Kind of funny that there are those in West that still cling onto the notion that Chinese production is inferior while over here people say if you want shit done you call China lol

Nationalisation might be one of their few good proposed policies along with land reform.

And that’s all that is needed. A complete reformation of the relations of production will have a profound effect in elevating the productive forces.

Your critique on the manifesto seems lazy because most bourgeois democracies and their parties over-inflate and exaggerate in their manifestoes. Doesn’t say much about their class character.

Many things can happen when a large mass movement built on consensus is in charge.

I am not saying the EFF is one either, but the critique you bring forward doesn’t showcase your points well.

Bringing back military conscription? For what?

It is answered in the quote you mentioned.

offering life skills and discipline.

Teaching the masses life skills is GOOD.

Military conscription (which in the cited quote doesn’t necessarily imply “conscription”) is not only about invading other countries or protecting sovereignty. That’s colonizer talk.

The army can help with a lot of people’s projects, mobilizing resources for the betterment of the country. Furthermore, most places that have conscription also have options to participate in other governmental bodies, like firefighting. It is not strictly just into the army.

Furthermore, all AES countries have mandatory military conscription.

The countries that do not have military conscription are often those tainted with liberal individualism, prioritising the rights of the “individual” rather than the service to the community especially wrt to Global South countries.

many of which have very little to do with Marxism.

May I get specific examples of which policies “are not relevant” to Marxism? And I want something that is unequivocally and undeniably for the empowerment of the comprador classes and Capital.

PKK and Imperialism https://en.rnp-f.org/2015/03/24/pkk-and-imperialism/

💯

However I’d like to add your analysis a bit. Excerpt from my other comment again:

the material harm NGOs cause to people are two-fold.

On a societal level, they aim to circumvent and build alternative structures to the current government and thus without the “democratic accountability” that these governments have to face (even if they are bourgeois dictatorships, they still have to manage the contradictions within society to remain in power). This can be seen in many colour revolutions that have occurred the past 50 years.

They also introduce and import foreign concepts, what I call “academic lib phraseology”, without the democratic consultation and “diffusion” to the masses. The masses here aren’t dumb when they realise that these NGO liberals speak the same as any other NGO liberal in other countries or those in the West. This is not a coincidence.

On a local level, despite their claim to the contrary, they actually maintain and sustain the oppression of LGBT people. Since they do not address the material basis of the oppression and are funded by foreign elements, their only justification and purpose for existing IS the existence of the oppression of LGBT people in the targeted Global South country.

Why would an LGBT rights NGO founder want to achieve LGBT liberation? The founder would lose their only source of income and their entire career!

This is similar to when the labour aristocrats in a trade union stops representing the interests of the rank-and-file.

This also means that the NGOs feature the worst of the liberal activists, who are often groomed by the West in the first place through their scholarship programmes. They are filled with opportunists and careerists, because to them, civil society is their way of climbing the corporate ladder and for their “professional development”.

Removed by mod

Read this response first if you want full context.

Before I start, I want to preface this by saying that even though it may not be obvious to foreign observers, believe me when I say that the rhetorics and contentions you all have has already been extensively discussed and debated by anti-imperialists in the Global South. It may not be in English, it may not be available in neat and easily read blogs, essays and articles, but it has been discussed and taken into account.

Have a little faith in the Global South, okay?

Starting with the first article, it’s a reddit post. I am not bothered enough to even begin to engage with that. It’s reddit.

Second article - okay so some random guy swooped in and said some wrong things about sexuality and got barred as a result.

To chalk this incident up to the actions of one rogue counsellor ignores systemic issues of inadequate sexuality education, the group [Pink Dot SG] added.

Okay so no one here denies discrimination exists and sex education is lacking. What I am against is the use of this unforunate circumstance for psyops and NGO infiltration. We don’t need an NGO to say that we lack good sex education policy.

Third article - that is all completely true.

Fourth article - random culture war bullshit that was imported into Singapore by the West in which the article itself notes that the chances of any law proposal coming into fruition amounting to zero.

Fifth article - this is where it gets more serious and has some interesting stuff I want to highlight.

Firstly let’s talk about the website. “Express your heckin’ LGBTQ+ identity.” Ok some random company that profits off LGBT suffering by selling LGBT themed pins and apparrel and then funnels it into some other LGBT NGOs (more on this below). Yeah, seems about right.

