The People v The Bureaucrat Capitalist Oligarchy
Tan Wah Piow
Singapore opposition and critics are in despair. The PAP appears invincible. Our collective blind spot has prevented us from recognising the real character of the PAP. A small elite core of bureaucrat capitalists commands and controls the PAP, using the party as the vehicle to serve their exclusive interests. They are the Bureaucrat Capitalist Oligarchy.
The people must expunge this cancer from our body politic to reclaim ownership of the National Pledge to build a democratic, equal, and just Singapore.
Only through popular control of Parliament can the people wrestle power from the parasitic Bureaucrat Capitalist Oligarchy. This struggle is winnable because the PAP’s betrayal of the National Pledge is indefensible.
This struggle is as winnable as when the Singapore people led by the Chinese-speaking masses won independence from the British in the 1960s.
But before we start our journey into the History of Tomorrow, let us unlearn our history, and rekindle the spirit of yesterday.
‘In the forefront – Commemorating the 60th anniversary of the Singapore Barisan Sosialis‘, a book launched on the January 20 2021, is a collection of political statements and speeches from left-wing political parties, organisations and leaders in Singapore from the late 1950s till the 1980s.
At first glance, few Singaporeans below the age of fifty-five would pause to investigate its contents, let alone purchasing a copy. After all, 95% of the contents are in Mandarin. Even if translated, few Singaporeans take an interest in history.
Why is there such scant knowledge about a party which was even acknowledged by the late Dr Toh Chin Chye as having played an essential part in Singapore’s history? Dr Toh was the PAP founder and member of Lee Kuan Yew’s cabinet from 1965 to 1981.
To understand the Barisan, one needs to revisit the broad anti-colonial independence movement in post-war Singapore. The 1940s to 1960s was politically the most dynamic and challenging period in Singapore’s history. Ideologies of the left and the right; communist and anti-communists; workers and employers; anti-colonialists and the British lackeys competed under the British colonial masters’ watchful eyes.
The Chinese speaking masses
In 1961, the Barisan, led by the legendary Lim Chin Siong, was the standard-bearer of the left’s mainstream political movement. Lee Kuan Yew was the Prime Minister of the Legislative Assembly following the 1959 general elections.
After the Second World War, the British establishment, already marginalised by the rise of the United States of America, was under pressure to decolonise. She had to devise an exit strategy to protect as much of their remaining commercial and financial interests in the Peninsula Malaya and Singapore. In the Peninsula, the Malayan Communist Party posed the greatest threat to Britain’s economic interests as tin and rubber revenues propped up the Sterling. In Singapore, the leftist electorally strong enough to form a coalition government was a political threat to British and western strategic commercial, financial and political interests in the region. It was no wonder that many, if not all of those detained without trial, or deported by the British were left-wing leaders and activists.
The Chinese-speaking activists, comprising of students and workers, were the bedrock of the movement whose numbers were tens of thousands. Apart from those from the newly established Nanyang University (Nantah), which started only in 1956, most Chinese activists only had a middle school education. Intellectually, the left’s Chinese speaking intellectuals were equal to their English educated counterparts, as evident In the Forefront articles. Their organisational skills and networking were what made them such a formidable force. Unfortunately, the rules of struggle within the law framework were in English, ensuring that at all stages of the battle for independence, those not fluent in English were marginalised, belittled, and had to rely on Lee Kuan Yew or David Marshall as their conduits.
This cultural domination was the hallmark of the British Empire. Even in defeat, the English language became an indispensable weapon, providing the coloniser with a wider berth to manipulate the eventual outcome to their benefits.
Consequently, most Chinese speaking activists relied heavily upon, and often exclusively, on the small band of English-speaking intellectuals who at times did not treat them as their equals. The British administrators were aware of this dependency. Hence effective and uncompromising English educated left-wing intellectuals were detained without trial in 1951 and 1952 to weaken the movement. The same happened with the Malay radicals in Malaya who were targeted, exiled, neutralized or forced underground by the British during the post-war period.
