities to fully benefit from the wealth of the country”, has not bore fruits, but rotten thorny durian of issues pricking everyone besides the sewage stench of economic mismanagement.

4] We shall construct the NEP inequality dimension through a Distributional National Account (DINA) for country, applying certain concepts as adopted by Piketty & the French-Berkeley-London academic studies: (Piketty, Saez and Zucman, 2018), (Garbinti, Goupille and Piketty, 2018) and the China experience (Piketty, Yang and Zucman, 2019), and studies by Khalid 2019 and Chua 2003; Khalid was in the Council of Eminent Persons’ (CEP2018) secretariat of the Pakatan Harapan government, 2018-2020.

5] Thirty years after the NEP implementation, by 2002, Malaysia’s inequality level was remains extremely high: its top 1 per cent income share was 19 per cent and the corresponding number for the top 10 per cent was 44 per cent, which is higher than those of the US and substantially even higher than those of China:

Comparative INEQUALITY among NATIONS

Throughout the 2002-2014 period, the trends of the three ethnic groups were very stable where the bottom 50 per cent of Malaysian adults, 73 per cent were still Bumiputera, 17 per cent were Chinese, and 9 per cent were Indians:

THE BOTTOM 50 per cent of Malaysian adults (Khalid 2019)

Throughout the 2002-2014 period, the poor population among bottom 50 per cent of rakyat2 has been consistent, that is, 32 years since NEP implementation till even 6 years ago, the major chunk of Malay population [75%] (as well as the Chinese & Indian lower classes) has remained poor: more so because the malay population only makes up of 60% nation size.

Thus, though pro-Bumiputera policies had improved the economic status of low income Bumiputera, however, approximately one-quarter of the population in the bottom 50 per cent that was left behind is made up of Chinese and Indian working class.

6] The most important implication is that although the middle 40 per cent and the bottom 50 per cent benefited significantly from economic growth, the Bumiputera in the top income groups (the top 1 per cent and the 10 per cent) benefited the most from economic growth.

This is to reiterate that in the top 10 per cent, the average growth rate per adult national income for Bumiputera is 5.4 per cent, compared to 1.2 per cent for Chinese and 4.6 per cent for Indians. The gap in the growth rate among the different ethnic groups was large in the top 10 per cent; however, it is even larger for the top 1 per cent. In the top 1 per cent, the average growth rate for Bumiputera was 8.3 per cent, which is sharp contrast to -0.5 per cent for Chinese and 3.4 per cent for Indians:

In sharp contrast, the income of the Chinese in the top income groups deteriorated. To put it in another way, the strong growth in high-income Bumiputera occurred at the cost of a decrease in Chinese and the slow growth of Indians in the top income groups where the prime beneficiaries are the top 1% of the Bumiputera elites.

This would likely be only 40,000 Malay households that may possibly – within clientele political endowment and rentier capitalism environment – be properly genealogically related, too.

7] The unpleasantness on why many Malays had not attained parity despite +60 years of neo-liberal-enforced economic development is the emergence of a new class of compradore capitalist. With post-industrialidation and the introduction of financialization capitalism, the role of clientelship capitalism had inserted into the monopoly-capital supply chain in an age of imperialism. Corporate capital in the SMEs collaborates with Global North to tighten the commodity supply chain with monopoly-capital M&E vendors like AIDA, SKF, Cohu, VAT, Oerlikon Balzers, Favelle Favco, Bromma, Vitrox, etc.; recently, Digi, Nestles and British American Tobacco are, by market capitalisation, leading the list of foreign companies that dominate our local businesses.

8] With an ardent economic nationalism inspiration (initiated and activated from the various Bumiputra Congress proceedings, KS Mun, 1987) and with an ethnocentric agenda cultivating support from their respective political bases, ruling elites in the the bumiputera ethnocratic-based parties are aligned with economic oligarchs in accepting rentier capitalism to sustain their hold on power. They adopt this clientelism as solicitations for votes at the grassroots level, allowing ruling elites the party patronage and political power to “effectively partisanizing them and ensuring ground-level officials with whom most voters interacted with ……are political party loyalists” (Weiss, 2020).

Indeed, GLCs have always been used to aid the vested interests of power elites in three ways: first, to channel government-generated concessions to key constituencies to garner electoral support. Second, to allow for the appointment of politicians to the boards of GLCs to sustain party support. Third, to offer lucrative directorships to pre-empt party hopping.

