James Puthucheary on Malayan socialism

Born in Kerala, India, James Puthucheary moved with his family to Malaya at a young age and was educated at Johor English College. In 1943, he signed up as a youth member of the Indian National Army under Subhas Chandra Bose and left Malaya to fight for Indian independence on the Indian-Burmese border. Influenced by Indian communists and introduced to the works of Marx,Footnote ⁹ on his return he joined the left-wing, anti-colonial movement in Malaya, first through his membership of the Anti-British League and subsequently by joining the University Socialist Club and the PAP.Footnote ¹⁰ Between 1951 and 1963 he was detained three times; most notably in his period of detention between 1956–1959 he authored the first major analysis of the Malayan economy, Ownership and Control in the Malayan Economy (1960).Footnote ¹¹

Puthucheary is today best remembered as an economist who pioneered the study of ownership patterns in the Malayan economy. Yet as a reading of Ownership and Control in the Malayan Economy shows, political questions were vital to his enquiry, in particular the problem of communalism.Footnote ¹² Communalism, which was a central concern of the University Socialist Club and the English-educated socialists around the PAP, was defined in Malaya by the overlapping of economic and communal divisions, commonly understood as the division between the urban Chinese and Indian trading communities and the rural Malay peasantry. Yet at that time a deeper economic understanding of communal differences was lacking on the Malayan Left.Footnote ¹³ A notable influence on Puthucheary were the 1956 household income surveys carried out by Goh Keng Swee in Singapore. This furnished Puthucheary with clear evidence that poverty, which the report found to be severe in Singapore, could not be ‘fit easily into communal moulds’,Footnote ¹⁴ with twice the percentage of Chinese households suffering from extreme poverty in Singapore compared to Malay households—a fact which suggested that poverty was not reducible to communal divisions. On this basis Puthucheary concluded in Ownership and Control that ‘Exploitation and poverty are class problems, not communal problems’,Footnote ¹⁵ and that they couldn't simply be dealt with by communally driven solutions because ‘Capitalists and traders do not suffer from any communal bias.’Footnote ¹⁶ Wealth distribution had to be understood as a problem of the total economic process.

In his analysis of patterns of ownership and control, Puthucheary then came to challenge the standard communal understanding of the Malayan economy as controlled by a rich Chinese trading class. Rather, he argued, the prominence of the Chinese was an illusion which concealed the fact that it was the foreign-owned agency houses which controlled the wealth and structure of the Malayan economy, leaving the Chinese as middlemen. Puthucheary argued against the scapegoating of the Chinese community for exploiting the Malays, pointing out that they were merely the more visible face of existing relations of colonial capitalism.

Nevertheless, at the time he was writing Ownership and Control, Puthucheary was also considering strategic questions of socialist politics in Malaya. As shown particularly by two texts from the period—‘On the Future of Socialism in Malaya’Footnote ¹⁷ and ‘Socialism in a Multi-Racial Society’Footnote ¹⁸—the question Puthucheary was also confronting was how the economic fact of British domination would translate into the political question of anti-colonial struggle. Yet although in Ownership and Control Puthucheary was eager to disprove the communalist thesis of Chinese economic domination and to show that communal differences were secondary to the economic process, in his more political writings he argued that, in spite of this secondary role, communal differences continued to be central to politics in Malaya and could not therefore be bypassed in favour of direct access to economic categories. Rather, social and cultural categories remained important. As he stated in an address to the University Socialist Club in 1959,

The view that Puthucheary was contesting here was, in part, that of the Malayan Communist Party (MCP), but it was also that set out by the socialist-inspired nationalists of the AMCJA-PUTERA coalition whose diagnosis in ‘Analysis of the Communal Question in Relation to the Constitutional Issue’ argued that it was British economic exploitation that produced communal antagonisms, and the removal of this exploitation would end communal division.Footnote ²⁰ So too was it the early position of the PAP, of which Puthucheary was a member, whose early platform centred around ‘the unity of all races and classes in Malaya’ against British exploitation.Footnote ²¹

Puthucheary, who still believed himself intellectually to be a Marxist but who had by the late 1950s broken with the ideology of communism and the position of the Malayan Communist Party,Footnote ²² was, against this view, calling into question the notion that the economic base was the sole determinant of the superstructure, and he pointed towards a more complex understanding of group belonging and of the influence of communal relations on the economic process. Giving the example of trade unions, he argued that the mere absence of economic exploitation was not sufficient to overcome communal disunity,