History could be very different if the vernacular languages enjoyed equal status as English during every constitutional negotiations stage. If that were the case, it would empower those whose feet were on the ground in the fight for independence, but virtually voiceless. For that linguistic empowerment to occur, it would involve a social revolution in mindset. That manufactured sense of superiority had so infected the minds of the colonised that even David Marshall dismissed as a joke when told by Lee Kuan Yew that Lim Chin Siong, already the finest Mandarin orator and leader, could one day be the Prime Minister of Singapore.
Lee Kuan Yew – the ally
It was this oppressive cultural imperialism that made possible for the meteoric rise of Lee Kuan Yew. By1954 Lee, a lawyer with just three years of professional experience, became the most sought after advocate for the persecuted. He wasted no time to exploit this political capital. Even though his duplicitous act of publicly condemning the British for detaining his clients while surreptitiously instigating further arrests had annoyed the British Commissioner in Singapore, the British establishment in London would find such a character reassuring. When Lee launched the PAP in 1954, the leftists and the Communist Party of Malaya’s underground operatives agreed to support him.
It was no surprise that at the 1959 general elections for the Legislative Assembly, the PAP won a landslide victory, taking 43 of the 51 seats, winning 54% of the popular votes. It did not take long before the leftists realised Lee Kuan Yew’s true colours.
Ms Low Miaw Gong (Loh Miaw Ping) a left-wing middle school student activist who was detained without trial for three years by the time of the 1959 general elections recalled in The May 13 Generation (published 2011): “In the general election [of 1959], the left-wing movement mobilised total support for the PAP, and the latter, under the leadership of Lee Kuan Yew promised to release all political detainees once they obtained political power. They pledged that they would not dirty their hands with Lim Yew Hock’s gloves. The PAP won a decisive victory in the May 30 1959 election, but did not keep their word to release all political detainees.” She remained in jail for another four months before she was eventually released. Some of the detainees were released with stringent conditions and barred from political activities.
In the Forefront serves as a valuable time-capsule of the 1960s., preserving the actors’ raw sentiments. There were disagreements between the left and Lee Kuan Yew over the release of political detainees, the terms of the merger with Malaysia, party democracy, self-government, freedom of press, free speech, assembly, the pace of the anti-colonial struggle, and trade union organisations. Their differences were so fundamental that one is tempted to ask in hindsight: why got married in the first place?
End of the marriage
In truth, the marriage was null and void at the point of conception. It was a marriage by deception on the part of Lee Kuan Yew. He led the leftists up his Oxley Road garden path, encouraging them to believe that it was a marriage of convenience for the left to realise their political program for independence.
Once Lee had his hands on the machinery of State, albeit with the British still in control, there was no looking back. The marriage officially fell apart on the 20 July 1961 when Lee expelled 13 left-wing Assemblyman and 5 political secretaries from the PAP. Lee’s coup against the left led to the founding of the Barisan Sosialis. Some researchers estimated that 60 to 80 per cent of the PAP membership left for the Barisan, and all but two of the PAP branches followed.
The 10,000 strong rally at the Barisan inauguration was impressive. Such was the strength of the left that despite the mass arrest under Operation Coldstore on February 2 1963 which robbed the Barisan of its core leadership, the left-wing movement was still able to field 47 candidates at the 1963 general elections, winning 33.2% of the popular votes, and winning 13 of the 51 seats. Lee’s PAP captured 37 seats, winning 47% votes. Though defeated, it was still a testimony of the leftist’s resilence. The viciousness and lies deployed by the PAP during the 1963 elections could match the deviousness of the British colonialists.
How did that resilence of a people collapse within a decade? Why did the Barisan vote share plunged to just 4.7 per cent of the popular votes when the party fielded ten candidates at the 1972 General Elections? The Barisan pulled down its shutters in 1988.
The left-wing movement, which was once the most promising force in the 1960s, was defeated and the Barisan forgotten. Why?
