Developing countries widening investment deficit while in pursuit to achieve Sustainable Development Goals

14/02/24

INTRODUCTION

Global foreign direct investment (FDI) defied earlier expectations for 2023, growing by 3% and finishing the year at an estimated US$1.37 trillion, according to UNCTAD’s latest Global Investment Trends Monitor published on January 17, 2024.

However, the overall surge was driven mainly by a few European “conduit” economies, which often act as intermediaries for FDI destined to other nations. Indeed, strikingly, when these conduit economies are excluded, global FDI flows show a steep 18% decline in 2023. The rest of the European Union also recorded a steep 23% decline, and the United States, the world’s leading FDI recipient, even experienced a 3% dip.

The overall FDI landscape for developing countries in 2023 exposed a 9% decline, amounting to US$841 billion. Developing Asian countries bore the brunt with a 12% decrease. China reportedly ensues an unusual 6% drop in FDI inflows but showed an 8% growth in new greenfield project announcements, ( see firesstorms January 2024, cobalt-red-colonialism-raids).

So much was the peak China narrative regurgitated (financial review, 2/02/24; John Ross) that there is even a Bloomberg headline which displayed an innocuous banner that a momentous shift is under way in global markets as investors pull billions of dollars from China’s sputtering economy, two decades after betting on the country as the world’s biggest growth story. Much of that cash is now supposedly heading to India.

What was not emphasised is that China’s investment climate and fiscal management are still clear and in fairweather:

Further, China’s trade surplus is hard to fully account for, but it is clearly gigantic and increasing in recent years. A figure of around $800 billion in surplus seems reasonable at the current time.

Source: Brad Setser after Adam Tooze, Chartbook, 12/02/24.

India, the other regional giant, on the other hand, saw a 47% drop in FDI inflows but remained among the top five global destinations for greenfield projects.

The Association of Southeast Asian countries (ASEAN), traditionally an engine of FDI growth, recorded a 16% decline. Yet the region remained attractive for manufacturing investments with a remarkable 37% increase in greenfield project announcements in nations like Viet Nam, Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Cambodia.

Conversely, FDI flows fell by a modest 1% in Africa and held steady in Latin America and the Caribbean, graciously in part to increases to Central America and 21% growth in Mexico, the region’s second-largest economy. The investment landscape in Latin America witnessed contrasting trends in 2023 because its largest economy, Brazil, recorded a 22% decrease in FDI inflows; while the country’s greenfield project numbers remained stable, international project finance deals plummeted by 40% compared to 2022.

GLOBAL VALUE CHAINS

Overall, the report’s sectoral analysis for 2023 showed an uptick in project numbers in sectors that rely heavily on global value chains, including automotive, textiles, machinery and electronics.

Meanwhile, the semiconductors sector recorded a 10% decline in the number of greenfield projects and a 39% drop in their value, following robust growth in 2022; read STORM, November 2023, smiley semiconductor supply chains.

The number of international investment projects announced in developing countries in sectors relevant to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) remained relatively stable in 2023. However, SDG-related international project finance deals showed a 27% decline in numbers and a 40% drop in value. On the other hand, greenfield projects aligned with SDGs recorded 12% growth in number and a 6% rise in value. The food and agriculture sector showed marginal growth, while most other sectors reported declines.

It’s another peak Global South narrative that hides the Global North capital-monopoly intrusion into the Global South economies that mired the domestic industrialisation processes of developing nations, slowing growth in emerging economies, and the continuance vulnerability in the rapid movements of global finance (IMF, World Economic Outlook, 2015; IMF squeezing poorer nations; New debt crisis threatening Global South; IMF’ed with Global Debts).

There is mounting evidence to suggest that global supply chain as the organisational forms of capitalism are 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 articulated in a Monthly Review article (“World Development under Monopoly Capitalism,” November 2021), where global supply chains have contributed to dynamics of concentration in leading firms, and a marked shift in national income from labour to capital across much of the world, (see Developing Economics, A Monopoly Capital Critique).

Global supply chains are representing the integrative structure of contemporary global capitalism, and any disruption to them potentially threatens the functioning of the system itself.

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, (Capital, vol. 1 (London: Penguin, 1990). 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 rivalries: STORM, June ’23, capitalism-crisis-to-crisis; KS Jomo, February 2024, north-ignores-perfect-storm-in-global south.

ADMIST GLOBAL UNCERTAINTIES

Looking ahead, the UNCTAD report says 2024 could see a modest increase in FDI flows citing stabilisation for inflation and borrowing costs in major markets.

UNCTAD, however, also cautious that significant risks persist, including geopolitical tensions, mounting debt in many countries and concerns about further global economic fragmentation.

We are at a turning point at this juncture where global trade is fragmenting when countries erect barriers in the name of “friendshoring,” “de-risking,” and “self-reliance.” More than ever, policymakers should attempt – in handling a fragmented world – on avoiding the worst-case scenario of a new economic cold war, (Gita Gopinath, Foreign Policy, 6th. February 2024).

RELATED READINGS

Sovereign debts Debt dependency and Financialisation capitalism

Financialisation Capitalism deepening neo-imperialism penetration

Globalisation of monopoly finance capital

Financialisation capitalism deepening neoimperialism penetration

21st April 2023

1] INTRODUCTION

Capitalism distinctive trends in contemporary history have been:

(1) slowing down of the overall economic growth rate;
(2) internationalisation of monopolistic transnational corporations (TNCs); and
(3) emergence of the “capital accumulation process” or financialization capitalism

Since the 1974-1975 recession, there is an economic slowdown in advanced capitalist economies with impactful economic effects on the poorest countries. Scouting for wider markets to sustain capitalism, a proliferation of corporations – with neoliberalism policies – begins setting up assembly lines across borders in different geographical locations, especially inside developing countries – the Global South – where by 2010, more than half of all foreign direct investment (FDI) went to third world and transition and emerging economies. With this strategic positioning in place, and world production dominated by a relatively few transnational corporations (TNC) exercising considerable monopoly power over states and labour, the migration towards the international concentration of capital clearly reflected on the work of Lenin (Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, New York: International Publishers, 1939) and, on the other hand, confirms Amin’s imperialism of generalized-monopoly capitalism and Emmanuel’s unequal exchange under Neo-Imperialism that widened underdevelopment under monopoly-capitalism practice through sheer economic expropriation and labour exploitation.

2] INTERNATIONALISATION OF FINANCE CAPITAL

Even households had become financialized, (see Costas Lapavitsas, Financialised Capitalism: Crisis and Financial Expropriation, Historical Materialism 17 (2009), School of Oriental and African Studies, London and Costas Lapavitsas, The Era of Financialization, Part 3, TripleCrisis).

a) In this country, financialization capitalism is engaging – and entangling – the political economy of Malaysia even during a Covid19 pandemic situation when such capitalism is as contiguous as the virus itself, and became the dominance of financial monopoly-capitalism in the nation, and consequently indebted the country. The urban poors are distressing in debts as reported by UNICEF 2020; Khazanah 17/03/2023.

The inevitable collusion of monopoly-capitalism with clientel capitalism is clearly evident during the acquisition, distribution and Covid19 vaccination processes; see STORM 2021, A case of ownership and control of vaccines distribution.

Fifty years ago, the penetration of neoimperialism is distinctively sharpened because during the 1970s, Malaysia went through an industrialisation initiative though did not employ as many workers as projected, but FDI still created an underdevelopment in monopoly-capitalism environment that inevitably invited these TNCs exploiting precarious labour. Presently, the few TNCs dominating particular industries or in the sectors of electrical and electronic production are confronted with a dialectic of rivalry and collusion: the mobile phone industry and a infrastructural platform, like Google, are prime examples of the control of telecommunication services:

b) There is a “competition” between firms in search for low labour cost (economics term: labour arbitrage) and low-cost production processes (operations management from lean to just-in-time and flexible production), competition for resources and markets (strategic management term: competitive advantages) and marketing principles on product differentiation (varied products with many features and multi-functionalities at various price structures in different marketspheres).

By 2008, those top one hundred global corporations which had shifted their production to foreign affiliates or subsidiaries accounted worldwide for 60 percent of their total assets and employment, and more than 60 percent of their total sales.

c) During an era of global monopoly-finance capital, financial capital is part of the transnational migration of capital with Information Technology augmenting the monopolisation trends primarily, (see John Bellamy Foster and Robert W. McChesney, The Internet’s Unholy Marriage to Capitalism, Monthly Review 62, no. 10 (March 2011): 1-30).

Increasingly, capital accumulation – real capital formation in the realm of goods and services – has become widely subordinate to finance, including the public healthcare and pharmaceutical providers, housings development through Real Estate Investment Trust (REIT) and many other entities.

Whereas labour ( owing to a combination of cultural, political, economic, legal and geographical reasons ) is rooted in particular nations – ensuring a constant and growing supply to the global reserve army of workers – capital is globally mobile, thus consolidating the Global Labour Arbitrage advantages with Global Value Chains bounding TNCs conglomerates cohesively and binding the global commodity supply chainings completely.

Therefore, one would present Amin’s arguments that as a system, generalized and globalised monopoly capitalism ensures that these monopolies derive a monopoly rent levied on the mass of surplus value (transformed into profits) that capital extracts from the exploitation of labour. Even though these monopolies operate in the peripheries of the globalised system, this monopoly rent becomes an imperialist rent. The capital accumulation process is consequently governed by the maximization of monopolistic/imperialist rent.

Anchored upon a capital-market system, this leads to the emergence to, and the pervasion of, financialization capitalism in Malaysia.

3] THE TECH-VENTURE CAPITAL COLLUSION

The 1990s’ unrestricted movement of international finance capital, public sector enterprises and even the government-link companies (GLCs) increasingly are controlled by the hounds of financialization capitalism. The metropolitan capital-as-finance (Patnaik 1999), gets control over Third World resources and enterprises to see the rise to international finance capital in league with the local neocomprador class becoming crony capitalism through the force of accumulation as articulated by Samir Amin (2019) in The New Imperialist Structure, Monthly Review, July 01, 2019.

This Capital Internationalisation fragments, and weakens, labour organizations, and during the Covid19 pandemic especially in union bursting regionally, including Malaysia – specifically in the electrical and electronic industrial sector.

To separate the physical outputs in manufactured productions, one has to distinguish the soft elements in the digital economy, too.

Firstly, the Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) is a monopoly regime. Intellectual property includes product design, brand names, and symbols and images used in marketing. These are protected by rules and laws covering patents, copyrights, and trademarks. Figures from the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) show that royalties and licensing fees paid to multinational corporations increased from US$31 billion in 1990 to US$333 billion in 2017, (United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, World Investment Report 2018).

According to the figures from Science and Engineering Indicators 2018 Digest, released by the National Science Council of America in January 2018, the total global cross-border licensing income from intellectual property in 2016 was worth US$272 billion alone. The United States was the largest exporter of intellectual property, with income from this source comprising as much as 45 percent of the global total.

With the TRIPs/WTO (Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights and the World Trade Organization as an international legal agreement between all the member nations of the World Trade Organization), the intellectual property regime has only strengthened monopoly-capital stronghold, (Cédric Durand, William Milberg, Intellectual Monopoly in Global Value Chains, 2018).

Through the ownership and control of information, monopoly-capital dominates the digital capital, too. Capital accumulation permeates the entire production chain but through soft elements in the ownership of patents, copyrights, brands and logistical systems impoverishing the poors but enrich the bourgeoisie class by way of financialisation capitalism.

Secondly, the tech-venture capital bloc’s reducing capital gains taxes in 1978 from 50% to 28% became known as the Silicon Valley model, now emulated much all over the world (Marxist Sociology April 2021).

Thirdly, without promulgated regulations, financial monopoly capital is very likely to work against the vision and goals set by any country for her industrialisation initiatives. The insurgent of capital financialization in the late 1990s had already created an increased circulation of paper instruments and their associated debts :

Malaysia increasingly national debts: 1970-2014

Indeed, three Swiss scholar-researchers had uncovered that a core of 147 MNCs multinational corporations controlled nearly 40 percent of the economic value; out of the 147 corporations, some three-quarters were regarded as financial intermediaries, (Stefania Vitali, James B. Glattfelder, and Stefano Battiston, “The Network of Global Corporate Control,” PLoS ONE 6, no. 10 (2011): e25995). The empirical study undertaken by them has further indicated that a relatively small number of multinational banks effectively dominate the whole global economy.

“Based on their analysis of 43,060 multinational corporations all over the world and the shareholding relationships between them, they found that the top 737 multinational corporations controlled 80 percent of total global output,” as cited by (Cheng Enfu and Lu Baolin in Monthly Review May 2021).

THE VALUE CHAIN EXTRACTIONS

There is a new battle on unequal exchange – not merely or only in the Production-exchange-Consumption model in physical goods – but in the soft digital arena presence in the infrastructural platforms horizon: Digital generation-exchange-Usage model which is equally expropriational besides sheer exploitative, too.

That under an e-commerce environment, digitally neo-imperialism is routed onto a refreshed monopoly-capital commodity supply chain pathway that shall have these ramifications :

Instead of exerting downward pressure in the middle of the curve – the part on processes of production – intellectual monopoly has inadvertently points to an upward pressure at both ends of the smiley curve where the control over intangible assets (like R&D and design, and e-commerce marketing and post-sales interfaces) is most concentrated.

This upward pressure on both left and right sides of the curve is a resultant outcome from dynamics arising from the growing role of intangible assets in the value chain processes, and also from tighter Intellectual Property Rights. This means that the market power of leading firms – the product/service initiators or front-runners – is often enhanced by intellectual monopoly endorsement which is fueled on one part by the dynamic advantages arising from global value chains network externalities, and on the other side, by the increasing returns on intangibles and legally-enforced proprietary control over standards, technologies and brands, (UNCTAD, The Digital Economy Report 2019: Value Creation and Capture: Implications for Developing Countries; Jomo 2020; Jomo 2021).

The implications for third world countries are that due to the monopoly-capital competition dynamics in the Global North, developing-country platforms that are trying to scale up typically face an uphill battle. The dominance of global digital platforms, their control of data, as well as their capacity to create and capture the ensuing value, tend to further accentuate concentration and consolidation rather than reduce inequalities between and within countries.

Secondly, in the global “data value chain”, many countries are already entrenched in subordinate positions, with value and data being concentrated in the few global platforms and other leading transnational corporations. One only have to peel away the infrastructural TNCs platforms like Microsoft, Alphabet and Meta to view the extensive intrusion of neoimperialism design in the digital economy; see STORM 2023, tigthening Infrastructural platforms stronghold.

Thirdly, the surfing serfs of the world are increasing commodified into digitised slavery to the triad of capitalism, monopoly-capitalism and financialisation capitalism where labour is outsmarted by digital machines; see STORM 2023, Short-circuiting the rakyat.

5] THE LABOUR EXPLOITATION

For Global North workers, today’s real average wage (that is, the wage after accounting for inflation) in USA has about the same purchasing power it did 40 years ago; and, what wage gains there have been have mostly flowed to the highest-paid tier of workers, of workers, (PewResearch 2018) :

with mitigated effect on “contingent workers”, (Fortune 2019).

Between 1982 and 2006, the average annual growth of the real wages of production workers in nonfinancial corporations in the United States was just 1.1 percent, not only much lower than the 2.43 percent recorded from 1958 to 1966, but also lower than the 1.68 percent during the economic downturn from 1966 to 1982. The slowing of wage growth allowed the corporations’ profit share to rise by 4.6 percent during this period and accounted for 82 percent of the recovery in the rate of profit.

Further, Noam Chomsky had once explained that “what you find is that US$47 trillion were taken from the bottom 90%, the middle class and the working class, and put in the hands of the top 10%. But if you look closely, it’s a fraction of the top 10% which takes the greatest wealth. Since Reagan, they have doubled their ownership of society’s wealth from 10% to 20%.”

Indeed, the profits of U.S. corporations increased from 5 percent in 1950 to 35 percent in 2008. The proportion of overseas-retained profits increased from 2 percent in 1950 to 113 percent in 2000. The proportion of overseas profits within the total profits of Japanese corporations increased from 23.4 percent in 1997 to 52.5 percent in 2008, (Cui Xuedong, “Is the Contemporary Capitalist Crisis a Minsky-Type Crisis or a Marxist Crisis?” [in Chinese], Studies on Marxism 9 (2018).