Thus, successive UMNO leadership, succeeding Parti Harapan governance and an unelected Perikatan Nasional regime cultivated support from their respective divisional political bases to reinforce its stronghold towards an ethnocratic Malay hegemony. The concentration of political and corporate power in the hands of the prime minister-cum-finance minister had allegedly contributed to serious abuse of business-based institutions, especially those of GLCs’ entities :

CONTROL AND CONCENTRATION OF PRIME MINISTER & PMO, including the Ministry.of Finance Incorporated

9] The rentier capitalism enveloped government- the companies (GLCs) that failed miserably in oversight administration and at doing business. Proton, Malaysia Airlines, Perwaja, Tabung Haji, FELDA, MARA, Feedlot – just to name the few – where these failed GLCs have depleted hundreds of billion ringgit from the national coffer and should be unforgiven.

In the process of mismanaging the national economic development, the ruling regimes since the NEP implementation have caused wide wealth differences among the rakyat2. According to the UNDP 1997 Human Development Report, and the 2004 United Nations Human Development Report, Malaysia has the highest income disparity between the rich and poor in Southeast Asia, greater than that of Philippines, Thailand, Singapore, Vietnam and Indonesia:

10] Predicament of destitute among the working class of Chinese and Indians, and the Muruts, Kadazandusuns, Melanaus, Orang Asal in Sabah and  Sarawak and their development of underdevelopment – is that both central federation and local leaders like the Najib and the Taib dynasties, respectively, failed to uplift their own people rakyat2 welfare, resulting in prolonged stagnation but so busy to gaining for themselves through sheer plundering of the national wealth, (Sarawak Report, 2018) :

CONCENTRATION OF WEALTH

11] For more than 70 years, many Malays were living happily with the RIDA (Rural and Industrial Development Authority, 1953) and later, in the FELDA (Federal Land Development Authority) schemes where the latter thtough, and because of, clientelism capitalism had it corporatised as the FELDA Global Venture (FGV) which indebted these settler-owners unfairly:

FELDA PERFORMANCE 2007-2017

12] Malaysia is saddle-burden with a food supply problem that resulted in money flowing out of country just to sustain rakyat2 stomachs. This glaring untenable situation is visually seen every night, in the midst of a spiking Covid19 pandemic, the dozen of food banks serving to the poors in the Klang Valley alone. Indeed, upon a casual review, we spend almost RM$45 billion annually on food imports alone; and, the amount is growing more frightening each year :

High Import of Food

Why aren’t we grow vegetables supply in FELDA to feed ourselves? Why don’t we give land to the titleless cultivators in Pahang, the untitled communities in Sabah and Sarawak interiors that have distinctly special soil to harvest coffee or pineapples? instead of commodifying Big Farm’s commercial crops to benefit Global North consumers? Why don’t we expand to cultivate our own rice in the fertile Tanjung Karang district or the Bario highlands of Sarawak? Why aren’t we to provide former plantation settlement  “orphans of the Empire” Indians the land as they are good cattle breeders. Why don’t we go through a truly land reforming as in Taiwan and South Korea so that everyone – anyone – can have land titles to live as an inclusive nation? Why are there be so many unemployment and underemployment, especially among our youths and graduates?

UNEMPLOYMENT RATE SURGED in 2020 (DOSM, 2020)

13] Corporate capital in collaboration with
Global North monopoly-capital would prefer to fulfill insatiable lust of their shareholders’ financial capitalism impulse rather than caring about the livelihood or welfare wellbeing of the rakyat2.

Corporate capital would not want to encourage nor initiate rakyat2 taking part on any of these communal farmings as they will destroy the essence of Big Farm’s commercial ventures. In fact, majority of agencies under the Ministry of Rural Development exists to collaborate with monopoly-capital vendors to acquire heavy machines and equipment (from Caterpillar and Big Dutchman) and advisory consultancy (McKinsey and John Deere Agrofarm) for “land development” purposes :

THE MINISTRY RESPONSIBLE FOR CONSULTANCIES AND ACQUISITION OF HEAVY MACHINES AND EQUIPMENT FOR LAND DEVELOPMENT

Corporate capital needs what Marx acknowledges another category of flexible labour, the “latent” category, a sort of “reserve” reserve army of labourers. “As soon as capitalist production takes possession of agriculture,” he says, (like FELDA and corporate plantations like Sime Darby, Good Hope and Boustead), “and in proportion to the extent to which it does so, the demand for a rural working population falls absolutely,” (to be replaced by Indonesians, and later Bangladeshi workers). “Part of the agricultural population,” says Marx, “is therefore constantly on the point of passing over into an urban population or manufacturing proletariat. There is a constant flow from this source of the relative surplus population. But the constant movement towards towns presupposes, in the countryside itself, a constant latent surplus population.” This is when surplus value is predominantly extracted from labour exploitation:

THE EXPROPRIATION OF SURPLUS VALUE FROM LABOUR

Similar situations had occurred in China – from communes to decollectivisation towards her industrialisation, but she has admirably maintained a targetted poverty eradication program.