Autopsy of the Barisan
A Barisan’s autopsy will reveal the party’s policy missteps and ideological drifts to extremism after the decapitation of the left by the 1963 Operation Coldstore. The policy missteps include the vacuous call to Crush Malaysia, and characterising Singapore independence as phoney. These policies did not gel with the people who had accepted the separation as a ‘fait accompli’. Likewise, the call to boycott national service conscription by Dr Lee Siew Choh, the Barisan leader, was politically suicidal given that Singapore was no longer a colony. While the 1954 middle-school campaign against conscription had its raison d’etre and enjoyed popular mass appeal because it was the detested Colonialists’ security the youths were supposed to protect, the same could not be said once Singapore attained independence. The period of policy missteps also coincided with the 1966 Cultural Revolution in China. If the Cultural Revolution impacted the streets of Paris, and campuses in the London and California, it too had infected the restless left-wing youths in Singapore. By the time the Barisan recovered from the virus of extremism which bore no relationship to issues affecting people’s livelihood and put forward a progressive Social Democratic manifesto at the 1972 General Elections, it was sadly too little, too late.
While the Barisan ‘self destructs’ as Lee Kuan Yew had described, Lee was studiously reclaiming the left’s fertile topsoil. Once in power, Lee Kuan Yew was quick to claim ownership of the Barisan policies that appealed to the electorate in general and the disenfranchised Chinese-speaking electorates in particular. He stole the policies of the Barisan to endear the PAP to the Chinese speaking masses.
Lee Kuan Yew – stealing the Barisan’s clothes
“We saw no reason why the MCP should have the monopoly of such techniques and organised drives to enthuse the people and involve them in setting higher standards in civic consciousness and the preservation of public property,” said Lee Kuan Yew[pg 322 The Singapore Story].
The left was strong in protecting the welfare of workers through trade unions. Lee responded by establishing the industrial arbitration court, providing the framework for conflict resolutions.
“We shared the view of the communists that one reason for the backwardness of China and the rest of Asia, except Japan, was that women had not been emancipated,” Lee claimed. The PAP embraced the Barisan’s program to ensure equality of the sexes.
The Chinese speaking population regarded the left as champions against ‘yellow culture’ – a term denoting a decadent lifestyle. “This aversion to yellow culture had been imported by schoolteachers from China… And it was reinforced by articles of left-wing Chinese newspaper journalists enthralled by the glowing reports of a clean, honest, dynamic revolutionary China. [Ong] Pang Boon (a minister) moved quickly, outflanking the communists with puritanical zeal. He ordered a clean-up of Chinese secret society gangsters, and outlawed pornography” recalled Lee.
On education, Lee observed “Our most significant programme was to give every child a place in school within a year… We adopted the proven methods of our communist adversaries. As with the mass campaigns, we saw no reason why we should give the MCP a monopoly of such techniques.”. [pg 327 the Singapore Story Lee Kuan Yew].
The same went for housing and public health. It was no wonder that voters shifted their votes to the PAP; they did not desert the values and policies advocated by the left. It was the PAP reverse takeover of Barisan’s values.
The strategic defeat of the National Bourgeoisie
While these may explain the ultimate demise of the Barisan, we need to search elsewhere for an answer to account for the disappearance of the spirit for active political engagement which was once the hallmark of the Singapore people.
The voices of the Chinese-speaking masses, once the most vocal, had not been heard since the late 60s, My investigation starts here.
Although Lee Kuan Yew managed to defeat the Barisan at the 1963 elections, he had not won the Chinese speaking population’s hearts and minds. In post-independent Singapore, the Chinese speaking masses wanted recognition of their mother-tongue, equal employment opportunity regardless of their medium of instructions, recognition of Nantah, and development of Chinese small and medium industries.
For ideological reasons, Lee Kuan Yew would not concede to those demands. He also knew with Lim Chin Siong behind bars; their staunchest supporter was Tan Lark Sye, the Nantah founder and multi-millionaire.