In a slightly different accounting, the share of foreign profits of U.S. corporations as a percent of U.S. domestic corporate profits increased from 4 percent in 1950 to 29 percent in 2019, (John Bellamy Foster, R. Jamil Jonna, and Brett Clark, “The Contagion of Capital,” Monthly Review 72, no. 8 (January 2021): 9).

6] CONCLUSION

The penetration of neoimperialism design in the Global South emerging economies are real, and realistically uncomfortable and unaccommodating to the poverty poors of the world.

i) Emmanuel’s premised that unequal exchange characterises the trade relation between the Global North centre and Global South periphery whereby ‘the inequality of wages as such, all other things being equal, is alone the cause of the inequality of exchange.’

ii) Capital accumulation is immense on a global scale because of the existence of a large, low-cost global workforce. According to data from the International Labor Organization, the world’s total workforce grew from 1.9 to 3.1 billion between 1980 and 2007. Of these people, 73 percent were from developing countries, with China and India accounting for 40 percent, (John Bellamy Foster, Robert W. McChesney, and R. Jamil Jonna, “The Global Reserve Army of Labor and the New Imperialism,” Monthly Review 63, no. 6 (November 2011): 3).

iii) With the advent and advancement in the financial liberalization process, finance capital is thus no longer just serving industrial capital, but has far overtaken it. The financial oligarchs and capital rentiers are now dominant; more so, with an ethnocapital assertion in the national banking sector, too, as in the case of Malaysia.

iv) World-wide, within twenty years since 1987, debt in the international credit market soared from just under US$11 billion to $48 billion, with a rate of growth far exceeding that of the world economy as a whole, (Cheng Enfu and Hou Weimin, “The Root of the Western Financial Crisis Lies in the Intensification of the Basic Contradiction of Capitalism” [in Chinese], Hongqi Wengao 7 (2018).

v) As a corollary, Emmanuel had argued that “by transferring through non-equivalent exchange, a large part of its surplus to the rich countries, the periphery deprives itself of the means of accumulation and growth.” Thus, an important implication of Emmanuel’s theory is that a widening wage gap leads to a deterioration of the periphery’s terms of trade, and a subsequent reduction in its rate of economic growth, see Emmanuel’s formulation of his theory; STORM 2021, Unequal Exchanges and STORM 2020, Gross Inequality in Global Wealth.

Infrastructural Platforms on Marine Cabotage under Netarchical Capitalism

Collective on Geoeconomics

30/01/2023

PROLOGUE

As countries try to recover and emerge from the pandemic, the firm rise in demand for intermediate inputs with energetic manufacturing activity, there arises a demand for container shipments. However, shipping capacity has been constrained by logistical hurdles and bottlenecks and even shortages in container shipping equipment. On top of these existing problems are also the unscheduled wharf disruptions and port congestions that have led to a surge in surcharges fees, including demurrage and detention fees.

Beneath the blue waterways, another geoeconomic submarine warfare is surfacing under the guise of infrastructural platforms as part of the netarchical capitalism torpedo-battle with a new governance.

1] INTRODUCTION

By the second half of 2020, shipping costs have soared. Since October 2021, cost indicatots of shipping containers by maritime freight had pointed to an increase of over 500 percent from their pre-pandemic levels, while the cost of shipping bulk commodities by sea had tripled (Fig. 2).

The geoeconomics of ports and ships are that in 2020, 41.8% of the world’s exports and 38.2% of global imports come to or from Asia and the Pacific, (ESCAP, 2020).

2] WHO ARE THE INFRASTRACTURAL PLATFORMS

Since raw data, processed information and uninterrupted communications are of prime importance in a globalised geoeconomic environment, the installation, repairs and maintenance of the underwater cables in the country are with these infrastructural platform players of tech giants such as Google, Amazon and Microsoft, and the national internet exchange body, Malaysian Internet Exchange.

On the other hand, cabotage involves laws put in place to protect domestic shipping industries from foreign competition.

2] WHAT ARE THE INFRASTRUCTURAL PLATFORMS PROBLEMS

According to the infrastructural platform entities, the requisite domestic shipping licensing exemption (DSLE), which allows a ship to undertake submarine cable repairs, can take up to 27 days to obtain in Malaysia. This is in contrast to 20 days in the Philippines, 19 days in Singapore and 12 days in Vietnam.

There were also other issues including that the foreign-flagged vessels selected to undertake submarine cable repairs had to be endorsed by the Malaysian Ship Owners Association or MASA, which would have to confirm that there was no locally registered vessel capable of handling the required function.

The infrastructural platform tech giants had further alluded that MASA was looking to protect its members and blocking foreign-flagged shipping companies from operating in Malaysian waters, which led to delays in getting approval for vessels to maintain and repair undersea fibre-optic cablelines in Malaysian waters.

3] WHY ARE THE INFRASTRUCTURAL PLATFORMS COMPLAINING

That the implementation of the cabotage policy by previous transport minister Wee Ka Siong is inappropriate and inconsistent with the Malaysia Digital Economy Blueprint, which was meant to spearhead Malaysia’s progress as a technologically advanced economy.

These infrastructural platform entities had contended that the technology pathway is predicated upon having fast and reliable internet connectivity, which in turn requires a supportive regulatory environment that would then encourage further investment in digital communication and its connectivity.

4] WHEN DID THESE ISSUES AROSE

The infrastructural platform players had contacted to previous prime ministers Tan Sri Muhyiddin Yassin in November 2020 and Datuk Seri Ismail Sabri Yaakob in September 2021, for the exemption under Section 65U of the Merchant Shipping Ordinance 1952 to revoke an exemption for vessels involved in submarine cable repairs.

His predecessor, encik Anthony Loke, had approved submarine cable repair vessels from being exempted from the cabotage laws in March 2019.

There were also appeals made to the then science, technology and innovation minister, Khairy Jamaluddin, in mid-January 2021, to help resolve their problems, but nothing came of it nor the cabotage matter resolved.

5] HOW OTHER CAPITAL PLAYERS ARE INVOLVED

Much of the undersea cable repairs have been undertaken by Asean Cable Ship Pte Ltd (ACPL), which operates three vessels — Asean Explorer and Asean Protector where both are flagged in Indonesia, and Asean Restorer which is registered in Singapore.

ACPL was set up by the Asean Telecommunications Authorities — Telekom Malaysia Bhd, CAT Telecom Public Co Ltd, Eastern Telecommunications, PT Indosat Tbk, Telekom Brunei Bhd and Singapore Telecommunications Ltd.

6] WHERE ARE CLIENTELE CAPITAL COLLABORATING

Telekom Malaysia’s largest shareholder is government-controlled Khazanah Nasional Bhd, which has a 20.11% stake. As at mid-March 2022, government-linked agencies Khazanah, Employees’ Provident Fund, Permodalan Nasional Bhd, Kumpulan Wang Persaraan (Diperbadankan) and Pertubuhan Keselamatan Sosial controlled about 60% of Telekom Malaysia’s stock.

OMS Group Sdn Bhd — another undersea cable repair company with five cable repair ships and two barges, some of which are flagged in Malaysia — has also been handling repairs for submarine cables locally.

OMS – a Malaysian company controlled by businessman Datuk Lim Soon Foo – is the only company in Malaysia that claims to have undersea cable submarine repair capabilities and the largest beneficiary of the cabotage policy, (I³ Investor, 2021).

7] HOW TO PROCEED

Since this marine issue is with regard to the Malaysian cabotage policy pertaining to submarine cable repairs came about in mid-November 2020 after previous transport minister Datuk Seri Wee Ka Siong exercised his powers under Section 65U of the Merchant Shipping Ordinance 1952 to revoke an exemption for vessels involved in submarine cable repairs, and that his predecessor, Anthony Loke, had approved these submarine cable repair vessels from being exempted from the cabotage laws in March 2019, the untangling has to be executed by present government, and encik Loke as the present transport minister once again.

8] WHAT ARE OUR POSITIONS TOWARD INFRASTRUCTURAL PLATFORM PREDATORS

The country has promoted the cabotage policy mainly to develop local know-how and expertise to support a national digital economy.

The country needs local expertise to ensure our national undersea cables are well maintained and not to be wholesomely dependent on Global North monopoly-capital corporations on an unequal economic and inaccessible technological exchanges.

That the international infrastructural platforms had once threatened to withdraw in cooperating with the national digital economic aspiration is uncalled for.

It is unbecoming and unbelieving for foreign investors – specifically Global North monopoly-capital corporates – not wanting to partner local expertise to provide support and services on their financialised capital but monopoly investment.

It is also most improper that when an undersea cable is cut and requires immediate attention, is it not that a national presence is better than relying on foreign vessels as a first choice?

That this ensuing case is a question of national security and that the country is at risk when foreign undersea repair ships are allowed to be operating freely in sovereign Malaysian waters.

9] WHO WHY WHAT WHERE WHEN NETARCHICAL CAPITALISM BE BURIED UNDERSEA

Digital infrastructural platforms are like neoliberal connotation of colonial ‘forward movement’ activities or ‘colonial intervention’ or better termed as anything but colonialisation where lands are to be discovered and conquered, and natural resources to be expropriated and labour to be exploited.

Under present environment of a digital economy, whoever gets there first, and holds fast and tight, shall get their information server-riches. The infrastructural platform kings (colonial-feudal lords) position themselves above end-users (the colonised), and their data surfing activities (serfs’ farm cultivation), thereby giving them overwhelming privileged access (lordship) to record and retrieve (dictate and dominate) end-users (the serfs and slaves) as and when demanded (as surplus value expropriation) under an information-commodity chained monopoly-capital domain (via routers and cloud servers) .

To gain, and accumulate, capital on behalf of the infrastructural platform kingdoms are the telecommunication intermediary knights riding on their Internet of Things to provide, partition and protect, information services to their surfing serfs.

It is the emergence of a new business model of large monopolistic firms on digital platforms that are capable of extracting immense amounts of data overwhelming legacy enterprises and suppressing labour empowerment, (Paul Langley and Andrew Leyshon, Platform capitalism: The intermediation and capitalisation of digital economic circulation, 2020).

10] At a time of an epidemiological-economic-ecological polycrisis, many national banks accelerated the monetary flow – and the resulting wave of liquidity – leading to substantial increases in corporate wealth in many developed and advanced economies, whereas the emerging and low income economies face external debt distress compounding poverty of the global
poors, (World Bank 2022). As a result of falling income levels, widespread employment losses and widening fiscal deficits, (UNCTAD 2020) – a rakyat-oriented governance should not allow vulture-capitalism in the shape of infrastructural platforms be roaming the waves of high blue waterways as predatory pirates.

Related Readings

Techno-Feudalism

Vulture Capitalism

Poverty Global Poors

Financial Monopoly Capitalism

Class Analysis of Ethnocapitalism

Destined to Debts: descendant to Dependency Development

Collective on Geoeconomics

1/11/2022

PROLOGUE

There are multiple crises in country’s economic developmental effort since gaining independence that culminated to present precarious state of a nation in trillion dollar debts after six and a half decades of economic growth. By itself, each crisis is a calamity, but collectively – as each subsystem is linked with associated suprasystems – constitute the catastrophic crises of capitalism in its manifestation: meaning that there are deep structural contradictions and challenges for this country.

What distinguishes between these crises arising from factors outside of country – as exogenous crises – and those generated by contradictions within own domestic economic and political environment, as endogenous crises. Exogenous crises included the inflation that confronted the present caretaker government, the global economic instability of 2008, and the Asian Financial Crisis of 1997, while endogenous crises included those associated with significant developmental phases and turning points, such as oil exploration and exploitation by and with Big Oil, FELDA land resettlement, the New Economic Policy, and Industrialization in the early 1970s, and later premature de-industrialisation and the subsequent financialisation capitalism phase. By the time of capital financialisation, the nation was engulfed with the insurgence of Political Islam, a Ketuan Melayu narrative, state corporated capitalism and increasingly an indulgence in wide-spread odious corruptive practices. In each instance, the resolution of the problems of one crisis carried within it the seeds of the next, a dialectical process which is continuing to the present period of uncertainty in economic affairs and possibility in the furtherance of political instability post-General Elections, November 2022 (GE-15).

These cascading crises are indeed not isolated incidences but formulated policies that subjugated rakyat2 to deliberated dependency to ruling regimes. Dependency Theory became closely identified with the Latin American Left in the 1960s and 1970s, when there was already a long history of such analysis (notably the work of José Carlos Mariátegui in the 1920s). The Cuban Revolution and the ideas of Che Guevara – as well as Andre Gunder Frank’s article in the Monthly Review where he stated that development of underdevelopment is about less developed countries being entrapped in dependence and dominance relationship with rich countries. Only that it also occurs when an ethnocratic governance practices kleptocracy – supported by national corporate capital that is connected to monopoly capital in the Global North that is assisting national kleptocrates to dominate their owned and controlled client states in the country.

All these crises have moments that may be budgetary or fiscal system imbalances and stresses which required policy intervention and innovative resolutions. They are regarded as “crises” in classical political economic sense that we have explored, and expanded, on many other national politico-economic issues for the past ten years in various postings and publications that shall be summarised as a dozen dimensions herein.

1 With neoliberalism economic policies as the preferred approach since independence , but without shared common prosperity nor progressive elements of developmental governance ethos or a new ideal socialist praxis referencing an equitable distribution of social wealth. The preferred present economic growth model undermines, and underdevelops, the country’s developmental effort.

This is compounded right at the birth of nation when coteries of foreign advisors from the Colonial Office, Development Advisory Service Harvard (DASH), the World Bank and International Monetary Fund – successors to IBRD and IDA – and the Asian Development Bank successively spun the narrative threads of neocolonialism, and later neoliberalism, and then bonded by neoimperialism intent that tightened the knots in dashing the country’s vision of betterment on a shared common wealth environment.

Through successive advisory consultancies – since IBRD and IDA had written a 4-volume Reports on Malaysia’s Development Prospects and Plans, surpassing the government Economic Planning Unit’s effort have few local professionals have access to “confidential reports”; the Official Secrets Act has plumbered all discrete leaks, and prevented any constructive opinion local professionals may have. Through this process, the World Bank and its twin entity the International Monetary Fund (IMF) attempted to restructuring the economy (IMF, 2001) or in implementing an infrastructure project than socio-economic considerations (World Bank 1957) to the quest of productivity growth (World Bank, 2016) and re-energise public sector (World Bank, 2019), by aiming high to achieve an accelerating growth path (World Bank, 2021), and to surge ahead (World Bank 2021b), but most catastrophically, country is still mired and entrapped within capitalism crisis to crisis in a struggle to catching up, (World Bank, 2022) among ASEAN peers:

Reinert 2007; Reinert 2009; Vries 2013; Ohlin et al have collectively argued that structural change and innovative creativeness are the keys to eradicating not only poverty, but a better prospect in sharing a common destiny.

What kind of development does a country need to share wealth within communities and between states? Then, we also need to ask what kind of institutions can promote socio-economic development? Third, how to develop? These three questions are crucial to understand why Malaysia – despite 65 years of “developmental effort” – performance outcomes that are glaringly deteriorated among emerging market countries (EMCs) in ASEAN, and even has accentuated poverty in Sabah and Sarawak states within its borders.

Schumpeter had once outlined a fundamental distinction between economic development and economic growth. This distinction helps us to approach the first question. Mere quantitative growth does not amount to economic development. Schumpeter (1934/2012: 64) had said figuratively that adding successively as many kerera api coaches as one pleases, one shall still never get a railway thereby. GDP growth nor Petronas towers, for example, do not equal an Schumpeterian economic development. Economic development ‘comes from within the economic system and is not merely an adaptation to changes in external data; it occurs discontinuously, rather than smoothly; it brings qualitative changes or “revolutions,” which fundamentally displace old equilibria and create radically new conditions’ (Elliott 2012). A country needs this kind of economic development to escape impoverishment (Reinert 2009), and rakyat² being potentially poverty poors (firestorms, 2021).

Schumpeterian institutions are concerned with the importance of innovation in generating new knowledge and modes of production, which helps move the economic activities to the next ‘stage’ or ‘paradigm’ (Reinert 2000: 11). Schumpeterian institutions tend to focus on production, and this stands in sharp contrast to the view of institutions adopted by mainstream economics and local legacy economists in the Economic Planning Unit (EPU) , which focus on the free market and trade and favours export-led and FDI-driven economic growth (Reinert 2006 ;Lim Mah Hui, 1982) where transnational corporations suppressed indigenous capitals and exploitated workers through labour arbitrage.

