Methods of Struggle

By batsman 

When RPK says that Malaysians are cry babies, the assumption is that we should do something instead of whining and complaining endlessly. Unfortunately, doing something is easier said than done. Our methods of struggle are poorly developed to say the least. Could this be one of the reasons for the phenomenon of 4 million eligible voters who do not even bother to register and 4 million more who did register but do not bother to vote? Have they lost all hope of making a difference or is it just plain indifference?

Those who still have hope cannot accept that people are just plain indifferent. There is a glaring need to improve our methods of struggle to give hope to those who have lost it. That is why there must be something more organized, more targeted or more determined that can be done than just making broad appeals or castigating the hopeless. 

Let us take a look at some of the methods of struggle currently existing. We are not taking a stand on the issues – just looking at the methods of struggle and hopefully learn from them, so I hope there will be no fools who feel the great urge to comment on the issues. 

The tragedy of Kg Buah Pala highlights some of the methods used by the settlers in their struggle. Just as Hindraf appealed to the Queen of England (if somewhat in a accusing manner) to do something, the leaders of Kg. Buah Pala first appealed (if in a somewhat accusing manner) to the CM of Penang and then to MIC and finally to the PM as their last hope, for the most part not even considering that the law is a very strong factor that may determine the outcome. This tells me that most Malaysians still depend on white knights to come to their rescue, just as PAS appeals to the Agong not to re-appoint the KPN because of his suspected shady connections, while DAP and PKR seem to have lost all hope, or are they just plain indifferent? 

This is not an isolated case. The 8 million eligible voters who voluntarily remove themselves from the process probably depend on white knights and leaders to solve the problems of Malaysia and feel that they themselves have no role to play. In any social situation there will be people who piggy-back on the efforts and sacrifices of others, but when fully half of eligible voters piggy-back on the efforts of the other half to implement a healthy democracy, the load is too great. What could cause this pervasive parasitic mentality? 

To try and understand this, let us look at Farish Noor’s call to re-inject rationale into politics by reviewing the use of “rational choice theory, structural or functionalist analyses, etc.” and coming up with new paradigms which can explain what is currently happening in Malaysia. 

Rational choice theory looks at things from the perspective of the individual while structural and functional analyses ignore the individual altogether and pretends to look at things from a social needs perspective that somewhat takes the individual into account. In all cases the individual is divorced from his community in the analysis. 

I believe this has been going on for a few centuries now. Since the onset of capitalism (maybe even before), the individual has been increasingly divorced from the community. I believe this to be unnatural to the human condition. While the emphasis is placed on the individual to be a more efficient, creative and productive cog in the machinery of capitalism, while the community (whether in the form of the family, tribe, gang, trade union or even religious order) is considered more of a nuisance or even a threat to the dominance of capitalism, the more unnatural human society becomes and the more artificial human behavior becomes. 

In a few words, the more developed and civilized human society becomes, the more artificial it also becomes. It is this artificiality that creates insurmountable problems in terms of human social organization. And this artificiality pushes humans to try and mould themselves in the image of the new social order against the grain of evolution. At best, even if one considers this to be part of the process of evolution, it is millions of years of evolution against a millennium or 2 of socio-economic development. This still makes it largely artificial. 

My contention is that if we have to be artificial, we might as well make it a well reasoned artificiality rather than an artificiality blindly imposed by economic pressure or development. The sad part is none of our universities or academia is equipped to teach philosophy or even critical thinking to help this process along. We teach mainly practical things such as engineering or accountancy so we may have employment and become employees. 

We now settle on one of the great lies of democracy. Democracy purports to give power to the people, but in effect if people are reduced to individuals who have no connection with each other with little or no community ties at all, the individual vote is a drop in the ocean unless there is a close contest, and a close contest means that both sides have started to become some sort of tribe or community at odds with each other, with shared values and common identities on each side. 

This is where the phenomenon of piggy-backing asserts itself. People try to get on with their lives and with their own personal concerns and problems. The community is no longer a big part of their lives. They can do without it. Great wealth is left to those who chase after it obsessively (often in a criminal manner) – it is no concern of the individual who after all has his own problems to occupy his attention and his own little wealth to chase after. Power is left to those who bother to fight for it or to the political party that is most unscrupulous, most repulsive and most greedy. 

Bertrand Russell observed that even modern democratic governments tend to accumulate the absolute power of Hobbes’s Leviathan and often in excess of it. Capitalism accumulates and concentrates wealth as never before. It is illogical to expect that power is not concentrated in the same manner. Any contrary expectation flies in the face of the fact that a democratic USA is the greatest and biggest super imperialist power that the world has ever seen. 

Society has been reduced to a loose gaggle of individuals by capitalism and they are no match for the power of the state that capitalism controls. 

How does this affect us in Malaysia? We are not immune from the social, economic and political trends that ravage the world. We have also been reduced to a loose gaggle of individuals (more so in the cities than in the villages). 

Unfortunately, unlike in the west, which hangs on to their grass roots institutions for dear life (the UK alone pays out 1.2 billion pounds sterling a year to finance quangos as a checks and balance factor in their democracy), we Malaysians appeal to white knights to solve our social and political problems. 

In the meantime, the greediest, the most unscrupulous, the most corrupt individuals are one step ahead and form into racist parties or criminal gangs to corner and monopolise political power. They use tribal or racist ideology fooling some to believe they belong to a virtual community of a master race, corrupt judiciary dispensing oppressive laws and police who only know how to victimize the victims and look the other way when criminal gangs run riot to maintain themselves in power. Even some S. American banana republics seem to be looking better than us at this stage. 

We are at present loose gaggles of individuals facing criminal gangs, paid thugs, organized racist political parties and biased civil service. We need to build up our communities and organize ourselves for strength. 

We need to go back to basics, to form ourselves into healthy communities once again and to organize grass roots institutions as a form of struggle, not just appeal to white knights. We need to make the law a sacred part of our fight for justice even if the holders of power corrupt it beyond belief. We need to build strong dependable institutions as part of the struggle for decency and not depend on finicky leaders who can be bought over at any time. We have to learn to work with each other and depend on each other even if our individualistic egos tend to drive us apart. 

Only when the democratic foundations are strong can the democratic state be strong. Only when the democratic institutions and organisations are strong and the people see themselves as healthy communities can those who have lost hope regain their hope. We need to rebuild healthy social, community and political lives and not just mainly depend on our economic lives. 

We need to push forward the struggle using institutions, organisations and the law supported strongly by the community as well as individuals and not depend on finicky individuals alone (which is really a no-win method). 

We need to become a real community not a virtual one. We have a long way to go yet.