In The Singapore Story, Lee Kuan Yew acknowledged that he had made a mental note of Tan Lark Sye, the multi-millionaire. When a government-commissioned report recommended in 1959 not to recognise Nantah, Tan Lark Sye protested by increasing student intake of the university for the following year. “I made a mental note to deal with Tan at a later date”, Lee Kuan Yew recalled in his memoir. His reason was “we were not then in a position to intervene without paying a high political price”. An increase in Nantah student population would meant for Lee, “great freedom to use the university as the breeding ground” for left-wing activism.
On the 23 September 1963, Lee Kuan Yew revoked Tan Lark Sye’s citizenship. The action against this icon of the Chinese community just two days after the General Elections was more than just personal vindictiveness.
That action was the start of his program to eliminate dissent from the Chinese speaking population. By 1980, Nantah was gazetted out of existence. The Chinese Chambers of Commerce once led by Tan Lark Sye, eventually had to change its name to Chinese Chambers of Commerce and Industries to syn with the PAP program. After decades of relentless discrimination against the Chinese educated, we only hear them through their silence.
The revocation of Tan Lark Sye’s citizenship was the best evidence that Lee Kuan Yew had never intended Singapore to be democratic. If he had, he would face up to Tan Lark Sye’s challenge at an electoral contest as any politician would have done in a democracy.
Tan Lark Sye case is also a reminder that even if the Barisan had travelled a middle path without the missteps and radicalism, the left-wing party would still be hounded into oblivion.
If Lee Kuan Yew were faithful to the constitution, the conditions were there for a healthy two-party system, as in Britain. In the Forefront’s documents provide ample evidence of mature politicians rationally advocating policies, with depths richer than today’s Parliament. I am not suggesting that the Barisan policies were necessarily better. The critical point is to realise that we were once a people with a rich political culture, and we need to recover this heritage.
Locking up the leftists and throwing away the keys, one for as long as three decades were both gratuitous and malicious. That was bad enough, but the real problem was something more insidious than just bad character.
Oligarch and his Network of Control & Command
Democracy was anathema to Lee Kuan Yew not because, as he would argue, it would open the floodgate for the communists to subvert, leading to the government’s overthrown. Democracy was anathema to the man’s elitist impulse, and an obstacle to his quest for absolute power.
Lee Kuan Yew’s extreme sense of destiny and belief in eugenics set him on the path towards Oligarchy. He believed that his intellectual excellence entitled him to claim ownership and political control of Singapore. His destiny was Singapore’s destiny; threats to him were threats to national security.
Oligarchy is a term that best fits the ideological framework of Lee Kuan Yew. It was an ancient form of governance defined as a rule by a small group whose claim to legitimacy is by nobility from birth, wealth, education, corporate, religious, political or military control. It was practised in Italy at the height of the Renaissance, in Florence during the 15th Century AD. Lee Hsien Loong’s use of the term ‘natural aristocracy’ in an interview in 2015 showed his ideological familiarity and approval of the ancient feudal self-serving practice of rule by the elites. “’Without natural aristocracy,” he said, society “will lose out.” As in ancient times, Singapore’s oligarchs nurture aristocrats to buttress their political, military, economic, judicial, administrative, ideological, media, cultural and social control.
To illustrate how this oligarchic rule of a minority entrenches itself in Singapore despite the outer semblance of a democratic state, I turn to the excellent study by Michael Barr The Ruling Elite of Singapore (Published 2014) for the necessary evidence.
In his study, Michael Barr highlighted the importance of Lee Kuan Yew’s 1996 speech when he reminded school principals that the government was running on the “ability, dedication and drive of only 150 people” and, “therefore it has to be enlarged quickly but systematically.” That speech was the “blueprint for producing the elite that has ruled Singapore since independence and which has formed its only fully autonomous network of power,” wrote Barr.
Lee Kuan Yew placed himself at the centre of the Network of Family, the position now held by Lee Hsien Loong. According to Barr, beyond the immediate family are old family friends and close friends. Beyond that layer is “an elite network that is the product of the complex interaction of personal favouritism, academic meritocracy, and willingness and capacity to be socialised into the elite.”