Further, Schumpeterian institutions differ from the World Bank’s conception of ‘good institutions’ including those for ‘building market institutions that promote capital growth to the detriment in poverty reduction and social benefits (World Bank 2002: III).

At a time when 70% of lower-income households cannot even meet monthly basic needs – indeed, more than 60% of these households reported having no savings at all – not much of a difference than 10 years ago:

After six and half decades of sustained neoliberalism economic developmental effort, the nation of Malaysia is still as accentuated in absolute income inequality as ever:

In short, if development in Malaysia is to be self-directed and comprehensively inclusiveness, then traits of such a “developed society should also embrace secularisation, industrialisation, commercialisation, increased social mobility, increased material standard of living and increased education and literacy besides such things as the high consumption of inanimate energy, the smaller agricultural population compared to the industrial, and the widespread social network” (Syed Hussein Alatas, in a paper presented at the Symposium on the Developmental Aims 1996, pp 70-71).

Prof Dr. Mohd Tajuddin Mohd Rasdi, Professor of Architecture, meanwhile, has extended the concept building of what is known as “beehive apartments” for urban poors where each capsule consists of basic living needs; and to allocate graduates and youths with 100 acres of farmland using the latest technology to solve national food security and rural employment, thus encouraging domestic entrepreneurship.

Neoliberalism is Neoimperialism

Struggle for Shelters

2 Big Oil exploration, and exploitation of a national resource, witnessed by 1973, nine transnational corporations Big Oil with Petronas were prospecting over 156,954 square miles of the Malaysian continental shelf. This area is larger than the total land mass of the Federation of Malaysia (128,727 square miles). The rapacious character of the transnationals can only be equaled by the obscene haste of the national compradors in granting concessions to the extent of not knowing olefin from a bar of chocolate.

The country had requested national participation on a 65% / 35% government and company basis, respectively. In such a product-sharing agreement, for example, with 100,000 barrels of oil output, 40% of production is deducted from exploration and operating expenses, and the remaining 60,000 barrels to be shared on a 65% / 35% basis. Therefore, the actual result of such contract formulation was that 61% of the oil produced during any given month would go to Big Oil, and only 39% to the country.

Petronas had become the piggy bank for all Malaysia Development Plans as the country gears to an indulgence to subsidies just as it is the fund provider to the ruling regimes through the years:

Capitalism: Crisis to Crisis

1 INTRODUCTION

On the World Bank Malaysia Economic Monitor, June 2022, it highlights the incompleteness of task ahead in the political-economic state of nation. Post-Covid 19 pandemic, there is a continuing, and an increased, vulnerability among affected Malaysian households and businesses, basically, the relatively high levels of household and corporate debt. This comes about partly because there is insufficient higher inflow of foreign direct investments to stimulate a laggard economy as was during the 1970s boom :

Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) in Malaysia registered higher net inflow of **RM$48.1 billion in 2021** as compared to RM$13.3 billion in the previous year; the services sector, accounting for almost 43% of total FDI inflow followed by the manufacturing sector, which makes up less than 43% of total FDI inflow (*theedgemarkets* 4 March 2022).

Then, the reality of foreign direct investments has changed from importation of machineries to complete physical finished end-products to that of provision of soft elements in advisory or consultancy contents that requires less material and labour involvement.

With intermittently lockdowns under State of Emergency, political hucksters had only accentuated that wealth at the top of society, wallowing in ethnocapiral clientelship, ever more concentrated and consolidated. Whether it is installing lampposts following no open-tender procedure or by retaining the Jendela infrastructural platforms with broad exclusiveness or to fill the pockets of the chairperson and board members of FELDA Global Venture (FGV): the crisis in capitalism continues by cheating the Felda settlers again, see STORM, Felda to FGV: cultivators and capital.

2 POLICIES AND POLITICS

There is yet any defined – or executive determined – articulation of policies at this stage of economic recovery on ensuring sufficient social protection for lower-income groups to support an inclusive growth as rakyat2 have demanded, (GBM-CSO, Rakyat Manifesto 2021. The UNICEF 2020 Report had already indicated the persistence low income female-headed households are exceptionally vulnerable, with higher rates of unemployment at 32% compared to the total heads of households. Female headed households also registered lower rates of access to social protection, with 57% having no access compared to 52% of total heads of households.

It was reported recently that in the Federal Territories, at least 6,100 households are considered poor and 4,500 are hardcore poor, according to the National Poverty Data Bank System (eKasih). A poor household is one that earns less than RM$2,208 a month while the hardcore poor earns less than RM$1,169 monthly, (thestar, 4/04/2022). In fact, 20.0 per cent of households from the M40 group with income between RM4,850 and RM10,959 had dropped to the B40 group.

To be acknowledged that the national household debt-to-Gross Domestic Product (GDP) ratio had already surged to a new peak of 93.3% as at December 2020 from its previous record high of 87.5% in June 2020, according to Bank Negara Malaysia (BNM). The majority of urban low-income families are much more likely to be unemployed or have lower working hours with lower pay, and greater challenges in accessing healthcare.

The number of poor households had increased to 639.8 thousand households in 2020 as compared to 405.4 thousand households in 2019. Further, the incidence of **absolute poverty** had also increased from 5.6 per cent (2019) to **8.4 per cent**. *Source*: Department of Statistics, Malaysia, August 2021.

The second economic problems – even after +60 years of neocolonial economic development – that there are states, namely Kedah, Perlis, Kelantan, Sabah, and Sarawak, with the lowest average income and highest incidences of poverty, (World Bank Press Report “Catching Up: Inclusive Recovery & Growth for Lagging States”).

This uneven spatial economic landscape is the hallmark of development of underdevelopment much acutely felt in Sarawak and Sabah, even though “by allocating at least 50 percent of the government’s basic development expenditure, such as the construction of schools, hospitals, and roads,” as said by Dato’ Sri Mustapa Mohamed, Minister in the Prime Minister’s Department (Economy), these twin states are still lagging well behind since their incorporation into the formation of Malaysia in 1963. In 2020, the East Malaysian state of Sabah had the highest rate of poverty in Malaysia, with 25.3 percent of the population living below the poverty line. Sarawak is ranked third in having the highest number of poor families among all the states in Malaysia, despite Sarawak government’s reserves of RM$31 billion, whereby Sarawak is ‘a rich state with poor people’.

The third problem, inherent to weakened governance, lies with politicians being too fetish eye on their electoral fortunes and their endowed, and enduring, largess as parliamentary representatives. The third Prime Minister – post GE14 – Ismail Sabri Yaakob’s government is more focused on perpetuating its time in (and benefits therefrom) office, (Bridget Welsh, June 2022). It seems that there is little stomach for needed policy reviews and interventions, except an appetite to witness, hear and view the gouging of national assets by a past premier passing times :

that 1MDB in 2009 wanted the bank to accelerate a US$1 billion remittance for a 40% stake in a joint venture company (JVCo) known as 1MDB PetroSaudi Ltd because then prime minister Datuk Seri Najib Tun Razak wanted to………

3 THE CAPITALISM CRISIS

With globalisation, rentier capitalism compradores colluding with neo-imperial monopoly capitalism – connecting linkages in the global commodity chains – only accentuate wealth disparity with the working class.

That capitalism fails as a good model is evidently clear that in capitalism, it is not about human development but privately accumulated profits by a tiny minority of the population. The most important implication, in our country, is that although the middle 40 per cent and the bottom 50 per cent have had benefited in some ways from economic growth, the Bumiputera in the top income groups (the top 1 per cent and the 10 per cent) benefited the most, (see Khalid lse.blog, 2019) or about 40,000 ethnocapital political families running and looting –and ruining – the national economy. The undeniable fact as to why many bumiputera had not attained parity despite +60 years of neo-liberal-enforced economic development is the existence of a new class of compradore capitalist which – in the pursuance of capital accumulation – has aligned with monopoly-capital to exploit the nation’s resources, and to dash her economic development potentialities: from the early days of the Development Advisory Service Harvard (DASH) to the present Google/Microsoft alliance in the design, development and deployment of infrastructural platforms henceforth.

This thrust in the social hierarchy from a class of clientel capitalists is to reinforce capitalism as the economic development agenda, and financialization capitalism as pathway towards the widening accumulation of capital. The ensuing profit generated in companies, and the rent elements received by oligarchy individuals, inevitably perpetuate the extraction of outsized surplus values relative to capital “invested”.

Thus, it is not surprising that the absolute gap across income groups in Malaysia has increased, contributing to widespread perceptions of the poor being left behind: The top 20% of population – the T20 – possess 46.2% of the nationalincome 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; see Khalid 2019.

The present unpleasantness on uneven economic development and unequal sharing of a common wealth owes, therefore, on one part to clientel capitalism (see James Chin, The Costs of Malay Supremacy, New York Times, Aug. 27, 2015) and, on another part, to the Burden of Privilege on the Malaysian Economy as articulated by Sudhave in 2021. This is correlated to the prematurely de-industrialisation in the 1990s. Deindustrialisation happens when there is a reduction in industrial activity or capacity, which Dr Jayant Menon – an Asian Development Bank (ADB) economist – said it was too early for Malaysia to have turned a major shift from manufacturing to the FIRE services (Finance, Insurance, Real Estates) because its manufacturing sector has yet to mature to a point where it could possibly achieve an advanced level of technological sophistication, and an educational ecosystem to support, and absolve to apply – with talented manpower – a transfer of technology strategy. The scarcity – and even inappropriateness of the national education system – of skilled workers have also been identified prevously, and in the present World Bank Report : one major impediment faced by these states is their lower levels of human capital development.……(whence) in the longer term, broadening access to quality education and skills training would raise the quality of human capital.

Throughout the1960-1970 era, the international concentration of capital invertibly had given birth to international monopoly-finance capital that ensues the emergence of financialization capitalism (see John Bellamy Foster, The Financialization of Accumulation, Monthly Review vol:62, issue 05 October 2010). Financialization capitalism becomes prominent because the transnational corporations (TNCs) were unable to find sufficient investment outlets for their huge economic surpluses from production, increasingly turn to speculation within the global financial sphere, (see John Bellamy Foster and Fred Magdoff, The Great Financial Crisis (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2009). Local capitalists were mersimerised, and so entrapped by financialisation capitalism attributes, especially in property development with its real estates investment trust (REIT) that even households had become financialized, (see Costas Lapavitsas, Financialised Capitalism: Crisis and Financial Expropriation, Historical Materialism 17 (2009), School of Oriental and African Studies, London and Costas Lapavitsas, The Era of Financialization, Part 3, TripleCrisis). In the country, financialization capitalism is engaging – and entangling – the political economy of Malaysia even during a Covid19 pandemic when such mode of capitalism is as contiguous as the virus itself.

It is capitalism – not competition between Malays and the other races – that is the source of our grave political-economic problems. The ethos of capitalism – from the forward movement during British colonialism to our present sluggish ruling regimes – is to insert clientel-capitalism to colonialise the minds of the unrepresented destitutes. This is capitalism at its heights to retain and sustain political power, immiserising countless land-settleless rakyat2 and urban destitutes. The capitalism in crisis would continue impoverishing the poors in order for capitalism, specifically ethnocapital clientel capitalism – with the political fabrication and construction that had rapidly metamorphosed into policy constructs in the 1970s (Lim Teck Ghee) ensuing as an economic entrenchment of the NEP construct (Woo 2015, James Chin 2016, KBN 2018, Khalid 2019, KRI 2020, Kua 2021 & Diam 2021) which clearly is divisive to the nation’s unity and sense of belonging – to exist and flourish.

Dr. Rashed Mustafa Sarwar, Representative for UNICEF in Malaysia, had once said the country must and should take opportunities created by the budget and within the 12th Malaysia Plan to rethink social protection in Malaysia “to ensure that no family, and no child, is left behind” (see Towards A Post-2020 Political Economy; REFSA April 2021; blogs.World Bank 2021; PSM 2021, For a better Malaysia; Re-examining Urban Poverty : 2-hour webinar organised by the Center for Market Education, Embassy of Belgium and Bait Al Amanah, KualaLumpur, 15/4/2021) and to better resolve the multidimensional multi-ethnic problems in the country.

Malaysia is at a crossroad in its politico-economic path. With fractious politics and a shrinking middle class, socio-economic conditions could become even more precarious because of the imminent stagflation risk arising amid sharp slowdown in growth accompanying accelerated inflation, (World Bank, Global Economic Prospects, June 7, 2022).

Malaysia ambition to become a leading edge in competitiveness is now well blunted with a stagnated economy, (Sudhdave 2020); that the economy direction needs to be changed, (Kamal Salih, 01/06/2022) because the Vision 2020 is already blinded, and betrayed (Jomo, 10/12/2020).

EXISTENTIAL ECOLOGICAL EXTINCTION

1. CLIENTEL CAPITALISM in collusion with STATE GOVERNMENTS

At the Parliament’s first session in 2022, the National Forestry Act 1984 was amended to make public consultations on any proposed forest degazetting exercise mandatory.

A] Yet an ecological existential threat has arisen because the Malaysian Islamic Party (Parti Islam Se-Malaysia) PAS-led Kelantan state government has allowed logging in the Nenggiri permanent forest reserve in Gua Musang without such prior public consultations.

It needs to be that many of the logged trees in the 292ha of special forest reserve, gazetted as virgin jungle under the National Forestry Act 1984, are the merbau species which are valued at RM4,000 per log. An estimate of such illegal logging activities would likely ensure RM7 million in profits to the pockets of clientel capitalism.

The Kelantan state government had, in fact, suspended a certification requirement that would have compelled logging companies to meet sustainable forest management standards since 2016, according to an eco-activist NGO: Sahabat Alam.

The environmental watchdog said the PAS led administration had put a stop to the ‘Malaysian Criteria and Indicators for Sustainable Forest Management’ (MC&I) indefinitely for six years now, a policy that casts serious doubts over its forest conservation pledge.

The MCI, a programme under the Malaysian Timber Certification System for six years, was introduced as a way to bind logging firms to sustainable practices by reserving licences for those that meet the certification standards.

“If the Kelantan government is genuinely committed to ensure all permanent forest reserves are managed under the Sustainable Forest Management (PHSB) and meeting the annual logging quota target, then why is the MC suspended by the Kelantan Forest Management Unit since 2016?” Meor Razak Meor Abdul Rahman, an activist with the group, asked.

“Was the certification by the Kelantan UPH suspended because they have transgressed the logging quota and raised monoculture farms in forest reserves that are supposed to practice selective management system (SMS)”

B] Not forgetting that Nenggiri is also facing the construction of a RM$5 billion hydroelectric power plant which the local Orang Asli villagers have protested for fear of losing their ancestral land.
The villagers are concerned the dam, slated to be developed at Mukim Ulu Nenggiri, would submerge four Orang Asli settlements as well as inundate 5,384ha of forest land.

Indeed, one hundred villagers had submitted a memorandum to the Prime Minister’s Office amid their concerns, while Tenaga Nasional Berhad had vowed to address the issues raised.

C] Similarly, massive forest conversions are occurring in Pahang, peninsular Malaysia, second only to Kelantan in magnitude, raising the concurrent issue of the possible abuse of the environmental impact assessment (EIA) process when Big Farms’ plantation companies are dividing the size of their projects to not exceed 500 hectares. This practice, by permitting monoculture plantation project between 100 and 500 hectares in size, the EIA process would be bypassed as it does not require mandatory public consultation, (malaysiakini, March 22 2022).

D] Then, there is the emerging issue of illegal gold mining activities in the Tersang Forest Reserve in Raub located in Ulu Renggol, at the heart of Pahang forest reserve. The Pahang Forestry Department director had not deny that an experienced gold mining syndicate likely behind the illegal activities.

Peninsular Malaysia will see deforestation amounting to a minimum of 72,584.73ha in the near future, says an environmental group. This is about three times the size of Kuala Lumpur or nearly the size of Singapore.

E] A total of 1,547 lots of land in Kelantan needed for phase one of the East Coast Rail Link (ECRL) project have been acquired and gazetted under Section 8 of the Land Acquisition Act 1960, said energy and natural resources minister Takiyuddin Hassan, malaysiakini 17/06/2022.