For Puthucheary, then, it was the intractability of communalism in Malaya that differentiated the Malayan situation from that experienced by socialists in other countries. Thus he argued that, while the socialists of China and India could appeal to the ‘theory of the unity of all classes and races against foreign capital' in the anti-colonial struggle,Footnote ²⁴ this theory was not equally valid in the case of Malaya. He noted,

In his reference to India, it is likely that Puthucheary was reflecting on his own time in the Indian National Army (INA) under Subhas Chandra Bose, as the INA's focus was on transcending communal, religious, and caste-based differences in the struggle against the British.Footnote ²⁶ Yet this reflection was a negative one for, as in the case of the trade unions, such an appeal to unity was problematic in the case of Malaya. On the one hand, this was because, for Puthucheary, Malaya lacked something that India and China possessed—notably a history or traditions that could ‘generate emotional factors that would make for unity’.Footnote ²⁷ Yet it was also because Malaya possessed something that they did not, that is, a particular pattern of uneven development. He argued,

For Puthucheary, then, the socialists of Malaya needed to better understand the nature of Malaya's communal divisions to build a movement capable of speaking to all Malayans. Central to this was the need to understand the nature of Malaya's uneven development and its intersection with such communal divisions. Important to this was the divide between a rural subsistence economy, overwhelmingly Malay and without direct contact with British capital, and a developing urban capitalist economy, largely Indian and Chinese, and in direct contact with British capital.Footnote ²⁹ Such an overlapping of economic and communal divisions also entailed differences in the understanding of economic exploitation. While for Chinese and Indian workers economic exploitation involved a direct interaction with British capital, for the Malay peasantry, exploitation did not mean a direct relation with the colonial power. Rather, it was mediated through economic relations defined along racial lines, notably with rural middlemen and moneylenders, significantly Chinese.Footnote ³⁰ Therefore, in the modern capitalist sector it was possible to mobilize workers against colonial capital, but among the rural Malay peasantry exploitation as a political category entailed cultural, linguistic, and religious connotations in reference to other Malayan communities—a fact that prevented the direct mobilization of the Malay peasantry against the British, as well as the unity of the Malay peasantry with Chinese and Indian workers. While the British determined the overall structure of economic exploitation in the colony, Puthucheary argued in his writings that it was in the direct relation between peasant and trader that the question of unity would be decided.Footnote ³¹

Arguing, then, that the slogan ‘colonial exploitation’ as a means of political mobilization in Malaya was weak, Puthucheary argued that Malayan socialists had to revise the ‘classical scheme of things’ which had determined the socialist approach to nationalism and anti-colonialism around the world. This in turn would produce a Malayan approach to socialist mobilization.

The ‘theory of the unity of all classes and races against foreign capital’ in Malaya

In arguing along these lines, Puthucheary was reflecting on the developments that had taken place on the Malayan Left in the aftermath of the declaration of Emergency in 1948, in which elements of the Left, led by the MCP, had sought to orient the struggle towards a direct confrontation between the Malayan people and the British in the belief that the anti-colonial struggle itself would serve as a unifying factor. As Puthucheary noted in his ‘Statement of Political Belief’ in 1957, however, with the movement towards independence above the Causeway, the real outcome of that struggle had not been to accentuate the split between the British and the people—between colonizer and colonized—but between a Malayan government, with significant support among the Malays, and a communist movement largely Chinese in character. The MCP's insistence on continued struggle, and its lack of attention to the problem of communal division, had only served to reproduce communal categories as opposed to challenging them.Footnote ³² For Puthucheary this fact suggested a broader problem with the question of communalism on the Malayan Left, a problem he also found in socialist and communist thought more generally—which in spite of its rhetoric had the potential not to challenge but to reinforce communal categories. As he stated in a letter to his friend Wang Gungwu:

In the case of Malaya the ‘theory of the unity of all classes and races against foreign capital’ failed in two ways: in its focus on anti-colonialism it neglected to specifically address the communal or national perspectives of the Malays, and, in basing the movement largely around one communal group—the Chinese—it made possible, consciously or unconsciously, the identification of the party with Chinese issues. Yet, Puthucheary was not only reading such a situation through the narrow lens of communalist thinking, rather, he was emphasizing that this reality formed part of a broader problem of socialist thought beyond Malaya: the way in which socialists understood the role of the nation within socialist struggle.