The “inner circles consist mainly of political and administrative leaders (Cabinet Ministers, Permanent Secretaries, SAF officers, CEOs and Managing Directors) in a selection of key ministries, a few key GLCs e.g. Singapore Telecommunications, Singapore Airlines, Neptune Orient Lines, Temasek Holdings and the Government of Singapore Investment Corporations.” Further down the food chain is the “mid-range circles of power and influence straddle a wide range of government and government-linked institutions such as ministries, important statutory boards and most GLCs…”. The “outer networks” which are important for political control but not so central to the elite’s institutional power base “include ethnic communities, trade unions, universities and businesses.”
Such a network extends beyond the realm of legitimate control of politicians in a democracy. Lee Kuan Yew had to breach all the barriers to achieve that level of dominance. To find out how he eventually succeeded – follow the money.
In ancient times, the oligarchs in 15th Century Florence in Italy were wealthy merchants, using their commercial networks to secure aristocrats’ political loyalty. Likewise, Singapore’s oligarchs have to buy loyalty by rewarding holders of high office with huge rewards. It was practised in pre-capitalist Holland to such effect that many from established merchant families would abandon their businesses and bribed their way to secure an office as a means for the accumulation of wealth.
In Singapore’s context, the source of funds come from the public chest. How oligarchs protect their interests could be gleaned from a close examination of the timeline in the legislative changes on inheritance tax and taxation policies on the very rich. If ever there were a mandatory public register of the wealth of all holding public offices, including politicians, CEOs and directors of statutory bodies and semi-government owned enterprises, and members within the network of elites, and their families, the public outcry would be beyond imagination. If Lee Kuan Yew’s net worth at the time of his death were revealed, we would know how the less than 1% lived and acquired their wealth. It would also help the understanding of Singapore politics. In the absence of such a register, we have to extrapolate from the evidence Barr had discovered in his study.
Compensating Ho Ching
Public criticisms of this elite network are so far limited to the exorbitant remunerations for politicians and CEOs of government-linked companies. The most high profile criticism was from Prof Tommy Koh. He criticised the $2 million a year payment to a public company’s CEO as a wicked pyramid when the bus driver earned only $3,000 a month. The secret salary of Ho Ching, the CEO of Temasek, is probably the most popular theme of PAP critics on cyberspace for several years. Criticisms of the elites’ high pay reflect the public moral repugnance of the enormous income gap between the aristocrats and the ordinary folks.
High pay was justified as a disincentive to corruption, and the bait to attract talents. While there might be some basis for such an argument, it had been disproportionately stretched to the hilt that it is no longer tenable. Prof Tommy Koh was spot on when he said running a business service was not rocket science to justify those disproportionally high rewards. All justifications the government gave on the subject, including the excuse for keeping Ho Ching’s pay a secret, were obfuscations and public relations exercises which fail to convince the people of either the high income or the need to secrecy.
Ho Ching is within the inner core of the family network of elites as defined by Barr. She is, therefore, part of the Oligarchy and a member of the ruling class. When the remunerations of other Oligarchy members are not zealously protected, one could only surmise that she is not merely an aristocrat, but a supreme member of the Oligarchy whose legitimacy does not rest on the holding any electoral mandate.
Singaporeans’ obsessions over the scale of Ho Ching’s pay has been festering for years. As ordinary shareholders of any public company, few would bother to enquire the CEO’s pay. Unfortunately for Ho Ching, being the Prime Minister’s wife did not help when you also happened to be the best person chosen to be the CEO of Temasek. The people’s insistence in knowing the real cost of Ho Ching may be the beginning of a popular backlash against the Oligarchy whose privileges and rich rewards are a form of economic expropriation of the people’s savings. On the other hand, the Prime Minister’s obstinacy to put an end to the saga by lifting the veil on secrecy mayalso be due to the risk that the truth could undermine the cohesion of the Oligarchy, especially the support of those further away from the centre core.
Accounting Accountability
Accountability is central to democracy, but a nuisance to the oligarchs. This is their Achilles heel. Meanwhile, junior aristocrats in the outer ring can potentially be restless as they become greedier over time. We can take comfort that at least this is a measure of current Singaporean political awakening.