He said the land acquisition in the districts of Kota Bharu, Machang, Bachok and Pasir Puteh were undertaken by the department of the director general of lands and mines (JKPTG) of Kelantan.

The expansive degradation of Malaysian natural resources is not a mere plot of deforestation, but a continuous extension of its neoliberalism economic expression to support capitalism in an alignment connecting to neo-imperialism monopoly-capital domination.

Neither is an attempt to avoid the EIA process a new matter. State and Federal governments have to be held responsible in failing to ensure that such manipulation does not take place. That it exists is because increasingly fewer hands (belonging to clientel capital for instance, and ethnocapital specifically with its dominance on economic affairs and activities – assuming entitled positions – that enforce political power to redefine economic dominance) that are incapable of balancing the needs of profit with the genuine needs of society as a whole; read STORM, PLACE POSITION POWER – A CLASS ANALYSIS OF ETHNOCAPITAL RELATIONSHIP, April 2021.

The whole spectre of development of underdevelopment can, therefore, be discerned in the relentless, and irreversible, Global North intrusion into our land to exploit, and disfigured, our pristine environment – whether it is the Lynas case, the gold mine in Pahang or copper mining in Sabah, and meanwhile, taking everyone for a ride along the Borneo Highway.

On Malaysian **ponds of kleptocracy illegal activities**, it is not that difficult to find **clientel capitalism** submerged underneath every lump of fertile soil.

2. EXTENSIVE ECOLOGICAL EXPLOITATION

While we try to move forward to amend the forestry law to enforce mandatory consultations, at the same time, our existing consultation spaces are being circumvented through sheer capitalism encroachment,influence and manipulation.

The existing Ecological-Epidemiological-Economic crisis can be related to “the global ecological rift,” where the disruption and destabilization of the human relationship to nature on a planetary scale, emerging from the process of capital accumulation without end, (Foster, Clark, and York, The Ecological Rift, 14–15, 18). In The Return of Nature, Foster has explored how socialist analysts and materialist scientists of various disciplines, first in Britain, then the United States, from William Morris and Frederick Engels to Joseph Needham, Rachel Carson, and Stephen Jay Gould, sought to develop a dialectical naturalism, rooted in a critique of capitalism. In the process, Forster delivers a far-reaching and the fascinating exploration in reinterpretation of the radical and socialist origins of ecology.

This argument is reinforced by Japanese Marxist-author, Kohei Saito who has shown from researching on Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe (MEGA) Volume IV/18, that the nature-human interaction and Marx pointed critique of the ecological harm produced by capital accumulation. This concept of ‘metabolic rift’ (Stoffwechsel) lies in the understanding on circulation of soil nutrients between countryside and town thereby contributing to human disharmonies from the natural world, (Kohei Saito).

It is in this context that Marx’s central concepts of the “universal metabolism of nature,” “social metabolism,” and the metabolic “rift” have come to define his critical-ecological worldview, (Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 3, London: Penguin, 1981), 949; Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 30, 54–66).

The totality of ecological Marxism elsewhere: in China as explained by Zhihe Wang and expanded by Zhihe Wang, Huili He and Meijun Fan; and the extension to Iran with Persi interest in John Bellamy Foster’s The Ecological Revolution: Making Peace with the Planet bears witness to a need in this country of that rising consciousness in preserving our Mother Earth.

3. EXISTENTIAL ECOLOGICAL EXTINCTION

Since implementation of the enthnocratically-administrative National Economic Policy in 1970, (Navaratnam 2020, Zainuddin 2019, Jomo 2005,) succeeding kleptocractic regimes had continued maintaining a clientel ethnocapitalism domain over the working class rakyat2 with 1% of the bumiputera population of about 40,000 ethnocapital families of the ruling class running and looting – and ruining – the national economy in alliance with Global North monopoly-capital.

In reality, Global North monopoly-capital investment in Global South is little more than a collaborating strategy for profiting on planetary destruction.

“Agribusinesses,” Rob Wallace writes, “are moving their companies into the Global South to take advantage of cheap labor and cheap land,” and “spreading their entire production line across the world.”

For instance, soy has become one of the world’s most important agroindustrial commodities – serving as the nexus for the production of food, animal feed, fuel and hundreds of industrial products – and South America has become its leading production region. However, the soy boom on this continent entangles transnational capital and commodity flows and disrupted social relations deeply in contested ecologies and economies, see The Journal of Peasant Studies Soy Production in South America: Globalization and New Agroindustrial Landscapes and John Wilkinson, The Globalization of Agribusiness and Developing World Food Systems, Monthly Review, Sep 01, 2009.

The outcome is that, for instance, prominent transnationals have had an important presence in the Brazilian agrifood industry since its birth; players that include: Nestlé, Unilever, Anderson Clayton, Corn Products Company, Dreyfus, and the Argentine transnational Bunge y Borne (now simply Bunge). They were later followed, as different markets matured, by Kraft, Nabisco, General Foods, and Cargill from the United States, and United Biscuits, Bongrain, Danone, Parmalat, and Carrefour from Europe.

The consequences are that uneven and often uncoordinated foray of metropolitan corporate capital is subjugating the agriculture and domestic food markets of many developing countries, particularly smaller, peripheral ones undergoing rapid urbanization, to the needs of global agribusiness monopoly-capital.

Indeed, it seems the Brazilian government remains firm in its objective of handing over indigenous lands, which make up 12% of Brazilian territory, to private hands, preferably agribusiness and mining. In other words: it is not enough to steal, it has to destroy. Since he took office, Jair Bolsonaro has accumulated a long history of attacks on indigenous peoples with the argument that they do not offer any benefit to society, so they have to be “integrated” to become workers. With that logic, the government dismantled the Funai (the body that should protect the indigenous people) and has turned a blind eye to all the attacks by grileiros (landowners thanks to false documents), jagunços (gunmen) and fazendeiros (landowners) on indigenous lands. The clandestine mining continues at full steam.

Munduruku people gather along the Tapajós River to protest a proposed dam on Nov. 27, 2014, in Pará, Brazil.“*We are protecting our land and the life on it. We have to preserve this life for our children’s future.*”

Similarly, in our country, for every far-sighted decision that has been made in previous years that can ensure the greater protection of forests, there had been contradictory direction leading to further forestry degradation and forest destruction.

In the past years, we witnessed, and many rakyat2 had experienced, floods, landslides, logjams and mudflows, in particular during monsoon seasons. From rural Kedah to rural Pahang, across urban parts of Selangor and the suburbans of Negeri Sembilan, these natural disasters have their roots in rampant deforestation and the failure in appropriate economic development planning. If state governments continue to allow forest conversions despite our international commitments on forests, biodiversity and climate change; and Big Farms elements of the plantation sector continue to disrespect the law and community rights, how can international climate funds be sufficient to protect us from future climate impacts – and the imminent existential ecological extinction in our tanah-ku?

EPILOGUE

Inherent to capitalism is inequality, social exclusion and environmental degradation by abuses to the soil as much as it exploits the worker. Under the Global North domain, with monopoly-capital supporting repressive states in Global South, the transnational corporations are applying destructive patterns of resource extraction to perpetuated their neo-imperialism domination indefinitely.

Bibliographies

LH Aun, Fifty Years of Malaysia’s New Economic Policy, ISEAS-Yusof 2021, Singapore

James Chin, ‘NEW’ MALAYSIA: FOUR KEY CHALLENGES IN THE NEAR TERM, Lowly Institute 2019, Australia

Edmund Terence Gomez, New Economic Policy @50: Looking back and forward, Economic History of Malaya: Asia-Eutope Institute 2022

KS Jomo, The New Economic Policy and Interethnic Relations in Malaysia, United Nations Research Institute for Social Development 2004

Lim Teck Ghee, Deconstructing the bumiputera construct, malaysiakini March 11 2021

UNEQUAL BASKING IN UNION BUSTING

PROLOGUE

In the Communist Manifesto (1848), Marx argued that with the
development of capitalism, a growing proportion of the labor force
would become proletarianized wage workers. As the size of the
proletariat expanded, capitalist development would also provide
favorable conditions for the workers to get organized. Urbanization
and industrialization would result in greater physical concentration of
the workers, and the progress of transportation and communication
would make organization easier. The development of capitalism
also requires providing the workers with general education and the
workers would develop political consciousness as they got involved in
the political struggle between different sections of the capitalist class.
Marx believed that as the proletarianized working class organized
to fight for its own economic and political interests

Adopted and Adapted from :

US Union Busting in Contemporary Malaysia: 1970-2000 by Mhinder Bhopal,
University of North London.

1] INTRODUCTION

Prior to independence 1957, the Malayan economy depended.on her exports of rubber and tin that accounted for 85% of export earnings and 48% of GDP. The induustrialization initiatives in the 1970s and 1980s changed the Malaysian economy so that by 1995 manufacturing goods accounted for 76.7% of all Malaysia’s exports.

The manufactured exports of electrical and electronic goods and electrical machinery, appliances and parts accounting for 50.3%, 16.9% respectively (Department of Statistics 1996). In 1996, 18 US electronics companies accounted for almost ten per cent of Malaysia’s gross manufactured exports and employed 65,000 people (Malaysian American Electronics Industry, 1998).

Even in this much endowed electronic industry, implanted behind free-trade zones employing female workers at US 40 cents per hour, these TNCs created only 12,000 new jobs in 1973.

2] THE UNIONISATION STRUGGLE

Contemporary imperialism has a new face and direction (Suwandi, Jonna and Foster, 2019) with global monopolies capturing the value generated by labour in the periphery on an unequal exchange basis. Labour has to be organised to fight for its rights.

i) In-house union like the RCA Workers Union (RCAWU) applied for registration on 23 January 1989, and proceeded to get membership majority hoping to achieve automatic recognition. However, accusations of illegal harassment and intimidation led to the Labour Minister saying that “the workers will be free to form in house unions or retain the status quo” (Business Times 25/2/ 89) and that action would be taken against any party found interfering in the exercise of that choice (NewStraits Times 25/2/89) when it became clear that the Malaysia Association of Electronic Industry (MAEI) was opposing unionisation, including in-house unions.

Membership in MAEI include Advanced Micro Devices Export, Harris Semiconductor, HewlettPackard, Intel, Integrated Device Technology, Litronix, Monsanto Electronics, Motorola Semiconductor, National Semiconductor, Quality Technologies Ottoelectronics, RCA, Texas Instruments and Western Digital, (BusinessTimes, 9 March 1989).

That case was referred to the Director General of Trade Unions (DGTU) to determine if the union had majority membership. Two months later,while enquiries were being conducted, RCA was sold to Harris Semiconductor and the operations’ identity became Harris Solid State, which made its parent – The Harris Corporation – the then sixth largest electronics component group in the world (New Straits Times 23 Feb. 1989).

It was further reported that all three of Harris Corporation in Malaysian were in close geographical assembly plant sites, and were, in fact, run by the same management team. The registration application was only accepted by the DGTU after a secret ballot of the embership approved a name change to Harris Solid State Workers Union (HSSWU).

On 10 January 1990 the DGTU gave the company 14 days to recognise the union, to which the managing director replied that “the company is studying the matter… we will respond with a press statement when appropriate”. In the meantime, the Human Resources International Director and a legal advisor of the Harris Corporation had flown in from the USA. Twenty four hours before the expiry of the deadline set by the DGIR the company transferred the contracts, with better terms and conditions, of most of the 2,500 employees of Harris Solid State to Harris Advanced Technology (HAT), a sister company that employer 100 staff (Business Times 25/1/90). Five hundred employees signed a petition in protest against the heavy-handed tactics employed with some claiming they were forced to sign under threat of possible job loss.

ii) Often, in an an attempt to avoid unionisation, transnational corporations (TNCs) would try out the buffering tactic whereby management would often focused and directed their strategy simultaneously at employee sentiments hoping to influence their preferences and at union organisers. The South East Asia High Technology Review publication was circulated among employees with the aim of convincing the workforce from the negative effect of pro-unionisation. The day following the inaugural meeting of the union (21 January 1989) staff at and above supervisory level were warned about the need to remain loyal to the company and they were also monitored closely to unauthorized non-work activity.

Senior and middle management surveillance was extended to night shifts in order to buffer employees from the union activists.

iii) Intimidatory tactics were used to discourage workers from attending the unions’ inaugural Annual General Meeting where workers were informed that attendance would be ‘asking for trouble’; increments would be affected; they would suffer ‘a miserable life in the company’ and could lose their jobs. Employees were warned that secret attendance would be detected by company ‘spies’ in the union (one executive committee member was expelled for co-operating with management to undermine the union) while managers would take pictures. Supervisors, claiming to pass management messages, informed staff that ‘the union AGM was a private matter and as such employees attend at their own risk, the company would take no responsibility for insurance compensation and medical charges should anything happen’. Some employees were threatened with disciplinary action for mere attendance at the AGM (Business Times 3/4/89).

iv) In attempts to divide the union along ethnic and religious lines, Malay employees, including prominent Malay union activists, consisting of supervisory rank and above, were called to two unofficial meetings. These were organized by a recently recruited senior Malay staff manager and the political entity activists of the Pertubuhan Kebangsaan Melayu Bersatu – United Malays National Organisation (UMNO) – to discuss “Muslim welfare”, Muslim solidarity” and the formation of a Muslim committee to channel workforce grievances. Malay unionists were rebuked for having been “used by the Indians when the Malays had always taken the leadership role in [the] Country”. It was suggested that the Malays were being led by self-interested Indians who had little regard for company and that Malays ought to “be the guardians of themselves”. The group was informed that “Mat Salleh” (the whites) would possibly shelve expansion plans or could, at worst, consider to transfer operations resulting in unemployment.

When these tactics failed, a senior Malay union official was called to meetings with a departmental staff manager where pressure to leave the union was said to have brought to bear.

v) At the level of a non-supervisory staff the company organised a government ‘ustaz’ (religious teacher), to lecture on ‘work ethics’.

These company lectures occurred twice a day over two consecutive weeks and were delivered to groups of approximately 100 each. The audience was warned that ‘a certain group’, who were under ‘police surveillance’, were out to ‘create trouble’, and if they were allowed to succeed the outcome would be job loss and possible plant closure.

In contrast the company was praised for its facilities and the need to give management undivided loyalty.

vi) Then, countering Union Campaign Strategy, not infrequently, many union officials were barred from entering company premises for union activity after working hours. When the union gained an injunction restraining company interference with organising activities, managerial presence was imposed by playing, at full volume, newly installed, televisions during union organizing activities (Sunday Star 4/6/89).

vii) Activists refusing to give up membership were targeted for reprisal. This included transfer to less desirable duties or into areas where contact with the workforce was minimised and could be monitored.

viii) Tactics involving psychological, physical, procedural and economic intimidation, varied from case to case and was viewed by the activists as designed for maximum impact depending upon the economic and domestic circumstances facing the individual as well as their personal make up, and position.

a) For instance, the least confident were subject to individual pressure, high achievers to demotions or withdrawal of work, unskilled/semiskilled women activists were required to be accompanied by anti- unionists when using the toilet. They were forbidden to nod, smile, speak or socialise with friends while at work.

b) Often employed transferees were not provided training in conducting new duties and necessary operations instructions were withheld. Union activists who were highly qualified, experienced and skilled, were left idle, transferred or demoted to lower status, repetitive and monotonous jobs.

c) Those in supervisory positions had their responsibilities eroded, decisions overturned and were bypassed by subordinates and managers.

Some suffered extreme financial loss because of transfers to day work.

ix) For the first time in their work and company careers, most activists were subjected to regular disciplinary proceedings on matters of established custom and practice.

a) One popular and highly regarded Malay unskilled female activist with an impeccable record of commitment to, and performance in, work and other internal and external company was subject to eight disciplinary investigations within a 10-month period of joining and becoming active in the union.

b) Performance review gradings of all the activists plummeted from regular outstanding and above average ratings (the average length of service of the activists was eight years) to below average resulting in smaller increments and relative loss of salary.

c) Attempts were also made, via three ‘poison pen’ letters, to implicate two senior executive committee members by stating ‘they tried to molest two girls at the union office’.

In April 1990 the Minister of Human Resources ordered the company to recognise the HSSWU which because of the transfers, represented 24 employees all of which were union officials or activists (Star 21/4/90). The company complied within seven days.