The ‘theory of the unity of all classes and races against foreign capital’ discussed by Puthucheary was fundamentally the position on the national and colonial questions taken by the 2nd and 4th Comintern Congresses, theoretically indebted to Lenin's contribution to the theory of the united front and the national question.Footnote ³⁴ Central to both was Lenin's belief that in order to produce the most widely unified socialist forces, communist parties in colonial countries had to form broad alliances, premised both upon alliances with other progressive forces and upon challenging forms of oppression, particularly nationalist oppression, within the workers’ movement through support for a right to the self-determination of all peoples.Footnote ³⁵ Underlying this was an idea of democratic centralism, premised upon the production of equality within the workers’ movement through the neutralization of forms of oppression, which could provide the basis either for direct class-based alliances or, through the production of a unifying national frame, the overcoming of sub-national or communal antagonisms. At the 2nd Comintern Congress this took the form of Lenin's ‘Theses on the National and Colonial Questions’ which was codified in the 4th Congress as the ‘anti-colonial united front’.Footnote ³⁶

This approach to building a united front through neutralizing forms of oppression was reflected in the Malayan Communist Party's early policy platforms which advocated for the formation of a democratic workers’ republic in Malaya, a programme of federation based upon the equality of all peoples,Footnote ³⁷ a right to education in vernacular languages,Footnote ³⁸ and a focus on economic issues, notably land redistribution and wage policy.Footnote ³⁹ Yet the more neutral approach to national issues advocated by Lenin and the Comintern elided the more practical need—particularly in multinational or multi-ethnic countries—to engage with nationalist issues to resolve national inequalities. This was a fact that Lenin, in the years after the Russian Revolution, came to confront, though without a broader theoretical solution to the problem.Footnote ⁴⁰ This in turn led socialist and communist parties around the world towards a series of improvisations with regard to relations between nationalities and communities in the production of socialist and anti-colonial united fronts, a fact that made possible not only strategic but also ideological alliances between socialism and nationalist thought.Footnote ⁴¹ In the case of Malaya, this fact led to a series of shifting positions on the national form that socialism in Malaya should take and the role of nationalism within this struggle.

The first position of the Malayan Communist Party was that of a unity party divided between Chinese, Indian, and Malay parties, in the belief that communist organization should conform to existing national divisions.Footnote ⁴² Yet criticisms soon led to the formation of a Malayan party, which united all communities into a single party centred around the equality of all the peoples of Malaya. In the aftermath of the war—and recognizing that the uneven development of Malaya's communities made armed struggle against the British difficultFootnote ⁴³—the party moved towards the formation of a united front with nationalist parties centred around the AMCJA-PUTERA and the People's Constitutional Proposals.Footnote ⁴⁴ The AMCJA-PUTERA called for the inclusion of the Malays in the struggle and the Proposals placed focus on the protection of the Malay rulers, the use of Malay as the national language, special provisions for the Malays, and special councils for the customs and religion of the Malays.Footnote ⁴⁵ The turn to the Emergency began to reverse this process, however, and while special attention continued to be given to the inclusion of Malays in the struggle, the party began to challenge the contents of the People's Constitutional Proposals, to call for an immediate unity in the struggle against the British, and to place focus on earlier themes: a Malayan anti-colonial nationalism, class struggle, equality of all communities, and vernacular education.Footnote ⁴⁶

This process in the 1940s produced two dominant trends in nationalist thought on the Malayan Left. On the one hand, a tendency to emphasize national, cultural, and linguistic equality in the production of a single Malayan national frame so as to unite all communities in the immediate anti-colonial struggle. On the other hand, a Malayan or Melayu nationalism which gave particular focus to a cultural and economic national group—the Malays—as a way of building an anti-colonial unity between the people, thereby sacrificing equality in the present for its realization in the future. These divisions between socialism and nationalism, equality and privilege, and programmatic versus revolutionary politics would continue to play out in the 1950s, at a time when Puthucheary became engaged in debates on the national question in Malaya.

