The developmental state in Malaysia is an intentional raced capitalist project juxtaposed against the racialised colonial/imperial capitalist world system often operating without intentionality in advancing processes of accumulation. This provides a pathway to address the conundrum of a developmental state seen as not always acting in ways that are subservient to the West, but simultaneously an imperial subject under the domination of imperialist states.

This should be contrasted to a country like Singapore, which intentionally aimed to cement itself into the global processes of accumulation.

The alternative is to view [race-based affirmative action] as replicating the racial logic of colonial capitalism, portrayed as a ‘hand-me-down’ from British colonialism. This view tends to negate the agency of Malay nationalists and cannot explain the broad-based support of non-elite Bumiputeras for the project, other than to implicate them as manipulated agents not acting in their own self-interests. It reproduces the orientalist discourse that assigns ‘irrationality and barbarism’ to non-elite actors (the colonised) and ‘rationality and civilization’ to elite actors (the coloniser). Furthermore, scholars who equate the racial logic of Bumiputera capitalism with the racial logic of British colonialism usually embed a post-racial outlook that renders all forms of racial intervention problematic. The Bumiputera agenda is misconstrued as a racial constraint hindering the full potential of Malaysian capitalism – in other words, a racial programme operating in a national/global economy that has transcended race…The modernity of global capitalism is something to be aspired to, its racial underpinnings not criticised or interrogated. Ultimately, such a post-racial conception fails to articulate the developmental state as a national capitalist project that has attempted to contend with ongoing racialisation of the national/global economy.

Relating to this, there’s this common sentiment from the petty bourgeois to always have your eggs in multiple baskets. What this means is that the people lack any sort of national allegiances, and are quick to move or try to relocate to the West especially. This is also enabled by the government’s own “openness” to foreign trade and investment, liberal visa policy, and established structures incentivising studies abroad, a sort of tradition started by the British wanting pliant feudal administrators and capitalist sycophants.

Many of these petty bourgeois feel unjustly treated by what they see as political machinations of a government elite, who would happy offer government contracts to Bumiputera owned companies but not them. This all makes the narrative of discrimination very compelling, fuelling a supposed brain drain. Coupled with Bumiputera only colleges and university quotas, many Chinese (and in some parallels, Indian) people especially feel cheated in a system that seemingly does not seem to care about them. But this also fuels sentiments that immigrants come here to make a “quick buck” and leave if things go bad.

To reclaim the place of Japanese imperialism in the retelling of Bumiputera capitalism, a myth surrounding the British colonial policy of divide and rule must be demystified, broadly invoked in public discourse as a strategy of creating racial hostilities and subsequently replicated by post- colonial governments to maintain power. While the British colonial policy had certainly segmented labour by race, it was in fact motivated by precisely the opposite reason, i.e. to reduce racial hostilities and maintain political order and stability so that capital accumulation could take place – a common colonial justification for conquest and control.

The deconstruction of race must hold this fact close, because ultimately the root causes of racial difference is itself capitalism and imperialism.

To resolve capitalist contradictions, the developmental state had to continuously adapt its gender strategy to complement the racially ordered system of capital accumulation amid changing power dynamics in the global economy. With the receding power of the British empire in Southeast Asia, coupled with the growing influence of the United States–Japan alliance in the region, Malaysia had to contend with massive direct investments from Japan from the mid-1980s, set off by an appreciation of the yen after the Plaza Accord in 1985. The gendered incorporation of rural Malay women as low-wage workers into Japanese multinational corporations operating within the ambit of export-oriented industries is well studied – the share of Malay female wage workers (as a percentage of total Malay female employed) significantly increased from 25.4% in 1970 to 50% in 1980.

Engagement with the global capitalist economy leads to ripple effects. Japanese investment in Thailand especially was critical for its pivot to export-oriented industrialisation, but failed to create vast employment opportunities. Before it was the Korean War that boosted the Malayan tin mining and rubber plantation economies.

In tandem with changing gender strategies, the developmental state also facilitated the transition of Bumiputera capitalism from a project predominantly focused on race to one where religion was more tightly hinged. At the onset of the NEP, Bumiputera capitalism was moored to the material objective of recapturing ownership and control of the colonial-inherited economy. While lauded as an objective, it inevitably meant taking over foreign corporate entities and acquiring their Western secular practices and business ethos. The ‘recaptured’ material domain became a point of contention as it did not address the moral/religious dimensions of economic life.

…However, what started out as a political anxiety around Islam has consequently taken on a self-sustaining economic rationality. The expansion of Malay wealth brought about by the NEP entails mobilising the savings and consumption of Malay-Muslim households for further rounds of capital accumulation, which increasingly has to be attuned to religious ethos and sensibilities. When ‘purified’ capital is mobilised under the capitalistic frames of the NEP, it also contributes to the growth of an Islamic economy perceived to be different from Western capitalism. In other words, religion provides cultural substance to the racial logic of constructing difference with Western hegemony while mobilising around the racial particular of Malayness in which Islam was central.

This fundamental misunderstanding of Islam in current society from both the Islamic and “non-Islamic” sides (which take on racial and class divisions), leads to scaremongering about turning into the Taliban’s Afghanistan or even Iran, while at the same time pushing against Western cultural consumerism and degradation of moral values. Both fail to capture the economic underpinnings of these developments.

One interesting quirk is that the “Islamic fundamentalists” (as described by the Chinese middle classes and Western media), constantly warn about the plight of Australian aboriginals and Native Americans in the US or even the Malays in Singapore. Because for the “fundamentalist”, Malay-Muslims having been economically sidelined in colonial-capitalism, fundamentally feels under attack from what they see as foreigners even til today. Mainstream Malay-Muslim identity is based on this claim of indigeneity through colonial trauma, of being ‘Bumiputera’ even if under UN definitions they are not Indigenous with a capital I.

by foregrounding the historical specificity of racial restructuring of a national capitalist project in Malaysia, it recentres race and colonialism in how we understand the developmental state. I provide a more nuanced reading of the ‘racial’ in raced capitalism encapsulated in such a project, reclaiming the developmental model and racial logic tethered to Japanese imperialism. This was adapted by Malay nationalists and turned into a counter-hegemonic capitalist endeavour to reverse the suppression of Malay/Bumiputera capitalism under British colonialism.

For a lot of politics, they disregard the economy. For a lot of economists, they disregard the political. Even in the study of the political economy, many rarely present the radical analysis of the “whole” that Marx and Engels argued for.