Meanwhile the Minister, ignoring the intimidatory tactics deployed by the company, stated that HAT workers “have the right under law to form an in-house union [and he] will try [his] best to speed up its recognition”

x) Though, early in June 1990 the Harris Corporation publicly unveiled plans to relocate operations from California, Taiwan and Singapore to Malaysia where it expected to invest M$60m the following year to bring the corporation’s investments in Malaysia to RM$7Bn while creating an addition 600 jobs (Business Times 7/6/90).

However, in late September, six days before a conciliation meeting over the first collective agreement covering the 24 employees of Harris Solid State, the Harris Corporation decided to close the operation.

The unionists were then made redundant, despite advertised company recruitment campaigns immediately before and after this event. The immediate response of the government, which had presented itself publicly as the champion of the in-house union, was to ask for an ‘amicable settlement’. Ministers stated that “employers should not have a negative attitude to wards trade unions but instead should take appropriate action in the interests of the company and nation” (Business Times 24/9/90).

It is not uncommon for TNCs to advocate alternative assembly sites or state departure from invested country as recently Apple had asked its major suppliers to evaluate the cost implications of shifting 15-30% of their production capacity from China to Southeast Asia as reported by Li, K, and T Cheng , “Apple weighs 15%-30% capacity shift out of China amid trade war”, Nikkei Asian Review, 19 June, 2019, and also due to the changing dynamics of global value chain analysis as illustrated by Yuqing Xing in Decoding China’s Export Miracle, April 2021.

The dismissed unionists in the 1990 era were advised by the then Minister of Human Resources to file reports of wrongful dismissal which would be investigated as a matter of ‘top Priority’ (Star 25/9/90).

The Minister, after a meeting with senior management, stated he ‘was not satisfied with the explanations given by the company’ regarding the dismissals (Business Times 27/9/90).

xi) Because of this case the ILRERF independently filed a petition to remove Malaysia from the Generalised System of Preferences (GSP) – eliminating duties on thousands of products when imported from one of 119 designated beneficiary countries – even though the main protagonist on this case was the American company itself.

The unionists’ cases relating to infringements of the right to organise and not be dismissed for undertaking union activity was repeatedly delayed and postponed in the courts. When eventually heard in 1996, the judges ruled that the company name change was a matter of form rather than substance, and the dismissal of the non-activists was due to their involvement in trade union activity rather than redundancy. This led to the reinstatement of all 21 of the sacked unionists, and compensation of six years back pay.

xii) As an indication of state interest the decision was, reputedly, discussed at cabinet with the Minister for International Trade and Industry, who acts as the voice for inward investors, raising concern over the fact of reinstatement rather than just compensation. This apparently resulted in a call from the Prime Ministers office to the courts seeking justification for the decision.

In contrast the reaction at workforce level was different as the current Secretary of the union described:

“soon as we came back .. the response … it was fantastic. We were there, all of us…. people were coming and going out and waving as if nothing had happened. Some of them came and hugged us… we demanded a plant tour before lunchtime because during lunch it would be quite packed to stop… we timed it for lunch break, at that time people are coming out and they saw us [and they were] crying and shouting and screaming … it was really quite emotional.”. (Interview: July 2000)

3] THE STATE COLLABORATION WITH MONOPOLY-CAPITALISM

With production dominated by a relatively few transnational corporations (TNC) exercising considerable monopoly power over states and labour, the migration towards the international concentration of capital clearly reflected on the work of Lenin (Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, New York: International Publishers, 1939) and, on the other hand, confirms Amin’s imperialism of generalized-monopoly capitalism (The New Imperialist Structure, Monthly Review, July 2019), Emmanuel’s unequal exchange under Neo-Imperialism that Global North monopoly-capitalism sustained through sheer exploitation.

Throughout the researched period, it is inadvertently clear from the reported incidents that ruling cliques of the state would collaborate wholeheartedly with the Global North monopoly-capitalists to suppress union formation, and to deprive the shared values of labour effort.

i) To allay TNCs apprehension that labour strife might adversely affected monopoly-capitalism FDI, ruling regimes had stated that ‘unions will not be allowed to form in the [electronics] industry’ because electronics workers in Hong Kong’s Fairchild electronics had taken strike action in pursuit of a wage increase only the previous year that might spread to Penang.

While unions were not legally outlawed, a union free environment was to be achieved by giving ‘pioneer industries’ protection against demands from a trade union that were better than the legal minimum stipulated in law: ministerial powers to outlaw recognition disputes, restricting access to labour courts; introduction of service requirements before individuals could stand for union election and the removal of negotiation over hiring, firing and transfer.

Those mentioned restrictions were officially justified to “maintain a manageable labour force, attract new investments, create employment opportunities and to make possible a more rapid pace of industrialisation”.

However, through the years, ruling regimes had defended its restrictions on freedom of association, domestically and internationally to the ILO on grounds that the industry had an important socio-economic role in the New Economic Policy (NEP) objectives, and unionisation would create a disincentive for electronics foreign investors.

It is the underlying application of global labour arbitrage to create “global labour value chains” to protect their profit margins, so that decentralised global production is associated with the growing concentration of profits and economic power, (Intan Suwandi, Value Chains: The New Economic Imperialism, Monthly Review 2019). Just like in the 1970-2000 era, TNCs presently has justified the coronavirus pandemic’s bull-whip disruptive effect impacted on the supply chain gridlock (Suwandi, 2021) to unfortunately spur the rollback of labour rights on issues from decent pay to safe workplaces ardently – thereby instigating incidents of union busting throughout Southeast Asia.

ii) The State had thwarted the early 1970’s Electrical Industry Workers Union (EIWU) recruitment drive in Monsanto, a member of the American electronics grouping (MTUC: General Council Report 1974-1976). This was justified by the state on grounds that electrical industries were not similar to electronics industries within the meaning of the Trade Union Act 1967.

iii) In response to late 1970’s international attention and a volatile domestic political climate with local unrest and inequity anomies arising from unequal development, the State retracted from its earlier accommodation of the transnational capital. In defiance of the EIWU, which it viewed as a relatively militant union, the labour minister advised the MTUC to submit an application for registration of a separate national electronics union (NUEW).

iv) While placating international pressure and domestic opinion electronics companies signalled “that……[they] are not interested in the idea of unionisation [with] some larger companies … indicating that they would phase out their operations if workers were allowed to form unions” (Business Times 9/3/85).

In this climate and given the legal right to unionization, this and subsequent applications for registration of a national electronics union in 1980 and 1986 were ignored by the Registrar of Trade Unions (RTU).

4] STATE AUTHORITARIANISM IN SUPPORT OF CLIENTEL CAPITALISM

In order to retain and sustain political power, and to continue impoverishing the poors in order for capitalism, specifically clientel ethnocratic capital – with political fabrication and economic entrenchment of the NEP construct (James Chin, 2016) which is clearly divisive to the nation’s unity and sense of belonging (Lim Teck Ghee) to exist and flourish at the same time immiserising countless rakyat2 land-settleless and industrial workers to international labour arbitrage. This unequal approach linked to the labour value commodity chains contribute to the enlarged capital accumulation by the transnational corporations, deepening the extracting surplus value from the labouring class.

The gouging of labour surplus value is assisted with the firm domination of assertiveness by state authoritarian apparatus.

i) Owing to the authoritarianism during the recession and the accompanying political crisis of the mid 80’s, trade unionists were imprisoned (1987), those oppositions in the ruling UNM0 purged (1987), and senior judges removed and dismissed (1988).

UMNO controlled media editorials has given high profiles to sentiments that argue “…. our union leaders should be imbued with a sense of patriotism. Loyalty and national pride are inherent in the love for one’s country especially when we are overseas. An act of betrayal of this trust tantamount to one being labelled a traitor…” (New Straits Times 27/7/92).

ii) The Malaysian Government seized these opportunities to attack the Malaysian labour movement, accusing it of being used as “mouthpieces” of US trade unions to reduce the attractiveness of overseas locations (Business Times 17/6/91) and “.. creating industrial unrest and political instability” (Deputy Prime Minister Ghafar Baba quoted in New Straits Times 15/1/93). The deputy Prime Minister publicly proclaimed that “destructive methods were being used by a small group of unionists who also happened to be opposition party leaders… who were not bothered about peace and harmony and who placed their own interest above the country’s interest….” (New Straits Times 29/9/92).

iii) In 1988, the AFL-CIO petitioned the US government to investigate worker and human rights in determining renewal of Malaysian GSP status, which provided favourable duties on imports to the US. The Malaysian government viewed the preferred nation status as a ‘locational advantage’ for assisting investments (Malaysian Business July 1-15 1991). While the petition, like two subsequent ones, proved to be unsuccessful, threat to GSP status was see00n to be particularly significant for the electronics sector, which exported 36% of its silicon chips to America.

In this context the Malaysian government, once again, accepted the idea of a national electronics union.

iv) To reinforce solidification of clientel capitalism, to benefit various divisional levels of the ruling regime, pro union sentiments were widely publicised and the Labour Minister stated `…. we believe an organisation that works as a unit will contribute to better employer-worker ties and ensure industrial harmony’ (Labour Minister Lee Kim Sai, 23/9/88) while the Deputy Prime Minister added that ‘unions should be used as a healthy negotiating tool’. In an apparent spirit of co-operation and tripartitism the government stated that unions in the electronics sector were to be organised with the help of the Malaysian Employers (MEF) and the Malaysia Trade Union Congress (MTUC).

v) The MTUC submitted an application for formation of the union in October 1988 supplemented with advocated changes.in unionisation policy and the release of some detainees in was publicised as being a ‘…timely and convincing demonstration that democracy is alive in Malaysia’ (Sunday Star 25/9/88).

v) However, within four days of the announcement, and under pressure from electronics companies, the MEF organised a day long, ‘closed door’ industry discussion of the unionisation issue. The resulting policy was that employees ought to be allowed to choose between no union, in-house union or industrial union rather than have one imposed (Business Times 28/9/88).

vi) Indications of employer acceptance of, and preparedness for, union recognition is demonstrated by the fact that Harris Semiconductor had hired consultants to conduct training sessions for managers and supervisors on union avoidance in September 1988. That within three days of the employers meeting, allegations of intimidation of workers who formed or joined unions and threats of plant closures, were being widely, prominently and negatively reported in the state controlled media indicates State-MNC conflict (Star and Business Times 29/9/88).

vii) In early October, and one day before a meeting between the Labour Minister and the Electronics companies to discuss the unionisation issue, AMD (Advanced Micro Devices) without warning or consultation and in breach of legislation announced 900 redundancies. On the 2nd of October, after the meeting with MAEI representatives, the Minister of Labour announced a volte face and a national union was no longer guaranteed.

viii) It is necessary to look at these administrative and political manoeuvrings as part of a class struggle. This is because class identities existing at each economic, political, and ideological (or cultural) level, and the understanding of such class relationship is to identify where the controlling power ensues. As an instance, the stronghold in the Free Trade Zone (FTZ) or the Export Free Trade Zone (EFTZ) is that of monopoly-capitalism [place] that has aligned with the political elites and compradore capital of a developing country [positions] and by ownership and control of assembly workers [power] is able to extract the surplus value through their labouring tasks.

It is not unsurprisingly that the application for the formation of a national union was ignored or to be neglected, and if possible, demised because the ruling class feels threatened.

5] UNION BUSTING IS NEO-IMPERIALISM IN UNITY SPLITTING

Jason Hickel, Dylan Sullivan and Huzaifa Zoomkawala contended in the New Political Economy – published online: 30 Mar 2021 – that wealth drain from the Global South remains a significant feature of the world economy in the post-colonial era; rich countries continue to rely on imperial forms of appropriation to sustain their high levels of income and consumption. The Global North appropriated from the Global South commodities worth US$2.2 trillion in Northern prices that are enough to end extreme poverty 15 times over; and we are unfortunately one of the politico-economic victims in this neoliberalism niche – as reiterated by Cheng Enfu and Lu Baolin Five Characteristics of Neo-Imperialism in Monthly Review, May 2021, where the country’s unionization of labour is defanged and defunct to serve the new age of imperialism.

During colonial administration, we have southern India’s indentured kangani labour who became “orphans of the Empire“, and post-independence when unionisation was disfavoured and disenfranchised.

The continuance of neoliberal socio-economic policies since 1970s only reinforces the pace of Neo-Imperialism onto the country unionisation positioning.

i) The international business press, reinforced the anti-union position of the electronics multinationals perhaps predictably supporting the anti union message of neo-liberal economic orthodoxy. The Wall Street Journal (6/10/88) commented that the Malaysian government’s decision to allow unions in the electronics industry ‘runs counter to the government’s campaign to attract foreign electronics investment by shielding companies from unions. It went on that to report that “……..a western trade official [said] “further investment could be jeopardised by this move… the electronics guys have said that if unions come in they’ll leave”‘.

ii) Similarly, the then Far Eastern Economic Review (6/10/88), reported that, “electronics companies are stating that if labour costs rise significantly, announced new investment in wafer fabrication could be diverted elsewhere”.

iii) Even the editors commented in the South East Asia High Technology Review of December 1988, in an unequivocal summary of the employers position highlighted the problems of dependent export orientated industrialisation.

iv) The pressure was exerted by TNCs – specifically the American electronics firms – and those official of the US trade representatives to express that the formation of in-house unions might help Malaysia retain its privileges under GSP, and that The Malaysian government would required only to take ‘Positive steps’ towards improving human rights (Business Times 29/10/88).

v) In this manner, the Malaysian state was provided with a domestic and international defence against accusations of violating workers’ rights while completely conceding to monopoly capital, specifically the neo-imperial American capitalism. The consequential followups were, in contravention of Malaysian Law and contrary to previous commitments, anti national union tactics were resurrected by the ruling regime’s State.

When the MTUC accepted the Director General of Trade Unions stipulation that all electronics workers be covered in a national secret ballot (New Straits Times 19/2/89) the government, declared that irrespective of the result no national union would be allowed (New Straits Times 28/2/89). The MTUC has since come in for increasing government criticism for tarnishing the image of the country and potentially jeopardising foreign investments and thus employment levels and workers’ welfare (New Straits Times 8/5/92).

EPILOGUE

By November 1989, shortly after a meeting between Prime Minister Mahathir and Henry Kissinger (at that time, he was acting as an inward investment advisor to the Indonesian Government) and Jack Welsh of General Electric, the state position had crystallised as Malaysia secured its GSP status. Prime Minister Mahathir asserted that only in-house unions would be allowed since “an industry wide union, national or state based, will hamper efforts to develop the electronics industry further” (Business Times 28/11/89), thereon the country’s kleptocratic regime with an ethnocapital base becomes an accomplice in the monopoly-capital domain of Neo-Imperialism.

MORE MALAYSIAN MANUSCRIPTS

STORM PAPERS ON INDUSTRIALISATION, PRECARIOUS LABOUR, UNION BUSTING, TRANSNATIONAL CORPORATIONS, ALIENATION, UNEQUAL EXCHANGE

NEOLIBERALISM IS NEO-IMPERIALISM

PROLOGUE

1947, in the Swiss Resort named after: Mount Pelerin Society (MPS) held its first conference. The 39 members were economists, historians, philosophers, businessmen and where nine members later became Nobel Laureates — Hayek, George Stigler, Maurice Allais, Gary Becker, Milton Friedman, James Buchanan, Ronald Coase and Vernon Smith in Economics, and Mario Vargas Llosa in Literature.

1] INTRODUCTION

The MPS’s influence is to spread through opinion makers in journalism and think-tanks, supported by billionaire like Charles Koch. The think-tanks included the Institute of Economic Affairs (UK), Council on Foreign Relations, the Atlantic Economic Research Foundation, the Heritage Foundation and Ford Foundation, Hoover Institution, Foundation for Economic Education, American Enterprise Institute, Center for American Progress, Canadian Fraser Institute and Australian Institute of Public Affairs supported by plutonic billionaire families-like of George Soros, Michael Bloomberg, and Glenn Hutchins, (see Laurence H. Shoup, Monthly Review, May 2021 on key policy formulation and outcomes of major USA think-tanks).

However, much of the intellectual work was completed by University of Chicago’s Milton Friedman, Ronald Coase and George Stigler – working on free trade, the importance of property rights, political freedom and minimal state interference and low taxes.