Left-wing politics and the national question in 1950s Singapore

The dynamics of Puthucheary's political development in the 1950s was caught up in the urban developments of the Emergency in Singapore, in which elements of the anti-colonial Left and the MCP embarked on a new wave of united front struggle.Footnote ⁴⁷ Central to this was the formation of new left-wing organizations, notably the Anti-British League (ABL), as well as the turn to campus politics.Footnote ⁴⁸ In this period youth politics on the Left was driven by the continuation of anti-colonial struggle and thinking around the question of Malayan nationalism as well as, among Chinese students, the victory of the Chinese Communist Party—a source of both inspiration for students as well as a new wave of repression by the British colonial state. At the University of Malaya these ideas—which were particularly indebted to the English-educated intellectuals from the Malayan Democratic Union—met with those of the communist-inclined ABL which was establishing a presence in student unions and publications.Footnote ⁴⁹ Puthucheary, a member of the ABL, was central to this process. In 1949 he attempted to establish a Malayan Student Party, which served as a framework for a future national union of students centred on Malayan nationalism that would be the ‘vanguard of progressive forces advancing the ideal of an independent nation’.Footnote ⁵⁰ He also played a vital role in the growing politicization of the English-educated students, central to which was a concern with the Malay peasantry and the role of the Malay language.Footnote ⁵¹ This is evident in Puthucheary's 1949 essay ‘The University and Student in Society’ in which he argued, referencing student movements in India, that Malayan students could play an important role by going into the kampungs and uplifting the rural poor through literacy drives, echoing the work of student activists in India.Footnote ⁵² It is likely that in his discussion of Indian students Puthucheary recalled the All-Indian Students Federation which was pursuing a radical left-wing approach in India in the same period.Footnote ⁵³

Detained in 1951 under Emergency Regulations, upon his release he was removed from the ABL—citing his own rejection of the ideological discipline of communist organizations—after which he broke with the communist movement in Malaya.Footnote ⁵⁴ Subsequently he was central to a new wave of student radicalism, first through the formation of the University Socialist Club, which opted for an anti-communal platform rather than a more radical socialist position, and secondly through the Pan-Malayan Students Federation, which was also active in anti-colonial politics. After graduating from the University of Malaya, Puthucheary and others, like Sidney Woodhull and Jamit Singh, entered into the trade unions to take up workers’ struggles, with Puthucheary joining the Singapore Factory and Shop Workers’ Union in 1954.Footnote ⁵⁵ It was through student and labour activism that the English-educated students would increasingly connect with the Chinese student movement, which was also engaged in educational and labour struggles. Through such connections, students increasingly mixed anti-colonial politics, workers’ struggles, and conflict around education and culture.

Ideological coherence was given to this activism by the emerging ideas of Afro-Asianism. Afro-Asianism itself emerged out of the hybrid nature of Third World liberation ideologies, influenced by the Comintern's discourse on the colonial and national questions, the liberal internationalism of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and ideas of Pan-Africanism and Pan-Arabism. Largely socialist in outlook, it gave particular emphasis to the anti-colonial struggle, the rights of the colonized, and the need for the unity of the colonized against colonial powers—emphasizing anti-racism and a rejection of cultural oppression.Footnote ⁵⁶ This thinking, which was important to the students around the University Socialist Club,Footnote ⁵⁷ was also key to the Chinese student movement, particularly Lim Chin Siong who in the early 1950s was also aligned to the ABL and the trade union movement. Lim saw the left-wing anti-colonial struggle as centred around the political and cultural rights of the colonized, a rejection of the authoritarianism of the colonial state, and the unity of the people against the British.Footnote ⁵⁸ This was a radical rights-based discourse that was differentiated from the more economic and historical focus of Marxist thought.