I can talk a lot about the individualization, commodification and liberalization of “LGBTQ+” “identity” and it’s harmful impact on Global South gender and sexual diversity but I’ll not mention it here so it doesn’t lead to an essay.

On the article itself :

First few paragraphs, nothing of use, just the event that the first article covered and a high school level statistics course I guess.

It then discredits some pop science transphobic authors which I agree with.

The article mention two authors which is supposed to indict Singapore’s LGBTphobia because they were invited into a webinar?? Ok so some people thought these frauds had something valuable to say, doesn’t really signify much about the quality of life of LGBT people in Singapore.

And then it tries to scaremonger about “misinformation”. Hmm where have I heard this term before? Oh right, western liberal circles.

The article is very liberal because it reeks of the short-term sightedness present in all liberals, whether Amerikan or their comprador counterparts. We have been suffering with “misinformation” for 500 years under colonization and imperialism.

I do not care about the article’s scaremongering and pathetic elaboration on “muh SCIENCE!!!”. The East doesn’t really treat Science as some sort of sanctimonious and immutable ideology to bully others for wrongthink. That’s why traditional medicines still exist.

The normalisation of misinformation — including fake news and fake science — can have destabilising effects on society. We’ve seen this happen in the US with the Trump administration — fake information about the pandemic led to a weak response and loss of public trust in healthcare institutions, and made the US the country with the highest COVID-19 death rates among advanced nations.

And the article’s whole tangent on vaccines misunderstands the entirety of the US situation aswell. Perhaps the history of colonized people and US culture where large vaccination drives, quarantines and mask-wearing cultures isn’t the norm may lead to many Yankees resisting when the government forces people to do it. It is not just evil Trump ignoring ScienceTM.

In the section about Quentin Van Meter, this paragarph stood out to me:

Local transgender support organisation TransgenderSG has compiled a useful and robust list of corrections to the fake science shared by Quentin Van Meter during his webinar. We recommend reading it to understand the full scope of corrections.

Ok that’s an interesting NGO I never heard of before. Let’s look at their website.

So a random website made by some volunteers. Seems innocent enough.

Then I look at their collaborations.

On the first home page:

17 March 2021: Read the press release on the Universal Periodic Review report that we co-submitted with Sayoni and the Asia Pacific Transgender Network.

Ah the infamous Asian Pacific Transgender Network.

Some of their sponsors include the Robert Carr Fund and the Global Equality Fund.

Robert Carr Fund gets its money from:

I searched the Global Equality Fund and found it on www.state.gov of all places. Oh very nice.

It’s nice that Google also funds APTN to really drive home that the US is a dictatorship of Capital.

The rest of these orgs:

TheProjectX - an NGO that wants to legalize sex work lol. No further comment.

The T Project:

The founder and director “participated in the U.S Department of State’s International Visitor Leadership programme in 2018” and also “ILGA-Asia”, oh you mean the sister branch of ILGA-Europe. (ILGA-Asia suspciously does not list any source of their funding…)

and ILGA World

Their Co-Secretary General: “Mexican Microfinance Institutions” (LOL), “MacArthur Foundation”, “EXXON MOBIL” <-- now that’s funnier.

Their other Co-Sec General: “Global Interfaith Network on Sex, Sexual Orientation, Gender Identity and Expression (former Co-Chair)” the org in which has funding from:

Oogachaga has this to say about their own website:

Yes, the NGO is sponsored by the High Commission of Canada and is transparent about it.

The jokes write themselves. It’s like a russian nesting doll of NGO and Western fuckery.

The book ‘The Aware Saga: Civil Society and Public Morality in Singapore’ also has information on how the christian right managed to ban official sex ed from ever being able to acknowledge or properly educate on gender and sexual minorities.

Sex education is an important issue that gets hijacked by “civil society” that politicizes and polarises the people. I have not read the book and it’s use of “civil society” in the title discourages me from ever touching it.

They constantly call LGBTQ foreign interference yet allow anti-LGBTQ talking heads into the country.

I’m sorry that Singapore isn’t an Orientalist Authoritarian Despotic State that will restrict anyone from entering if they are speaking anything that someone else would disagree with. (And this isn’t even the case - it’s just a random online webinar.)

It is argued that anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric is entirely imported (which I agree) but seemingly when I say that pro-LGBTQ+ rhetoric also comes from the West it is somehow belittled.