These neo-liberal views were taken up by UK prime minister Margaret Thatcher (1925-2013) and US president Ronald Reagan (1911-2004), with nearly one third of latter economic advisers being MPS members. The neo-liberal philosophy and its application in economic policy eventually morphed into as the Washington Consensus, first articulated by World Bank economist John Williamson.

The concentration of neoliberal elites and circulation of neoliberal ideals amongst the political class.

2] NEO-IMPERIALISM AS NEW MONOPOLY IN PRODUCTION AND CIRCULATION

The internationalization of production and circulation, together with the intensified concentration of capital, monopolostic transnational corporations (TNCs) whose wealth is nearly as huge as that of many countries, for examples, in 2017 Walmart earned more than the whole of Belgium; Netflix had a greater revenue in 2017 than Malta’s GDP; Apple would be 47th in the world by GDP if it were a country.

The tendency towards the international concentration of capitalism is clearly reflected from Lenin’s contestaton (Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, New York: International Publishers, 1939) which points out that imperialism is the monopoly stage of capitalism where markets became competitive stages for global and regional hegemony.

To broaden capital intrusion there is “competition” between firms to seek low labour cost (economic term: labour arbitrage) and low-cost production processes (lean to just-in-time and flexible production), competition for resources and markets (strategic competitive advantages) and marketing on product differentiation (varied products with many features and multi-functionalities at various price structures in different marketspheres).

By 2008, the top one hundred global corporations which had shifted their production foreign affiliates or subsidiaries accounted for 60 percent of their total assets and employment and more than 60 percent of their total sales. The foreign direct investment (FDI) to developing economies was US$694 billion in 2018 making up 58% global FDI share. By engaging in contractual relationships with partner firms but without equity involvement, mostly in the Global South, TNCs were generating about US$2 trillion in sales in 2010 (UNCTAD, World Investment Report: Non-Equity Modes of International Production and Development (Geneva: United Nations, 2011), 131).

Between 1980 and 2013, benefiting from the expansion of markets and the decline in production factor costs, the profits of the world’s largest 28,000 companies increased from US$2 trillion to US$7.2 trillion, representing an increase from 7.6 percent to approximately 10 percent of gross world product, (see Richard Dobbs et al., Playing to Win: The New Global Competition for Corporate Profits (New York: McKinsey & Company, 2015).

Under capitalism, the capitalists are dominant at each level of society, the working proletarians are dominated at each and every stage of labouring activities. When class exists at each economic, political, and ideological (or cultural) level, the understanding of class relationship is to identify where the controlling power ensues. As an instance, the stronghold in the Free Trade Zone (FTZ) or the Export Free Trade Zone (EFTZ) is that of monopoly-capitalism [place] that has aligned with the political elites and compradore capital of a developing country [positions], and by ownership and control of assembly workers [power] is able to extract the surplus value through their labouring tasks.

Those were the resultant outcomes of neoliberalism “free trade” ethos.

3] NEW MONOPOLY OF FINANCE CAPITAL

Secondly, the progress of capitalism to control and concentration generates a malformed development process towards economic financialization.

From the research of Cheng Enfu and Lu Baolin (Monthly Review May 2021), it is found that the proportion of overseas profits within total profits of U.S. corporations increased from 5 percent in 1950 to 35 percent in 2008. The proportion of overseas-retained profits increased from 2 percent in 1950 to 113 percent in 2000. The proportion of overseas profits within the total profits of Japanese corporations increased from 23.4 percent in 1997 to 52.5 percent in 2008, (Cui Xuedong, “Is the Contemporary Capitalist Crisis a Minsky-Type Crisis or a Marxist Crisis?” [in Chinese], Studies on Marxism 9 (2018).

By a slightly different accounting approach, it was acknowledged that the share of foreign profits of U.S. corporations as a percent of U.S. domestic corporate profits had increased from 4 percent in 1950 to 29 percent by 2019, (John Bellamy Foster, R. Jamil Jonna, and Brett Clark, “The Contagion of Capital,” Monthly Review 72, no. 8 (January 2021): 9).

Further, world wide, within twenty years since 1987, debt in the international credit market soared from just under $11 billion to $48 billion, with a rate of growth far exceeding that of the world economy as a whole, (Cheng Enfu and Hou Weimin, “The Root of the Western Financial Crisis Lies in the Intensification of the Basic Contradiction of Capitalism” [in Chinese], Hongqi Wengao 7 (2018).

4] MONOPOLY OF US$ DOLLAR AND INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY

Again, in Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, Lenin stated: “Typical of the old capitalism, when free competition held undivided sway, was the export of goods. Typical of the latest stage of capitalism, when monopolies rule, is the export of capital.” (Lenin, Selected Works, 212).

July 1944, on the initiative of the U.S. and British governments, representatives of forty-four countries gathered in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, to discuss plans for a postwar monetary system. The documents Final Act of the United Nations Monetary and Financial Conference, Articles of Agreement of the International Monetary Fund, and Articles of Agreement of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development – collectively known as the Bretton Woods Agreements – were adopted. The Bretton Woods main focus was to construct an international monetary order centered on the U.S. dollar. Other currencies were to be pegged to the US dollar, which was in turn pegged to gold.

The U.S. dollar thus plays the prominent role in world currency, while replacing the British sterling pound but designating the U.S. a special position compared to the rest of the world. Henceforth, U.S. dollar makes up 70 percent of global currency reserves, accounting for 68 percent of international trade settlements, 80 percent of foreign exchange transactions, and 90 percent of international banking transactions. Owing to this financial dominance, the U.S. dollar becomes the internationally recognized reserve currency and trade settlement currency. On one aspect, not only the United States is able to exchange it for real commodities, resources, and labour, and thus to cover its long-term trade deficit and fiscal deficit, but can also make cross-border investments, mergers and acquisitions of enterprises using U.S. dollars.

In a sense, the U.S. dollar hegemony provides one good example of the predatory nature of neoimperialism. The United States can also obtain international seigniorage by exporting U.S. dollars. She can reduce its foreign debt by depreciating the U.S. dollar or assets that are priced in U.S. dollars. The hegemony of the U.S. dollar has also caused the transfer of wealth from debtor countries to creditor countries. This would, in fact, mean that poor countries would subsidize the rich, which is completely and utterly unfair.

The other related financial instrument is the Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) which is a monopoly property. Intellectual property includes product design, brand names, and symbols and images used in marketing. These are protected by rules and laws covering patents, copyrights, and trademarks. Figures from the UN Conference on Trade and Development show that royalties and licensing fees paid to multinational corporations increased from $31 billion in 1990 to $333 billion in 2017, (United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, World Investment Report 2018).

According to figures from Science and Engineering Indicators 2018 Digest, released by the National Science Council of America in January 2018, the total global cross-border licensing income from intellectual property in 2016 was $272 billion. The United States was the largest exporter of intellectual property, with such source income at 45 percent of the global total.

With the TRIPs/WTO (Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights) as an international legal agreement between all the member nations of the World Trade Organization), the intellectual property regime has only strengthened, henceforth, (Cédric Durand, William Milberg, Intellectual Monopoly in Global Varlue Chains, 2018).

5] NEW MONOPOLY OF INTERNATIONAL OLIGARCHIC ALLIANCE

The fourth point is that with permeability of neoliberal thinkings prod a string of international monopoly alliance of oligarchic capitalism, featuring thereby a hegemonic ruler and several other great powers. This introduction is to provide the economic foundation for the money politics, vulgar culture, and military threats that exploit and oppress on the basis of the monopoly, as articulated by Cheng Enfu and Lu Baolin in Monthly Review May 2021, ibid).

Examples of international monopoly economic alliance as dominated by the United States are the 1975-formed G6 group with the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, France, Japan, and Italy, and became G7 when Canada joined the following year. G7 and its monopoly organizations are the coordination platforms, while the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization are the functional bodies of the new Bretton Woods global order of economic governance international capitalist monopoly alliance manipulated by the United States to serve its strategic economic and political interests, (Youzhi and Zha Junhong, “The Evolution and Influence of the G7 Group after the Cold War” [in Chinese], Chinese Journal of European Studies 6, 2002).

Other hegemony entities shall comprise the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) and regional collections like ANZUS — the Australia, New Zealand and U.S. Security Treaty, Moroccan-American Treaty of Friendship, The US-Israel Strategic Partnership, The U.S.–Afghanistan Strategic Partnership Agreement, the QUAD in an India-Pacific coalition, PRISM and the Five-Eye program as part of multilateral UKUSA Agreement – a treaty for joint cooperation in signals intelligence.

6] ECONOMIC ESSENCE AND TREND

The final characteristic of neoliberalism is the globalized contradictions of capitalism and its various crises of the system creating contemporary capitalism as late imperialism (Patnaik 2016), where U.S. political scientist like Joseph Nye had articulated that soft power may be applied to accomplish one’s desires through attraction rather than force or purchase.

It is often presented that the soft power of a country is constituted mainly of three resources, namely, culture (which functions where it is attractive to the local population), political values (which function when they can actually be practiced both at home and abroad), and foreign policy (which functions when it is regarded as conforming to legality and as enhancing moral prestige), see Wang Yan, “Review of Research on the Index System of Cultural Soft Power” [in Chinese], Research on Marxist Culture 1 (2019).

The United States subjugates the cultural markets and information spaces of other countries, especially developing countries, by exporting to them U.S. values and Hollywood lifestyles, with the goal of making its culture the “mainstream culture” of the world, (see Hao Shucui, Research on Marxist Culture 1, 2018) from Ford Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, Mont Pelerin Society, and Center for International Private Enterprise to promotion of “color revolutions” – through Albert Einstein Institute (AEI), National Endowment for Democracy (NED), International Republican Institute (IRI), National Democratic Institute (NDI) – by controlling the field of international public opinion via the promotion of neoliberal values by funding seminars and academic organizations, and through broadcasts by Voice of America and CNN or publications in Bloomberg, USAToday, New York Times, and increasingly since 2009, the US Agency for Inter-national Development (USAID)’s Interagency Counterinsurgency Initiative became official doctrine in the US. Now, USAID is the principal entity that promotes the economic and strategic interests of the US across the globe as part of its counterinsurgency operations.

7] IMPACT UPON MALAYSIA

The spectre of neoliberalism and neocolonial economic development surfaced after independence.

The British assisted in scripting an economic policy known as the Draft Development Plan that would became the Malaya Plans (1955-60); also implemented was the Second Malaya Plan 1961-65.

There seems to be a greater deference to foreign economic advisers who not only represent the neoliberal interests of international economic agencies but also enhancing the foreign business interests that successed in penetrating wholesomely the national economy.

a) Then, the subsequent three Malaysia Plans that followed were said to be crafty masterminded by foreigners from the United States of America. In fact, the earliest Malaysia Plan was drafted with the advice of Warren Hansbuger from USA; the second plan was completed by Prof. V.M. Bernett, Dr. D. Snodgrass and Prof. H.J. Bruton, all from the USA; though Snodgrass had pointedly admitted that these programmes were to gain “support from the rural Malays, if not indeed for the leadership of UMNO itself” rather than as a wholesome beneficiary to the rakyat-rakyat. The third plan had the advice of Prof. B. Higgins, also from the USA. The Development Advisory Service of Harvard (DASH) was heavily involved with the Prime Minister Economic Planning Unit (EPU) in drafting and promotion of this suite of development programmes.

Later in 2010, the government think-tank – Performance Management on Delivery Units (Pemandu) – even had allocated RM66 on “external consultants”, including American consultancy firm McKinsey and Co, which took the lion’s share of an estimated RM36 million; other foreign consultants included the Hay Group (which was paid RM11 million), Ethos & Co (RM1.5 million) and Alpha Platform (M) Sdn Bhd (RM1.5 million); an undisclosed “external consultant” named “Tarmidzi” had also received RM3 million for work done in setting up Pemandu as part of a neoliberalism economic development collaboration.

During 1997 currency crisis, and the eventual financial meltdown in 1998, the Malaysian government initial response was to rely on the International Monetary Fund consultancy response requiring expenditure reduction policies, that is, tighter fiscal and monetary control, which most unfortunately exacerbated the recessionary situation within the country concurrent with sharp portfolio capital outflow (see Athukorala 2000, “Capital Accounts Regime, Crisis, and Adjustments in Malaysia”, Asian Development Review 18, No:1 ,pp:17-48 and Bird & Rajan 2000, besides Kaplan and Rodrik 2001, “Did the Malaysian Capital Controls Work?”, NBER Working Paper No:8142).

b) TNCs deployment abroad is a manifestation towards capitalism late imperialism notation of labour arbitrage. On one side, the political economies of newly independent countries encourage foreign investment from Global North monopoly-capital. On the other perspective, through the application of global labour arbitrage where, as a result of the removal of or through the disintegration of barriers to international trade, jobs and industries have since moved to nations where labour and the cost of doing business is with low-pay and operational costs are inexpensive, respectively. This approach, together with labour value commodity chains, contributes to the enlarged capital accumulation by the transnational corporations, deepening the extracting surplus value from the labouring class.

However the uneven labour employment was to be seen in the Second Malaysia Plan, 1971-1975, where it had proposed that 22% of the 495,000 new jobs to be created in peninsular Malaysia would be in the manufacturing sector. This means a three folds increase in employment in the manufacturing sector from the 1960 figure of 121,000 to 378,000 by 1975. Past performance had shown that the low employment absorption capacity in the manufacturing sector, especially in the pioneer companies; in fact, the manufacturing sector provided only 5,500 new jobs per year during 1966/67,(Lo Sum-Yee, The Development Performance of West Malaysia, 1955-1967, with special reference to the industrial sector, Heinemann, Kuala Lumpur, 1972, Chapter 7, pp.66-73 and E.L. Wheelwright, Industrialisation in Malaysia, University of Melbourne Press, 1965, Chapter 4, pp.62-70).

c) Thirdly, without promulgated regulations, financial monopoly capital is very likely to work against the vision and goals set by country for her industrialisation initiatives. The insurgent of capital financialization in the late 1990s had already created an increased circulation of paper instruments and their associated debts :

*Government issuance of new debit papers: floated upward in the AFC1997, then another sitcom burst splurge 2001, followed by the GFC2018 spike* with “*helicopters’ monies” circulating in the market since AFC1997*; *see* **STORM 2020**

d) Forty-five years after the New Economic Policy (NEP) implementation, by 2002, Malaysia’s inequality 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 :

where it is deduced that the **top 1% of Bumiputera is way above the national income, and other communities incomes,** (as extracted from a decomposition of growth rate of real income per adult, 2002 to 2014 (pre-tax national income) : **Khalid** 2019

e) 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.

f) the emergence and ascendancy of ethnocapital clientel capitalism had witnessed the consolidation of ethnocratic clientel capitalism postcolonial affinity in the country as well as the constructed concentration of economic power in the banking, pharmaceutical and infrastructural platform sectors – all coexisting with neoliberalism economic developmental policies that aligned with late imperialism monopoly-capital and financial monopoly-capitalism.

g) 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:

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.

h) That what is widely referred to as neoliberal globalization in the twenty-first century is in fact a historical product of the shift to global monopoly-finance capital.

The politico-economic stage the country is presently stationed confirms Amin’s imperialism of generalized-monopoly capitalism and Emmanuel’s unequal exchange under Neo-Imperialism.

Jason Hickel, Dylan Sullivan and Huzaifa Zoomkawala contended in the New Political Economy – published online: 30 Mar 2021 – that wealth drain from the Global South remains a significant feature of the world economy in the post-colonial era; rich countries continue to rely on imperial forms of appropriation to sustain their high levels of income and consumption. The Global North appropriated from the Global South commodities worth US$2.2 trillion in Northern prices that are enough to end extreme poverty 15 times over; and we are unfortunately one of the politico-economic victims in this neoliberalism niche.

8] CONCLUSI0N

The character of neoimperialism is that it is a monopolistic financial capitalism established on the business model of giant and expansive transborder multinationals. The production monopoly and financial monopoly of the transnational corporations have higher stage of production and capital concentration, whereby “nearly every industry is concentrated into fewer and fewer hands.” (see John Bellamy Foster, Robert W. McChesney, and R. Jamil Jonna, “Monopoly and Competition in Twenty-First Century Capitalism,” Monthly Review 62, no. 11, 2011 :1).