“Accountability is almost non-existent across senior levels of government,” observed Barr. “In fact, the higher one goes up the hierarchy of governance, and the closer one gets to the Lee family, the less accountable he or she becomes. There have been no attempts to codify or monitor conflicts of interest, and the occasions on which anyone has excluded themselves from anything on the basis of a conflict of interest can be counted on one hand.”
The quest for accountability will strengthen as unease over the oligarghs’ and aristocrats’ rewards and privileges deepen. This conundrum is not going to disappear unless the government concede to those demanding freedom of information. POFMA is only a temporary stop-gap for the PAP to stem out dissent.
The current whinging or intense chattering over the ‘natural aristocrats’ unfairly generous rewards have yet to crystalise into political energy for change. People need to recognise the political nature of that unfairness, that such injustice is not inevitable, and finally the need for change. In other words, as those activists in the 1960s would have said, we need to do political work to raise the people’s consciousness.
The oligarchs would not want the current chattering to boil over to the level of anger as felt by George Bernard Shaw, a well known British socialist and Nobel Prize winner about a century ago :
“I now want to give the common man weapons against the intellectual man. I love the common people. I want to arm them against the lawyer, the doctor, the priest, the literary man, the professor, the artist, and the politician, who, once in authority, are the most dangerous, disastrous and tyrannical of all the fools, rascals, and impostors. I want a democratic power strong enough to force the intellectual Oligarchy to use its genius for the general good or else perish.”
Bernard Shaw was awarded a Nobel Prize in Literature in 1925 for work on ‘idealism and humanity’. I am sure he would be thrilled if Singaporeans adapt his words to their local context. If we change intellectual man to LHL Natural Aristocrats, we get a ready-made charter for a revolution!
Power relationship and Popular Interests
To address the fairness of rewards enjoyed by people like Ho Ching, Lee Hsien Loong, and their relatives and friends in the network of elites, we need to return to basics to understand the exact nature of that social-political relationship between them and the people.
My thesis is that Lee Kuan Yew was ideologically an oligarch, also in temperament and conduct as well. He was a Modern Oligarch, supported by a network of highly paid political praetorial guards with symbiotic links with his centre core.
The power relationship between the people and the Oligarchy is similar to that between powerlessness and an all-powerful dictator. The people’s powerlessness seems immutable, while the Oligarchy is omnipotent.
Under the banner of meritocracy, the Oligarchy embarked on a recruitment drive for talents since 1966. Some selected from humble background were treated as trophies by co-opting and rewarding them with high offices. It was marketing fake egalitarianism in the land of inequality. The Modern Oligarchy is indeed a dangerous political chameleon. It even bastardised Parliamentary Democracy, retooling the system to ensure its perpetual dominance, while giving the Oligarchy a veneer of legitimacy.
The difference between Oligarchs elsewhere and Singapore is this. The wealth of a Russian Oligarch oozes from the ground. The Russian oligarchs use political office, and extra-economic means to gain great wealth by claiming ownership to the oil pumped out of the land.
Singapore is a small island. Except for real estate, there is otherwise little to squeeze out of the internal circulation of goods. The finiancialisation phase of international capitalism in the 1980s benefited Singapore as a financial hub. The political Oligarchs in Singapore were well equipped to reap the benefits, following the American footsteps. The finiancialisation of capitalism was politically destructive enough for the IMF chief economist Simon Johnson to warn Americans in 2010 that “increased power and influence of financial services sector had endangered representative democracy through undue influence on the political system and regulatory capture by the financial oligarchy”. The takeover of the Oligarchy on the island was long over by the time the American sounded the alarms about their own Financial Oligarchs.
By dint of their positions in lucrative public offices, the Oligarchs and their supporting aristocrats receive handsome salaries, large enough to transform once civil servants or MPs into capitalists.
An ordinary Singapore worker aged 25 earning $4500 per month had to work 37 years till his retirement age at 62 to match the $2 million made by Lee Hsien Loong in one year. If this were bad enough, this same worker would need 30 lifetimes to reach what Ho Ching receives in a year, even if her ‘compensation’ were not as high as $100 million. The real issue is not the exact amount paid to Ho Ching or even the inequality, but whose interests do that Oligarchy represent, and how they impacted public policies and subverted representative democracy as in the United States.