The turn to constitutional struggle came in 1954 with the establishment of the People's Action Party (PAP). With British attempts to relax the Emergency Regulations and transfer power to the Singapore government through the Rendel Constitutional Commission, conditions were created for an open united front struggle, which was in turn capitalized on by a diverse cross-section of the Singapore Left, uniting the English educated and Chinese educated, the students’ groups, trade unionists, and middle-class nationalists as well as those advocating for both parliamentary and mass-based struggles.Footnote ⁵⁹ Puthucheary's own political history at this time saw him straddle different tendencies.Footnote ⁶⁰ Like other figures such as Sidney Woodhull and A. Samad Ismail, he was English educated and an advocate of building a united Malayan nation—placing him closer to the party's English-educated elite—yet he also remained a more radical socialist. Through his work in the Singapore Factory and Shop Workers’ Union he was also in close contact with Chinese trade unionists such as Lim Chin Siong and Fong Swee Suan who had influence over the Chinese working-class and student movements. Yet despite attempts to build a united front from different elements of the party, a central fault line would gradually emerge throughout the 1950s and early 1960s over the type of anti-colonial nationalism to pursue.

For the moderate social democrats of the party like Lee Kuan Yew and S. Rajaratnam, the goal of the Malayan Left would become nation-building through Merger. They emphasized the need to overcome communal divisions in Malaya through the Chinese population of Singapore proving their Malayan loyalties to the Peninsular Malays, by the learning of Malay, and its endorsement as the national language. This took seriously communal categories and the need to work through such categories to build a Malayan nation.Footnote ⁶¹ For the more radical wing led by Lim Chin Siong the focus was on the anti-colonial struggleFootnote ⁶² and the unity of the Malayan people against the colonial state. Among elements of the Chinese-educated Left this often entailed the argument that all nationalities had been oppressed under colonialism and that anti-colonial mobilization would take place through the diverse struggles of different nationalities, workers, students, and peasants within a single national frame. This struggle was to be horizontal in character and, while it endorsed the learning of Malay in solidarity with the Malay peasantry, it saw itself as uniting equal national and linguistic groups.Footnote ⁶³ The division was premised upon two different political ontologies. One emphasized the production of an immediate unity through struggle and the other, the production of unity through a gradual process of nation-building. Yet this was evidenced in the party by more technical debates over the priority of Merger as against the anti-colonial struggle, the role of culture in the left-wing struggle, and the nature of a future Malayan culture, that is, whether the fusion of Malaya's cultures should maintain linguistic or cultural differences or contribute towards the production of a single Malayan culture.

This distinction, which reflected earlier debates on the Malayan Left between procedural-constitutional versus popular struggle, was reflected in the kind of socialist language used. The radical wing of the party was accused of ‘political infantilism’ and ‘adventurism’ as a result of their downplaying of communal differences and their focus on direct struggle as well of alliances with right-wing chauvinism (opportunism) in their endorsement of educational struggles or in questions around Singaporean independence.Footnote ⁶⁴ The moderate wing, on the other hand, was accused of a disconnect from popular struggles and alliances with imperialism, both in terms of their focus on the communal question and the political concessions required to achieve Merger.

In such debates over nationalism Puthucheary's political allegiances after 1951 placed him in both camps and neither.Footnote ⁶⁵ English educated, and fundamentally a Malayan nationalist who took communal divisions seriously, he was also a radical anti-colonialist and a trade unionist who highlighted the role of the workers’ struggle and the popular anti-colonial struggle. At the same time, his intellectual position as a Marxist differentiated him from both trends in the party, a fact reflected in his understanding of questions of nation-building and anti-colonial struggle which he outlined later in the 1950s. Central to this were the interventions Puthucheary made on the questions of language and education on the Left—interventions that put him at odds with the radical wing of the party of which he had been a member.

Communalism and equality on the Singapore Left

From the early 1950s questions of education and language policy had become important to the question of post-colonial nation-building, both on the part of the British colonial government and the anti-colonial movement.Footnote ⁶⁶ In Singapore this took place in regard to the Supplementary Plan to the Ten-Year Education Plan, and in the Federation through the Barnes Report and later the Razak Report of 1956, which favoured instruction in Malay, with some accommodation for vernacular education. The intricacies of late-colonial education policy produced debates on the Left over the role of colonial education policy and the colonial language of English in the reproduction of colonialism, and questions around the oppression of vernacular education and the place of cultural and linguistic minorities in a future Malayan nation. These debates often split the Left in the course of the 1950s and 1960s.