14] To those who migrate to an urban setting in seek of “better jobs”, it comes at a time when there is a huge demand for housing, but a steep fall in homeownership across all age groups because of soaring prices of housing, which has inadvertibly displaced the working class rakyat2 from the property market.

The gap between wages and house prices in the country has steadily widened, too.

The Department of Statistics Malaysia (DOSM) released figures to show that the average monthly salary and wage received by workers in the country was RM3,224 in 2019; a typical apartment in the Klang Valley is one hundred times say on this basic monthly salary. Presently, there is a total of about 10 million salary and wage recipients in Malaysia. The Household Income & Basic Amenities Survey Report 2019 by DOSM showed that the country’s 2019 median income of a household of four is RM5,873. This means it is sixty times of both parents’ monthly salaries to get a decent shelter.

15] Housing are dominated by real estate developers, GLCs property owners, PNB collaterised trust ownership, and the Real Estate Investment Trust (REIT) property-share trading system.

Since 2003, however, the corporate bond market has reached an unprecedented size of RM$190 billion, while similarly since 1999 the total private sector bonds outstanding have surpassed that of public sector bonds (Bank Negara, 2007). This expansion of bond finance favors bigger corporation linked to the government – much to the disadvantage of the Chinese and Indian capitals’ SMEs (small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), which constitute 98.5% of the corporate sector) that do not have the sizeable funding resources whereas ethnocratic entities have the Bank Rakyat and SME Bank to assist bumiputera businesses :

The ensuing financialization of Malaysian capitalism led to the emergence of a new politics of debts, and it also coincides with rising levels of household indebtedness. It reconfigures society where share ownership and shareholder value take preeminence, a growing influence from capital market-based financial system, the further entrenchment of the political renter class power as well as the polarization of wealth and income, and the explosion of financial innovation and trading that led an economy more towards “speculation” than the engenderment of production to be equally shared by rakyat (Costa Lapavitsas, “The financialization of capitalism”, SOAS), thus increasing government debts in the process :

GOVERNMENT CIRCULATION OF NEW DEBT PAPERS

16] The inequality generated through NEP implementation has seen the intrusion of public sector going into privatisation – whether it is through telecommunications or healthcare services – accentuating the ownership and control of clientelism capitalism in the country, basically highlighting the dominant role of ethnocratic hegemony in public affairs through musical GLC chairmanship, but with much disservice to rakyat2.

This domination highlights the collusion of clientelism capital with the monopoly-capital, especially through the circuitry of capital in the commodity supply chains, upstream to Global North finance capitals and commodity vendors, and downstream to crony-connected small manufacturing enterprises (SME) in the country, assisted by Bank Rakyat and SME Bank, and institutions like the SME Corporation Malaysia and Malaysia Global Innovative and Creativity Centre (MaGIC) to assist corporate businesses.

17] Malaysia did not nurture domestic giants such as Samsung or Foxconn or Alibaba. Rather, the ruling ethnocratic leaders in alliance with compradore capital tycoons, was to maintain a consolidation and inequality of assets and wealth, both by a system of selective privatisation through clientelism capitalism in the GLCs.

The Bumiputera Economic Empowerment Policy (BEEP) is to mobilise GLCs to promote “market friendly affirmative action” through the exclusively bumi’s Bumiputera Vendor Development Programme. From 2009 onwards, former premier Najib would increasingly tap GLCs to generate growth and infrastructure development, as well as to draw investments from foreign State Owned Enterprises (SOEs), especially China, (James Chin, 2019).

Even the first few years after independence, we were still in a neo-colonialism environment, (STORM 2016). The resurgence of economic nationalism from the Guthrie Dawn Raid to the 1970’s industrialization was shorted by the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis (AFC1997) and the Global Financial Crisis (GFC 2008) with lower growth rate since :

MALAYSIA STAGNATION POST AFC1997 AND GFC2008

With the economic stagnation – that demands comprehensive structural reforms as advised by the World Bank – blocking a faster growth rate due to the 2000s’ deindustrialisation process within an ethnocratic-run economy, there was a subsequent urge in harnessing the impetus to growth with attraction to an influx of foreign ownership in the Malaysian economy, companies such as Digi, Nestlé, and British American Tobacco leading the list of Malaysian companies by market capitalisation.