The Bureaucrat Capitalist Oligarchy silent coup
My thesis is the Oligarchy collectively are bureaucrat capitalists Their wealth derives from the legal expropriation of the public chests. Their control of all levers of government and determination of public policies, laws and the judiciary empower them to protect and grow their capital. Such privilege is unique only to this class of capitalist, and their interests lie in the protection of this privilege.
When we transpose the warning of IMF chief economist quoted above to the Singapore context, we can understand why the PAP continue to resist transparency. What Oligarchy would legislate for its own demise?
How different is Nicolai Tangen, the millionaire Norwegian former hedge fund manager who is worth US$500 million, and now a civil servant managing the US$1 trillion Norwegian Wealth Fund from Ho Ching? Apart from managing a fund four times larger that Ho Ching’s Singapore $300 billion, his pay of US$672,000 is just around 1% of Ho Ching’s. Nicolai Tangent is a financial capitalist in his own right. He is not a bureaucrat capitalist because he is not part of a Oligarchy exercising command and control over the Norwegian body politic. Although his salary is high by Norwegian civil servant standards, it has not rich that indefensible rate as enjoyed by his Singapore counterpart. Besides, Ho Ching receives a “compensation”, announced Temasek in April 2020. That distinguishes her from Nicolai Tangen “Compensation” – a Singapore euphemism for houmongous rewards – suggests ‘sacrifice’ on the part of Ho Ching. As a defensive mechanism to fend off criticisms, Temasek applies the similar logic as the British colonialists telling American Red Indians in the 17th Century that the Empire did not subtract anything from their land, but added value by taking the land into white men’s ownership.
Opposition MPs has not raise any issue about the silent coup partly because of the blind spot, and also because their attention are diverted to estate management, which ought to be the work of local councils. By transforming parliamentarians who ought to be legislators into estate managers, the Oligarchy deliberately distracts them from scrutinising big issues.
The silent coup by bureaucrat capitalists has yet to be publicly explored by the critics or the opposition parties. In my case, it has been a blind spot because my attention was disproportionally focused on narratives of social control and economic disparity without making a serious attempt to examine political economy and power structure of Singapore. The Singaporean despair over “lack of alternative” is a consequence of the blind spot.
A people’s struggle against the Bureaucrat Capitalist Oligarchy
I started this essay by an examination of 1950 to the mid-1960s as a time of hopes when competing ideas existed, and people were engaged in the dynamic political process.
The silence since the 1960s is not just of the Chinese speaking leftists. It spreads to all, post-independence. The Oligarchy systematically subverts democracy for the benefit of a privileged class of bureaucratic capitalists.
The silenced masses are no longer that of the Chinese speaking, but of the entire Singapore population.
Singapore’s wealth derives from our ability to manage the opportunities generated by the international and regional circulation of capital, goods, services and people. Our success is not because of the negation of democracy by the Oligarchy. It was through the discipline, hard work and creativity of the Singapore people that great progress was achieved, despite the lack of democracy.
The alternative to Oligarchy – the political control by a small, self-serving class of bureaucrat capitalists – is a return to democracy.
A return to democracy where legislators are lawmakers and not estate managers will ensure that senior civil servants and ministers are returned to their place as servants, receiving salaries and not claiming “compensations” for their “sacrifices”.
More importantly, a return to democracy would put the people in command and control of the nation’s destiny. The European model of social democracy is able to deliver a modicum level of social justice principally because it is the rule by the middle class, changing hands periodically from right to left, managing the capitalist system by balancing the capitalist’s interests and the rest of the working people.
The struggle ahead in Singapore is a popular struggle against the Oligarchy so that we can honour and realise the National Pledge to build a democratic, equal and just Singapore, and stop the persecution of those who fought for its restoration.
There is nothing more revolutionary than this humble quest.
Tan Wah Piow
4 Feb 2021