International monopolistic financial capital not only controls the world’s major industries, but also monopolizes almost all sources of raw materials, scientific and technological talent, and skilled physical labour in all fields, controlling the transportation hubs and infrastructural platforms by various modes and means of production. It owns, controls and dominates capital, global financial functions and associated derivatives and information technologies through vast culutural and military shareholding systems, (Li Shenming, “Finance, Technology, Culture, and Military Hegemony Are New Features of Today’s Capital Empire” [in Chinese], Hongqi Wengao 20, 2012).

October 1984, Deng Xiaoping stated: “There are two major problems in the world that are very prominent. One is the issue of peace and the other is the North-South issue. Deng emphasized that “peace and development” were the two major questions to be resolved, (Li Shenming, “An Analysis of the Age and Its Theme” [in Chinese], Hongqi Wengao 22, 2015), not perpetuating endless wars and destructive extractions upon Mother Earth.

EPILOGUE

Progressive nations working together to build a shared socialist community for the better future for humankind.

THE MALAYSIAN MANUSCRIPTS

DOMINANCE OF FINANCIAL MONOPOLY-CAPITALISM

1] INTRODUCTION

The New Political Economy (NPE 2021 cited henceforth) published online: 30 Mar 2021 by the Jason Hickel, Dylan Sullivan and Huzaifa Zoomkawala research team presents that wealth drain from the Global South remains a substantial feature in post-colonial global economy; rich countries continue to indulge in imperial forms of appropriation to sustain their high levels of income and spending.

The 1990s’ unrestricted movement of international finance capital, public sector enterprises or government-link companies (GLCs) increasingly are subjected under the hound of financialization capitalism. The metropolitan capital-as-finance (Patnaik 1999), gets control over Third World resources and enterprises to see the rise to international finance capital in league with the local neocomprador class becoming crony capitalism through the force of accumulation as articulated by Samir Amin (2019) in The New Imperialist Structure, Monthly Review, July 01, 2019. Anchored upon a capital-market system, this leads to the emergence to, and the pervasion of, financialization capitalism in Malaysia.

2] THE TECH-VENTURE CAPITAL COLLUSION

Firstly, the Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) is a monopoly regime. Intellectual property includes product design, brand names, and symbols and images used in marketing. These are protected by rules and laws covering patents, copyrights, and trademarks. Figures from the UN Conference on Trade and Development show that royalties and licensing fees paid to multinational corporations increased from $31 billion in 1990 to $333 billion in 2017, (United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, World Investment Report 2018).

According to figures from Science and Engineering Indicators 2018 Digest, released by the National Science Council of America in January 2018, the total global cross-border licensing income from intellectual property in 2016 was $272 billion. The United States was the largest exporter of intellectual property, with income from this source comprising as much as 45 percent of the global total.

With the TRIPs/WTO (Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights) as an international legal agreement between all the member nations of the World Trade Organization), the intellectual property regime has only strengthened, (Cédric Durand, William Milberg, Intellectual Monopoly in Global Value Chains, 2018).

Thirdly, without promulgated regulations, financial monopoly capital is very likely to work against the vision and goals set by country for her industrialisation initiatives. The insurgent of capital financialization in the late 1990s had already created an increased circulation of paper instruments and their associated debts :

Indeed, three Swiss scholar-researchers had uncovered that a core of 147 multinational corporations controlled nearly 40 percent of the economic value; out of the 147 corporations, some three-quarters were regarded as financial intermediaries, (Stefania Vitali, James B. Glattfelder, and Stefano Battiston, “The Network of Global Corporate Control,” PLoS ONE 6, no. 10 (2011): e25995). The empirical study undertaken by them has further indicated that a relatively small number of multinational banks effectively dominate the whole global economy.

3] THE VALUE CHAIN EXTRACTIONS

There is a new battle on unequal exchange – not merely or only in the Production-exchange-Consumption model in physical goods – but in the soft digital arena presence in the infrastructural horizon: Digital generation-exchange-Usage which is surely expropriation and sheer exploitative.

That under an e-commerce environment, digitally neo-imperialism is routed onto a refreshed monopoly-capital commodity supply chain pathway that shall have these ramifications :

Thirdly, the surfing serfs of the world are increasing commodified into digitised slavery to the triad of capitalism, monopoly-capitalism and financialization capitalism where labour is outsmarted by digital machines.

4] THE LABOUR EXPLOITATION

Though transnational corporations are able to use their monopoly of intellectual property to generate huge returns, the share of wealth is not equally distributed amongst labour in Global North.

In Global South, workers are engaged in labour-intensive activities like production, processing, and assembly, and are responsible for producing simple parts in mass quantities. Performing typically in unspecialized factory operations for these TNCs, workers earn only meagre wages.

From the research of Cheng Enfu and Lu Baolin (Monthly Review May 2021), it is found that the proportion of overseas profits within total profits of U.S. corporations increased from 5 percent in 1950 to 35 percent in 2008. The proportion of overseas-retained profits increased from 2 percent in 1950 to 113 percent in 2000. The proportion of overseas profits within the total profits of Japanese corporations increased from 23.4 percent in 1997 to 52.5 percent in 2008, (Cui Xuedong, “Is the Contemporary Capitalist Crisis a Minsky-Type Crisis or a Marxist Crisis?” [in Chinese], Studies on Marxism 9 (2018).

5] CONCLUSION

i) Emmanuel’s premised that unequal exchange characterises the trade relation between the Global North centre and Global South periphery whereby ‘the inequality of wages as such, all other things being equal, is alone the cause of the inequality of exchange.’

iii) With the advance of financial liberalization, finance capital no longer just serving industrial capital, but has far overtaken it. The financial oligarchs and capital rentiers are now dominant; more so, with an ethnocapital assertion in the national banking sector.

iv) World wide, within twenty years since 1987, debt in the international credit market soared from just under $11 billion to $48 billion, with a rate of growth far exceeding that of the world economy as a whole, (Cheng Enfu and Hou Weimin, “The Root of the Western Financial Crisis Lies in the Intensification of the Basic Contradiction of Capitalism” [in Chinese], Hongqi Wengao 7 (2018).

v) As a corollary, Emmanuel had argued that “by transferring through non-equivalent exchange, a large part of its surplus to the rich countries, the periphery deprives itself of the means of accumulation and growth.” Thus, an important implication of Emmanuel’s theory is that a widening wage gap leads to a deterioration of the periphery’s terms of trade, and a subsequent reduction in its rate of economic growth, see Emmanuel’s formulation on his theory.

More MALAYSIAN MANUSCRIPTS

THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF NATION – THE MALAYSIAN MANUSCRIPT

Capitalism has become increasingly nomadic, leaving a trail of social-economic disorderliness and disarrangement in its wake.

The turbulents create Capitalism: crisis to crisis.

CONTENTS

1] INTRODUCTION
2] PETRONAS, PEASANTRY AND THE PROLETARIATS
3] THE DEVELOPMENT OF UNDERDEVELOPMENT
4] CORPORATE CAPITAL, RENTIER CAPITALISM AND THE CLIENTEL CAPITAL CLASS
5] LABOUR, CLASS AND ALIENATION
6] CIRCUITRY OF CAPITAL
7] ECOLOGICAL ECONOMICS

8] MADANI MALAYSIA
9] EARLY MALAYSIAN TRILOGY

[click each bold LINK: goto a MANUSCRIPT]

( click see soft link : goto external sources )

1] INTRODUCTION

Capitalism important trends in recent history:

(1) slowing down of the overall rate of growth;
(2) internationalisation of monopolistic transnational corporations (TNCs); and
(3) emergence of the “capital accumulation process” or financialization capitalism

a) Since the 1974-1975 recession, there is a growth rate slowdown in advanced capitalist economies with impactful economic effects on the poorest countries. Scouting for wider markets to sustain capitalism, a proliferation of corporations – with neoliberalism policies – begins setting up assembly lines across borders in different geographical locations, especially inside developing countries – the Global South – where in 2010, more than half of all foreign direct investment (FDI) went to third world and transition economies. With this strategic positioning in place, and world production dominated by a relatively few transnational corporations (TNC) exercising considerable monopoly power over states and labour, the migration towards the international concentration of capital clearly reflected on the work of Lenin (Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, New York: International Publishers, 1939) and, on the other hand, confirms Amin’s imperialism of generalized-monopoly capitalism and Emmanuel’s unequal exchange under Neo-Imperialism that initiated underdevelopment under monopoly-capitalism through sheer exploitation.

The international concentration of capital invertibly gives birth to international monopoly-finance capital that ensues the emergence of financialization capitalism (see John Bellamy Foster, The Financialization of Accumulation, Monthly Review vol:62, issue 05 October 2010). Financialization capitalism becomes prominent because the TNCs are unable to find sufficient investment outlets for their huge economic surpluses from production, increasingly turn to speculation within the global financial sphere, (see John Bellamy Foster and Fred Magdoff, The Great Financial Crisis (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2009). Even households had become financialized, (see Costas Lapavitsas, Financialised Capitalism: Crisis and Financial Expropriation, Historical Materialism 17 (2009), School of Oriental and African Studies, London and Costas Lapavitsas, The Era of Financialization, Part 3, TripleCrisis). In the country, financialization capitalism is engaging – and entangling – the political economy of Malaysia even during a Covid19 pandemic situation when such capitalism is as contiguous as the virus itself, and became the dominance of financial monopoly-capitalism in the nation, and consequently indebted the country. The urban poors are distressing in debts as reported by UNICEF 2020. The collusion of monopoly-capitalism with clientel capitalism is clearly evident during the acquisition, distribution and Covid19 vaccination processes.

b) Malaysia, within a world economy infused with capitalism, has a neo-colonialism economy past where a particular racial class of succeeding ethnocapital kleptocracy regimes exist in looting national coffers essentially through illicit capital and illegal tradings after her independence from British colonial master, inadvertently perpetuating the consolidation of ethnocapital clientel capitalism.

c) That what is widely referred to as neoliberal globalization in the twenty-first century is in fact a historical shift to global monopoly-finance capital (see Samir Amin imperialism of generalized-monopoly capitalism) taking on a new phase in the globalization of production and finance.

During the 1970s, Malaysia went through an industrialisation initiative though did not employ as many workers as projected, but FDI still created an underdevelopment in monopoly-capitalism environment that inevitably invited these TNCs exploiting precarious labour. Presently, the few TNCs dominating particular industries or in the sectors of electrical and electronic production are confronted with a dialectic of rivalry and collusion: the mobile phone industry and a infrastructural platform, like Google, are prime examples of the control of telecommunication services.

d) There is a “competition” between firms in search for low labour cost (economics term: labour arbitrage) and low-cost production processes (operations management from lean to just-in-time and flexible production), competition for resources and markets (strategic management term: competitive advantages) and marketing principles on product differentiation (varied products with many features and multi-functionalities at various price structures in different marketspheres).

e) During an era of global monopoly-finance capital, financial capital is part of the transnational migration of capital with Information Technology augmenting the monopolisation trends primarily, ( see John Bellamy Foster and Robert W. McChesney, The Internet’s Unholy Marriage to Capitalism, Monthly Review 62, no. 10 (March 2011): 1-30). Increasingly, capital accumulation – real capital formation in the realm of goods and services – has become widely subordinate to finance, including the public healthcare and pharmaceutical providers, housings development through Real Estate Investment Trust (REIT) and others.

This Capital Internationalisation fragments, and weakens, labour organizations, and during the Covid19 pandemic especially in union bursting regionally, including Malaysia specifically.

2] PETRONAS, PEASANTRY & THE PROLETARIATS

a) In the 1970s so it comes about with the discovery of oil and gas, and in a beachhead, the Big Oil controlled the exploitation along the east coast of Peninsular Malaysia, and on the South China Sea off Sabah and Sarawak. The ensuing Neo-Imperialism penetration tilted an economic development paradigm shift: an intensified economic nationalism – culminating with the Guthrie Dawn Raid – a focused ethnocratic inclination that firmly reconstructed the strengthening stronghold of an ethnocapital hegemony of the ruling class. These factors contribute to consolidation of rentier capitalism as was enmeshed in the New Economic Policy (see Jomo 2004, SME 2019). The associated negative ramifications that surfaced perpetuates a burden of privileges in the economy (see Sadhive) that need to be reviewed and restructured, if not, rejected.

b) Concurrently with the energetic endeavour in O&G exploitation is the promotion of the rural community FELDA scheme that was envisaged to forestall possible Urban-Agrarian collaboration and cooperation for revolutionary changes towards a new peasantry-proletariat political economy in Malaysia. Supposedly to be corridor sanitarian to corral rural Malay communities with modern built-in infrastructure – with clinics, schools, roads and bridges – ensuring subsistence dependence with loyalty to the ruling class and the transnational corporation presence in the FTZs and EFTZs (Exports Free Trade Zones) to mop-up precarious labour.

What is acclaimed as “accumulation by dispossession,”(see David Harvey, 2019) with the mass global removal of peasants from the land by Big Farm agribusiness and peasant migration to overcrowded cities yet to encounter dialectical urbanism in capitalist enclaves – from FELDA to FGV – has greatly increased the “reserve” industrial reserve army of labor worldwide, but landless impoverishment culminating in the students’ Baling Hunger Strike.

3] THE DEVELOPMENT OF UNDERDEVELOPMENT

NEP consequential follow through, as stated, is the emergence of clientel capitalism solidified into an ethnocapital hegemony. The subsequent Asian Financial Crisis (AFC1997) and the Global Financial Crisis (GFC2007) tanked the country with a stagnant economy (see Sadhive 2020) – whereby the country is forever mired in debts with profound poverty among rakyat2 and inequality in wealth distribution. To compound the politico-economic landscape is that often we have big budgets, bad debts accompanied by a bad government after the Sheraton Move in 2020, and its aftermath (James Chin 2020; Bridget Welsh 2020).

The country is a case in development of underdevelopment even to her member states so much so that besides stripping the nation’s endowed potentialities under the auspice of GLC’s ownership and control, she also sold out to Big Oil (see also Rob Urie, Oil Imperialism and Monetary Policy, 25/03/2015, counterpunch); the accompanying intra-state political intrigues and deft maneuverings (see James Chin 2020, 2018, 2016; MA63) have yet to subside.

4] CORPORATE CAPITAL , RENTIER CAPITALISM AND THE CLIENTEL CAPITAL CLASS

The political economy of the country thus rests upon an agenda of neoliberalism favouring corporate capital colluding with clientel capitalism locally to connect with Global North monopoly-capital, besides getting entangled under a Ecological-Epidemiological-Economic crisis during a covid19 pandemic.

Linking the conduit of monopoly-capital connections, whether as in Apple Corp. case or HERE, and locally like the Top Grove, is that where financialization capitalism is playing a big role in gourging the financial domain than promoting productivity, research and development breakthroughs nor wider market coverage as under industrialisation.

The implementation of the enthnocratically-administrated National Economic Policy in 1970, (see, selectively: Navaratnam 2020, Zainuddin 2019, Jomo 2005,) where succeeding oligarchy regimes had continued maintaining a clientel ethnocapitalism domination over the working class rakyat2 with 1% of the bumiputera population (see Khalid lse.blog) or about 40,000 ethnocapital political families running and looting – and ruining – the national economy in alliance with Global North monopoly-capital – all in furtherance of neo-imperialism penetration that by now the ownership of a failed state, (see Aliran 2021).

An ethnocratic governance is where representatives of an ethnic group is holding a disproportionately large number of public posts to advance their ethnic group to the disfranchisement of others, (see Winter, J.A., Oligarchy, Cambridge University Press, 2011 and Wade, G., The Origins and Evolution of Ethnocracy in Malaysia, Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore, Working Paper Series 112, April 2009), including enforcng political Islam.

With entrenched political power wielding authority over or directing the behavior of rakyat2, whether in economic, social lives or cultural, the accumulation of capital to the ruling class continues expanding. The political economy of Malaysia needs to be analysed on a class basis because it entails producing, expropriating, and distributing surplus value of rakyat2 labour – by rent seekers in collusion with monopoly-capital.