18] Concurrently, the GLCs were nurtured by clientele capitalism. Pharmaniaga is the Big Pharma GLC. OP is given sole distribution rights on the Pfizer’s vaccine in Malaysia during the Covid19 pandemic.

The role of Pharmaniaga in the public healthcare system is essentially acting as a middleman. It is rare for countries to rely on a single concessionaire company to supply biopharmaceutical products, and for such a long period of time, too. More than an ownership, Pharmaniaga is the sole concession holder to purchase, store, supply and distribute both branded and generic approved drugs and medical products to 148 government hospitals and 2,871 clinics and district health offices nationwide.

Indeed, with 100% market share of the government concession, more than RM1 billion goes to Pharmaniaga annually whence the GLC had a 10-year concession agreement with the Ministry of Health (MoH).

Then, we have another GLC entity resting as an intermediary on one side of infrastructural platform thrones of Global North monopoly-capital and at another corner as part of ruling elites’ corporate capital: Telekom Malaysia or TM as the digital knight. As a GLC, it is government-funded, financialisation capitalised from foreign banking institutions and provision of hardware and software by Global North monopoly-capital stakeholders. TM controls the “last-mile” broadband connection access to the Big Tech’s infrastructural platforms :

TELEKOM MALAYSIA AS INFRASTRUCTURAL PLATFORMS’ INTERMEDIARY

Indeed, the country leading investment arm, Permodalan Nasional Bhd (PNB) and Malaysia’s only sovereign wealth fund, Khazanah Nasional have ownership and control of eight of Malaysia’s top 10 publicly-listed companies. These firms include : Maybank and CIMB, Malaysia’s leading banks, the utilities-based Tenaga and Axiata (which, at one time, was owned by Telekom Malaysia; presently, it is a government-link investment corporation (GLIC) as KWSP, Khazanah and PNB own almost 80% of the company), the highly-diversified conglomerate of Sime Darby, the oil and gas-based Petronas Chemicals and Petronas Gas, and the huge healthcare enterprise, IHH Healthcare with Mitsui Bank the largest shareholder followed by the Malaysian government’s sovereign wealth fund Khazanah Nasional and Citigroup of the United States; a further stake is held by the Employees Provident Fund of Malaysia.

19] After more than six decades under Kleptocracy Governance by succeeding ruling UMNO regimes, has the country progress or rather, have we not indebted ourselves to more than RM$1.2+Trillion?

Where have our money gone?

Does the Finance Ministry knows that it controls the huge savings-based institution, EPF, the public sector pension fund, KWAP, and the Minister of Finance Incorporated, a key government holding company ? – as the figure below indicates :

The MINISTRY OF FINANCE INCORPORATED (Gomez, April 2020)

Are we poorer?

Khazanah Research Institute 2018 Report  revealed that lower income households spent around 90% of their income on household expenses, but the higher income households only spent 45% of their income for the same essential items.

In fact, the top 20% of population – the T20 – possess 46.2% of the national income share, while M40 have 37.4% of the national income share but the bottom 40% of population – the B40 – only get 16.4% of the national income share of wealth.

To compound this situation, even the essential household expenditure on food is of serious health issue. According to the State of Households II Report released in Aug 2016 by Khazanah Research Institute’s (KRI), a nutritionally adequate diet is beyond the reach of many Malaysians particularly in urban areas and after taking other living expenses into account. This is bound to have a causal effect on the state of healthcare in the long term, (malaysiakini, 2016).

The Ministry of Rural Development oversees statutory bodies responsible for the development of rural areas where many low-income and poor bumiputeras are situated. These statutory bodies include Mara and Felcra which own a sizeable number of GLCs; yet, poverty consistently permeates to the poors.

20] Rooted in the mode of capitalism itself, and the exploitation upon which the system hinged, we are, as Engel had once argued, in one of “the numerous smaller, secondary evils which result from the present-day capitalist mode of production.” Therefore, an analysis of class divisions and struggles is especially of importance in developing an understanding of the nature of capitalism.

Capitalism is the apotheosis of class society; it must be the last class society: it must, therefore, be eliminated.

The passing of dominant interests of the monopoly-capitalist world economy seeking to define its exploitative expropriation and deprivation of the poor in tight collusion with local compradore capital, specifically at this moment of time – to destruct the bumiputera construct – those clientel capitals within rentier capitalism, cannot succeed without our determined class struggle ahead.

And, only through understanding that the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles, and that the working class rakyat2, as admirably said by Marx, is capable of doing that.