The left-wing of the PAP and elements of the Labour Party of Malaya above the Causeway often argued that colonial education policy, in discriminating against the Chinese, made education and language policy an important area of anti-colonial struggle where colonial oppression should be combated. At the same time they argued, in the spirit of Bandung and Afro-Asianism, that colonial policy was breaching the rights of minorities and that by focusing on education issues they could mobilize a broad part of the Chinese community against the colonial state and behind the Left around principles of democracy and equality.Footnote ⁶⁷ For the moderates in the PAP and Malay nationalists around Parti Rakyat, the over-politicization of vernacular education and language served to divide the Chinese and Indians from the Malays, and prevented the formation of a nation and national culture which they understood would need to be, in some form, Malay-centric.Footnote ⁶⁸

The area in which this question played out politically was in the student struggles in support of Chinese education. The strike of Chung Cheng High School students in Singapore in 1955 in response to government threats of closure caused the student-labour movement, led by Lim Chin Siong, to form an alliance with other Chinese organizations, notably the Chinese Chambers of Commerce, to form a Chinese Education Committee. It was through this Committee that Lim and others on the Left—utilizing the language of human rights and the United Nations’ Charter—sought to mobilize a cross-section of the Chinese community in an anti-colonial direction.Footnote ⁶⁹ Similar alliances were formed at Chung Ling High School in Penang in 1956 in response to the implementation of the Razak Report, providing opportunities for the Labour Party of Malaya—increasingly an advocate of vernacular education and minority cultural rights—to work with protesting students and the United Chinese School Teachers Association,Footnote ⁷⁰ a struggle which helped the Labour Party win the 1956 Penang Municipal Elections.Footnote ⁷¹ This kind of activism continued after Merdeka in a wave of Chinese student strikes in November 1957 which won compromises from the government on aid for Chinese schools.Footnote ⁷²

Yet the maintenance of a separate system for Chinese education also produced divisions on the Left. After 1959, and with the PAP government in power, debates emerged as to the place of Chinese educational institutions, particularly Nanyang University, in a future independent Malaya, in view of the party's commitment to the Malay language.Footnote ⁷³ Nanyang University had been founded through an alliance between progressive Chinese student groups and the Chinese business community, but in challenging the hegemony of English and in championing the rights of Chinese students, it was seen by elements of the Chinese Left as an anti-colonial institution. By rejecting calls to admit more non-Chinese speaking students to the institution, however, it became increasingly open to the accusation of being anti-national or chauvinistic.Footnote ⁷⁴ This led to two different perspectives on the ‘Malayanization’ of the University. On the one hand, there were those who argued that the crux of the problem was decolonizing higher education in Malaya and that this could be achieved through a more Malayan-centric curriculum, without harming the rights of the Chinese to vernacular education.Footnote ⁷⁵ On the other hand, there were those elements who, while continuing to accept the need for the learning of mother tongues in some form, argued that maintaining a national Chinese-language university prevented nation-building and fostered communal separation.Footnote ⁷⁶ This mirrored debates that were also taking place over vernacular education in the Socialist Front above the Causeway.Footnote ⁷⁷

Puthucheary's second detention in 1956 came after the Chinese middle school riots, when Chinese middle school students protested against the closure of the Singapore Chinese Middle School Students’ Union. In detention, Puthucheary, who had long advocated the building of a common Malayan nation but who had also worked alongside supporters of Chinese education such as Lim Chin Siong in the union movement, came to reflect increasingly upon the earlier struggles of the radical left in Singapore. Puthucheary, alongside Devan Nair and Sidney Woodhull, expressed criticism of the Left's Chinese bias,Footnote ⁷⁸ with Woodhull recalling ‘interminable debates’ over the role of the Chinese language in an independent Malaya.Footnote ⁷⁹ This sentiment was reflected in the two documents released by the detainees: ‘The Road to Socialism in an Independent Malaya’ (1957),Footnote ⁸⁰ largely influenced by Puthucheary,Footnote ⁸¹ which argued against an ‘extra-national cultural bias’ on the Left, and ‘The Ends and Means of Malayan Socialism’ (1959),Footnote ⁸² which rejected communal chauvinism in the Left's struggle. This was evident too in Puthucheary's own attack on chauvinism in his ‘Statement of Political Belief’ (1957). Yet it was in his letter to Wang Gungwu that he reflected more explicitly on the problems that the socialist movement in Malaya faced in focusing on questions of Chinese education and language rights, and in failing to address communal politics. ‘It is in this context,’ he argued,

This was particularly true, he noted, in the mobilization around education and language issues. Arguing against the ‘reactionary role that socialists are playing in the education controversy’, he said of the 1957 disturbances in the Federation:

As in his discussions on the Emergency, here Puthucheary was drawing a distinction between the intentions of socialist mobilization around language and education issues—which emphasized themes of oppression and fundamental rights—and the real effects of such mobilizations. In the same way that the armed struggle against the British had sought to mobilize all peoples against the colonial power but had served only to increase communal antagonisms, so too did the mobilizations around education issues risk having the effect of empowering right-wing elites and of reproducing communal distinctions.