I expect that for the comprador liberals who doesn’t even know about their own colonial history but I am a bit dejected that this same rhetoric is also conveyed in an “anti-imperialist” site.

Perhaps it is a means to divide the people and cause instability like I said in my previous comments? So yes, I will call it western cultural imperialism when Christian sodomy laws were enacted that restricted Global South cultures to the Eurocentric gender binary but I will also call it western cultural imperialism when these liberal NGOs faff about “queer theory”, “intersectionality” and “lgbtqia+ rights”,.

This is because it all inevitably came from European Enlightenment epistemology (which itself stems from Western Philosophy), reeking with self-centered individiualism that can not facilitate and forment lasting gender and sexual liberation.

We survived 500 years of onslaught and invasion. We will develop our own path to liberation.

I recognise that life is, perhaps, awful, but that won’t make me give colonizers an inch when they WILL take the whole mile.

I wrote these two long effortposts with the acknowledgement that it may just be disregarded as a slight of hand and all my time invested here may just be wasted. But I’ll say this: this perspective I am saying right now isn’t fringe. It may not be directly structured into the sentences I formulated in these two posts, but it is more common than you think. I’m going to take a long break after this. This has exhausted me.

So there’s this popular Ex-Muslim youtuber that I used to watch a while back.

They became a raging Zionist.

Average “Ex-Muslim” Westerner be like.

They make some noise about it sometimes but when you country is fully intertwined with Global Capital liberal media tends to look the other way.

the size of Italy

Speaking of which…

On the top right there is a drop-down menu with the letters “KP”. If you click on it you can choose English instead.

The colour for Malaysia is outdated. North Korea-Malaysia diplomatic relations were cordial in the past but worsened in 2017 after the assassination of Kim Jong-nam in 2017 in KLIA. Relationships soured further in 2021 after Malaysia expedited a North Korean businessman to the US in contradiction to north Korean wishes.

Further information by an official Malaysian government website. Another Malaysian site detailing the timeline of events.

Here is north Korea’s official response by their Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

It is important to note however the Malaysian establishment is in favour of positive diplomatic relations with North Korea. Friendly relations is especially advocated by Mahathir, a member of the traditional Malay-Muslim ascendant national bourgeoisie that governed as PM from 1981-2003 and 2018-2020. He did leave remarks that he wanted to improve relations with North Korea when he was in power. However after the Sheraton move, and subsequently 2 governent reshuffles and the 2022 election, diplomatic relations with North Korea is stuck in limbo without any sign of change in the short term.

In terms of national ideology and foreign policy, North Korea and Malaysia have more in common than differences. To speak of it in a Malaysian perspective, Malaysia was one of the first member of ASEAN to normalize relations with communist countries. Despite being a middle-power state, it has more than 111 diplomatic missions in 85 countries, with a passport holding visa-free travel through 168 territories.

Although the current circumstances is unfortunate, I don’t doubt that eventually Malaysia-North Korea relations will warm up again - especially with the decline of US-led Western hegemony.

Personally, this whole situation is a bit saddening as I did plan to visit North Korea one day - and tour guide prices weren’t too pricey (when they were running).

Hello, how’s everyone?

Went and touched some grass for a month.

If everything goes well the next few weeks, I’ll have a lot of free time the next few months for some effortposts on SEA history and politics.

One I especially wanted to do for a while was comparing South Africa vs Malaysia, specifically comparing the racialised class structure of their economies.

This is because in my preliminary research I found out that the the South African BEE (Black Economic Empowerment) programme (for all it’s faults) were inspired by Malaysia’s NEP (New Economic Policy) that aimed to redistribute wealth among the racialised classes in Malaysia. I wanted to explore more on that and also assess the failures of the aforementioned policies in actually transforming the racialised economic base of both countries (and improve my understanding of their histories as well).

Stay tuned for that.

If anyone has any material relating at all to this, by all means share it with me.

Instead of seizing the gravity of the caste question and facing it, the communists took shelter under Marx’s metaphor of base and superstructure, as though it was incontrovertible.