Under capitalism, the capitalists are dominant at each level of society, the proletarians are dominated at each and every sector of labouring activities. Where class existing at each economic, political, and ideological (or cultural) level, the class relationship to where dominating power ensues could be identified from the stronghold of clientelism and the ensuring political clientel relationship where ruling elites in, say United Malay National Organisation (UMNO) [place] had aligned with economic oligarchs [positions] in accepting rentier capitalism to sustain their hold on [power]. They adopt this clientelism as solicitations for votes at the grassroots level, allowing division-level ruling elites [place] the party patronage [position] and political [power] to effectively partisanizing them and ensuring ground-level officials with whom most voters interacted with are political party loyalists, (see Weiss 2020 and newmandala). The entrenched class even tried to own and control the banking sector just as government linked companies (GLCs) have administrative controls over various land distribution to landless cultivators. GLCs also have their hands full in many financial sectors including the Permodalan Nasional Berhad (PNB) which is the investment arm of the Bumiputra Investment Foundation (YPB) under financialization capitalism :

The web of the Prime Minister Office that is linked to the Prime Minister Economics Affair controlling government corporations, registered companies, trust and saving funds, cooperatives, state authorities, research and development departments

5] LABOUR, CLASS AND ALIENATION

a) The political economy environment encourages local corporate capital colluding with external monopoly-capital towards continuous extracting surplus value from the labouring class. Through the application of global labour arbitrage where, as a result of the removal of or through the disintegration of barriers to international trade, jobs and industries have since moved to nations where labour and the cost of doing business is through workers’ low-pay and where operational costs are inexpensive, respectively, thus creating a rentier capitalism class to enlarge upon capital accumulation by the TNCs.

b) With the introduction of computerisation in the country during 1980s, and the inauguration of the Multimedia Supercorridor in Cyberjaya – more wide spread when the economy engages in e-commerce at the beginning of the twenty-first century – Workers in the digital-economy and zero-hour workers often found themselves underemployed, and alienated whether as the reserve army of labour looking for jobs or searching for unaffordable housing or as unsettling owners on Felda Venture Global’s FELDA plantations.

c) Now with the introduction of a system in infrastructural platform, likely it shall indeed expand and likely prolong the unemployment problems in the country because present education system has not engender nor energise an IT ecosystem to support such high-technology system where the main gainers are the digital lords and digital knights like Telekom’s TM as a monopoly GLC-clientel gainer just as in the pharmaceutical industry the privatised pharmaceutical firm Pharmanagia profited well during the Covid19 pandemic. In the public hospitals, owing to the compradore capitalists greeds and the adoption of a financialization capitalism model, there is an unequal access and inequity healthcare services throughout the country- whether in Sabah or Sarawak. There should be a national initiative towards equity and equality access to healthcare provision, more urgently now with the rollout of Covid19 vaccines, the distribution process could be disrupted by the challenges in the monopoly supply chain, (see codeblue, bridgetwelsh, aliran 2019; see also Jomo on vaccine nationalism and vaccine apartheid).

6] CIRCUITRY OF CAPITAL

a) The chaining to the neo-colonialism economic architecture linking to extractive value chain benefitting Global North monopoly capitalism that encourages penetration of neo-imperialism with financialization capitalism which has gourged national resources is the circuitry of capitalism that indebted national sovereign wealth.

b) The circuitry of capital that tied to Global North monopoly-capitalism by commodity chaining in the acquiring, production and distribution of raw materials into as finished commodities to be channelled to various external marketspace has not endowed, despite urged to aim high by World Bank, the national economy towards wealth creation for rakyat2 but solidify in the country clientel capitalism. In partucular, present ruling regimes are adopting clientel-capitalism to colonialise the minds of the unrepresented destitutes in order to retain and sustain political power yet without much spread effect to be equally shared.

Indeed, the top 1% own 45% of all global personal wealth; 10% own 82%; whereas the bottom 50% own less than 1% according to Credit Suisse Global Wealth Report on the household wealth of 5.2 billion people across the world.

c) In a globalised world, activities are involved in the production of goods and services and later their supply, distribution, and post-sales activities are coordinated across geographical destinations; there are values in these activities because capital follows these processes during circuitry. Global Value Chain (GVC) has generated much inequalities that is dissonance with poverty’s poors with approaches of unequal exchange. Most unfortunately, the GVC world also enhances the dominance of transnational corporations (TNCs), concentrates wealth, represses the incomes of supplier firms in developing countries, and creates many bad jobs (degrading, dirty, dangerous) that demand foreign labour intake with deleterious outcomes for local workers, but if they do protest on working conditions whether through go-slow or collective strikes, union busting by TNCs becomes the directive norms.

7] ECOLOGICAL ECONOMICS

a) Since the accumulation of capital is paramount to the owners of capital, their prime objective is to obtain their returns of investment within a short period so they can accumulate profits faster. As a result, investors do not consider long term impacts of their actions on the environment nor Mother Earth’s biosphere, (see Ian Angus, Earth Science and Ecological Marxism)

b) Marx’s central concepts of the “universal metabolism of nature,” “social metabolism,” and the metabolic “rift” to define the ecological worldview, (Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 3, London: Penguin, 1981), 949; Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 30, 54–66) means that an understanding of ecological economics and ecosocialism development for nation is a necessity towards attaining ecologically Engels.

c) The deforestation of Borneo rich hinterlands with the construction of the Pan Borneo Highway, the radioactive contamination by rare earth Lynas, the suphuric discharge in Mamut copper mine and cyanidation of Raub Australian Gold Mine bear testimonials that human must bear ecosocialism responsibility to our planetary well-being to Mother Earth.

8] MADANI Malaysia

Post-GE15, there is a serial of articles on MADANI economy Malaysia covering The Script on capital accumulation and labour exploitation relations besides other economic elements in The Naratives and critical observations therein with The Conversation. The main components in a Madani Malaysia economic development are covered by various aspects like the vision of a democratic islamic view on politico-economic development as well as the parameters require to execute the endeavour: financial requirements and means to secure them; the approaches including the Targeted Area in Poverty Alleviation Objectives (TAPAO), and the method to implement the PRAXIS, those identifiable constraining factors in deliverance from neoliberal policies as advocated by the World Bank/IMF to the inefficiency in the class-stratified public sector besides the limitations in fiscal tools to minimise debts and will power to restructure the government-link companies and their ensuing odious practices.

The geoeconomic challenges of a Madani economy Malaysia is amplified whilst an alternative community-based organisation based on socialism with a Malaysian characteristic is proposed.

9] Other than the inherent weaknesses of capitalism are examined, the alternative economic model in socialism practice is proposed using US-CHINA case studies in an Incremental Capital Output Ratio analysis.

10] EARLY MALAYSIAN TRILOGY

Acknowledging that human evolution helps us to understand the biological and cultural expressions of these First People, with far-reaching implications for Man’s shared welfare, there is a need on the extension, and explanation, of a Malaysian consciousness towards a national identity, and firming the nation-bonding.

Part I: The Early Malaysians

The oldest evidence of early human habitation in Malaysia was discovered in 2008 when stone hand-axes were unearthed in the historical site of Lenggong dating back 1.83 million years. Also in Malaysia, the earliest discovery of a 40,000-year human skull was found in the Niah Caves of Sarawak, besides new archaeological discoveries in the Lembah Bujang area in Sungei Petani.

Therefore, only by being conscious about the role of various communities – with different ethnic, race and creed – that defines our Malaysian nation can help to challenge power holders who had distorted and reconstructed history based on self ethnocapital class interests by seducing society according to ethnicity, race and religion, (see Lim Teck Ghee 2021, Cheah Boon Kheng 1996).

EPILOGUE

One possible solution to these crises of capitalism, and that is, the demise of capitalism itself.

GLOSSARY TERMS

1mdb Malaysia sovereign fund heisted

AI Anwar Ibrahim; artificial intelligence

agency house British entity acting as an intermediary to merchants or cohort of traders in colonial England

alienation the process whereby the worker is made to feel foreign to the products of his/her own labour or the process of labour and a self consciousness on self-estrangement during the labouring effort

B40 represents the bottom 40% of income Malaysia

black swan an unpredictable or unforeseen event, typically one with extreme consequences

bourgeoisie rose at the end of the eighteenth century, and (in Marxist contexts) the capitalist class who own most of society’s wealth and means of production

bumiputra (Jawi: بوميڤوترا) is a term used in Malaysia to describe Malays and Orang Asli or indigenous peoples of Malaysia or Southeast Asia; officially, it recognised the “special position” of the Malays provided in the Constitution of Malaysia, in particular Article 153

capital wealth in the form of money or other assets owned by a person or organization to further generate higher rates of return to the initial capital outlay thereby creating capital accumulation https://youtu.be/DwyYzewiGh8

capital accumulation is an increase in assets from investments or profits and is one of the building blocks of a capitalist economy (capitalism) where the goal is to increase the value of an initial investment as a return on investment, whether that be through appreciation, rent, capital gains, or interest (that could also be part of financialization capitalism)

capitalism an economic and political system in which a country’s trade and industry are controlled by private owners for profit, rather than by the state

capitalist class the group of people who own the means of production and employ workers

class where the ruling class (bourgeoisie) who own the means of production and the working class (proletariat) who are exploited

class struggle where in any society there is tension or antagonism that requires such conflict to be resolved

clientel capitalism is rent-seeking capital in the monopolization of access to any kind of property (physical, financial, intellectual, etc.) to gain significant amounts of returns without any contribution to society

compradore capitalist an entrepreneur in colonial or THIRD WORLD countries who accumulates capital through acting as intermediary between indigenous producers and foreign merchants

coronavirus capitalism is a particular type of Malaysian corporate capitalism infecting and destabilising the national economy through cronyism and/or ethnocratic empowerment; can transmit transnationally across the South China Sea to the states of Sarawak and Sabah

cronyism the appointment of friends and associates to positions of authority, without proper regard to their qualifications

dawn raid the returning and retaining of British agency houses assets and resources to Malaysia; see Guthrie Dawn Raid

digital labour e-commerce workers

digital transactions seamless system involving one or more participants, where such transactions are effected without the need for cash

economic nationalism favors state interventionism over other market mechanisms, with policies such as domestic control of the national economy, labor, and capital formation

ethnocracy political structure in which the state apparatus is controlled by a dominant ethnic group (or groups) to further its interests, power and resources

ethnocapital where bumiputera is advancing the Malay community with capital to the disfranchisement of others

epidemiological relating to the branch of medicine which deals with the incidence, distribution, and control of diseases

FELDA the Federal Land Development Authority – a Malaysian government agency to handle the resettlement of rural poor and smallholders into newly developed areas to plant, grow and harvest cash crops like palm oil and rubber

FGV Felda Global Venture is the global, diversified and sustainable integrated agri-business corporatized from FELDA settlers’ schemes

FTZ free trade zone: a geographic area where goods are imported, stored, handled, manufactured, or reconfigured and re-exported without subjecting to customs duty

financialization development of financial capitalism during the 1980s to present, in which debt-to-equity ratios increased and financial services (derivatives. hire-purchases, insurance, leasings, rents, digital transactions and interests) accounted for an increasing share of national income relative to other sectors

fiscal stimulus (packages) a government cuts taxes or increases its spending or just gives out any money in a bid to revive the economy and placate rakyat

glc government-link companies

globalization the process by which businesses or other organizations develop international influence or start operating on an international scale

global capital is the interlinking of various investment exchanges around the world that enable individuals and entities to buy and sell financial securities and digital transactions at international level

global labor arbitrage is an economic phenomenon where, as a result of the removal of or disintegration of barriers to international trade, jobs move to nations where labor and the cost of doing business is inexpensive and/or impoverished labor moves to nations with higher paying jobs.

global north refers to those developed societies of Europe and north America with dominance of world trade and politics

global south identifying countries with one side of the underlying global North–South divide, the other side being the countries of the Global North; underdeveloped and developing countries which are not part of global north

global oligopolistic capitalism, in which finance capital has come to dominate worldwide production and distribution

global value chain in a globalised world, activities are involved in the production of goods and services and later their supply, distribution, and post-sales activities are coordinated across geographical destinations; there are values in these chained activities that are not accrued to labour in the producing countries

kleptocracy a government whose corrupt leaders (kleptocrats) use political power to appropriate the wealth of their nation, typically by embezzling or misappropriating government funds

labouring class comprises those engaged in waged or salaried labour, especially in manual-labour occupations and industrial work

landless untitled cultivators and farmers, indebted FELDA settlers and unsettled natives in Sarawak and Sabah

M40 representing the middle 40% of income earners in Malaysia

malay dilemma is the particular question on the dilemmas of many a malay not understanding what are the problems of the malay community that has to be examined and analysed by a Dr. Mohammed Mahathir

means of production also termed as capital good, are physical and non-financial inputs used in the production of goods and services with economic value

monopoly capital greater centralization and concentration of capital by conglomerate of businesses along with the financial domination of industry

neoliberalism market-oriented reform policies through eliminating price controls, deregulating capital markets, lowering trade barriers besides reducing state influence with privatisation in the economy

nep new economic policy initiated in 1970 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

ngo non-government organisations

neo-colonialism use of economic, political, cultural, or other pressures to control or influence other countries, especially former dependencies https://wordpress.com/read/blogs/58770018/posts/264

neo-imperialism using cultural, commercial and/or political power and influence to dominate smaller countries. Neoimperialism is the specific contemporary phase of historical development that features the economic globalization and financialization of monopoly capitalism.

neo-liberalism economics market-oriented reform policies such as “eliminating price controls, deregulating capital markets, lowering trade barriers” and reducing state influence in the economy, especially through privatization and austerity.

oligarchic alliance an international monopoly alliance of oligarchic capitalism, featuring one hegemonic ruler and several other great powers, has come into being and provides the economic foundation for the money politics, vulgar culture, and military threats that exploit and oppress on the basis of the monopoly

pandemic an epidemic of an infectious disease that has spread across a large region, for instance multiple continents or worldwide often as a result of global capital that drove the deforestation for economic activities exposing emergence of new pathogens

political islam the ideology of Ketuanan Melayu Islam (Malay Islam Supremacy)

precarious labour to describe non-standard or temporary employment that may be poorly paid, insecure, unprotected, and unable to support a household

privatisation the transfer of businesses, industries or services from public ownership and or control to private ownership and control.

rakyat folks or ordinary people of Malaysia

rentier capitalism monopolization of access to any kind of property (physical, financial, intellectual, etc.) and gaining significant amounts of profit without contribution to society

rukunegara https://wordpress.com/read/feeds/15271425/posts/2891028545

socialism where there is no ownership nor private-property income, but when labour work for a share of firm’s profits or collect a share of dividends from society’s wealth which is equally shared

supply chain is a network between a company and its suppliers to produce and distribute a specific product or service. The entities in the supply chains include producers, vendors, warehouses, transportation companies, distribution centers, and retailers

surplus value the excess of value produced by the labour of workers over the wages they are paid

T20 represents the top 20% of income earners in Malaysia

tasik utara student movements’ campaign for eradication of rakyat rural poverty

third world countries included nations in Asia and Africa that were not aligned with either the United States or the Soviet Union

transnational an entity going beyond national boundaries or interests; often, the term MNC multinational corporation is used where it is a large organisation incorporated in one country that produces or sells goods or services in various countries. The two main characteristics of MNCs are their large size and the fact that their worldwide activities are centrally controlled by the parent companies

value chain is formed of primary activities that add value to the final product directly and support activities that add value indirectly

zero hour type of employment contract between an employer and worker whereby the employer is not obliged to provide any minimum number of working hours to the employee

	FRIDAY FILES 1… on China’s growth strategy in the…
	SATURDAY SURGE:11/03… on The Big Push – A Little…
	M137 4th – 10… on The Big Push – A Little…
	The Big Push –… on Towards structuring economic d…
	Financial Monopoly C… on Sovereign Debts, Debt Dependen…

Towards The Malaysia Narrative

Study Team on Rakyat2 Malaysia

Tag Archives: Monopoly-capitalism

Developing countries widening investment deficit while in pursuit to achieve Sustainable Development Goals

Financialisation capitalism deepening neoimperialism penetration

Infrastructural Platforms on Marine Cabotage under Netarchical Capitalism

Destined to Debts: descendant to Dependency Development

Capitalism: Crisis to Crisis

EXISTENTIAL ECOLOGICAL EXTINCTION

UNEQUAL BASKING IN UNION BUSTING

NEOLIBERALISM IS NEO-IMPERIALISM

DOMINANCE OF FINANCIAL MONOPOLY-CAPITALISM

THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF NATION – THE MALAYSIAN MANUSCRIPT