I think atleast CPI(M) have shown a willingness to adapt Marxism to the current Indian material conditions. One of the articles I linked in the other comment mentioned how:

Perhaps the most important retrograde development is that the entire caste system has become hereditary and transformed itself into a crystallized prejudice structure. Although it is still a superstructure of the relations of production, it has over the centuries acquired a measure of autonomy, and in some ways behaves independently of the relations of production. This is the most distinctive characteristic of class relations in India today. This is also the single most important social reality that the left forces spearheading the class struggle in India must weave into their strategy.

In their 23rd political resolution (latest), one of their clauses mentioned Casteism specifically:

Abolishing of the caste system and all forms of the caste oppression; special measures to ensure basic human rights to the SCs and STs; enactment of central legislation for special component plan for SCs and an ST sub-plan with an empowered committee to monitor its implementation; protection of Constitutional and legal provisions for adivasi rights to forest lands, livelihood and culture; enactment of law to provide reservations in the private sector; filling up of all backlogs of jobs in reserved categories. Strict implementation of the abolition of manual scavenging; strict punishment against practices of untouchability; strict implementation of the Forest Rights Act; caste census to enumerate OBCs.

The national bourgeosie is rightfully scared of Communism holding sway by the masses once again that would rid all their attempts at keeping us divided (racialism and communalism).

The last thing they want is comprehensive land reform and destruction of all feudal vestiges in Malaysian society which includes the parasitic monarchy. (Insulting the monarchy is constitutionally illegal.)

Also I have to laugh at anyone describing Malaysia as a democracy - we literally don’t even local council elections. It was abolished to contain communism.

If anything Malaysia was always democratic if we follow liberal polsci definitions (multiparty elections). Do they even know that the COALITION that ruled for 50 years consisted of the United Malays National Organisation (UMNO), Malaysian Chinese Association (MCA) and Malaysian Indian Congress (MIC)?

POC representation in my coalition? What a wholesome liberal democracy!

This act betrays the hope of Malaysian people that the new government under Anwar Ibrahim will be more democratic, fair, intellectually and culturally open than all the previous eras.

This is not surprising in the slightest. The material basis and class antagonisms have not been removed. The so-called centrist unity government we have now dug their own grave and have to entrench themselves in racialist and anti-communist rhetoric to maintain in power.

Can’t wait for the urban liberals to come and defend the guy because he speaks “eloquently” and “professionally”. (Just kidding, I don’t have to. They already do this.)

Oh of course. I assume that the diaspora still has some remaining casteism but I just mean in terms of like political organization it is not a relevant factor over here.

An issue that is prominent in Malaysia specifically is Tamil dominance in politics and of course just general race-based and communal issues. Especially with regards to other Indian minorities like Malayalis, Punjabis, etc.

And I don’t really expect anyone to know much about Malaysian history, that’s all fine.

Malaysian Indian history especially is neglected in the literature as well.

Personally, I have complete respect for my Indian comrades. It was the Indian proletariat that lead the struggle for labour unionisation and became prominent union leaders in our history.

I have heard about this criticism of the CPI(M) before.

Is there any specific statistics or articles that speak on this matter?

Because I know for a fact that there are materials on the CPI(M) website that mentions caste.

CASTE AND CLASS IN INDIAN POLITICS TODAY

and

CLASS STRUGGLE AND CASTE OPPRESSION : INTEGRAL STRATEGY OF THE LEFT .

A relatively more recent article on this subject: Caste and the CPI(M) in Tamil Nadu

This was from a quick online search I did months back when I was curious about the topic.

Do you believe that the party has not adequately addressed the issue despite all this?

Is it a case of not walking the talk?

I am very curious, because back in my home country, caste among Malaysian Indians is considered quite antiquated. From what I understand, and know, it is not as pervasive as in the past, and perhaps the nature of the political economy here destroyed any material basis for caste oppression specifically.

Yeah it’s really weird. The British were inventors of a vicious form of financial capital that is holding the whole world hostage. A cultural tradition of short-term predatory lending and “indirect rule” that controls colonized populations through false rulers.

And we focus on… a local town somewhere just acknowledging their history and holding a community event that has been done for the last 700years.

This is exactly my thought process. I really don’t see a big deal here.

I didn’t put forward an argument in my original comment because I genuinely thought there was nothing much to argue about.

It’s so trivial.

Let the people have fun and participate in community events.

It is, from what I gather, a small town anyways. It will affect like, what, 0.0001% of the entire population?

I don’t really see a problem with this to be honest.

Just a quirky local tradition.