The dynamics of this process played out in a later debate over the role of the English educated in the PAP's journal Petir.Footnote ⁸⁵ The debate, opened by Goh Keng Swee's comments on the privileges of the English educated,Footnote ⁸⁶ ignited discussion in the party on relations between the Chinese and English educated, leading to further criticism of the Chinese-centric focus of some Chinese Leftists.Footnote ⁸⁷ Yet important again in this debate was the relationship between anti-colonial struggle and communalism. As Puthucheary argued in a response in Petir, the focus of the Chinese educated on the anti-colonial struggle tended to establish the English educated as an elite ‘class’ allied to colonialism and the Chinese community as marginalized by colonialism and as a revolutionary (proletarian) ‘class’, in turn communalizing the question of class struggle. Against this Puthucheary argued that the English educated were not a class but were stratified in the same way as other communities, contained only a small capitalist element, and did not therefore possess an inherently reactionary position towards the anti-colonial struggle. The Chinese community, on the other hand, was also made up of various classes, including a strong capitalist class, and the association of the Chinese with anti-colonialism tended to ignore the reactionary role played by Chinese capitalists. For Puthucheary, then, the focus on communal issues served only to limit the role played by the English educated in the anti-colonial struggleFootnote ⁸⁸ and to confuse socialist terminology.Footnote ⁸⁹

On the one hand, this communal bias was a matter of the ‘weakness [of] communists who owe national loyalties’,Footnote ⁹⁰ which Puthucheary had noted in the case of Eastern Europe and had argued was also present in Malaya—a matter of a conscious or unconscious preference for particular nationalities which lay under the universal ideals of socialist thought. On the other hand, it was a matter of short-termism in socialist thought in Malaya. While socialist mobilization on issues on education and language were responding to immediate colonial oppression and injustices—notably with regard to the employment of Chinese graduates—socialists were leaving untouched the more fundamental question of the kind of nation and national education system an independent Malaya would require in order to overcome communal divisions. This left unquestioned, for Puthucheary, the nature and effects of communalism on the socialist struggle in Malaya.Footnote ⁹¹

As Puthucheary's writings from the late 1950s also highlight, such tensions were reflected in the Marxist arguments that Malayan socialists engaged in, particularly when referencing Soviet nationalities policy. While members of the MCP and some on the left-wing of the PAP and the Labour Party of Malaya cited the Soviet Union and communist approaches to linguistic rights in support of a right to vernacular education and a right to cultural autonomy for the different communities of Malaya, Puthucheary rejected such claims to socialist authority.Footnote ⁹² He argued that a reading of Stalin's arguments with the Bundists was ‘enough to realise the fallacy of the theoretical assumptions of the local “Marxists” who accept cultural autonomy as an unquestionable truth’.Footnote ⁹³ Rather, Puthucheary argued, the traditional Marxist position was not that of an absolute right to cultural autonomy but of the need to produce broader social, cultural, and national unity, a fact which had to determine the kinds of questions Malayan Leftists were asking.

For Puthucheary, then, an approach purely based on mobilizing the people against the British, without considering more critically the basis of unity among the people, would end up endorsing, consciously or unconsciously, communalism. So too would the focus on the doctrine of cultural autonomy and the self-determination of peoples serve only to contribute towards the division of the Malayan people and hinder the development of a socialist movement. As he noted in reference to theories of cultural autonomy:

In challenging such approaches to anti-colonial unity and cultural diversity Puthucheary was challenging both a radical Afro-Asianist tendency on the Left in Malaya as well as the earlier discourse on the colonial and national questions as they had been taken up by the Malayan Communist Party. In doing so he turned towards more foundational ideas within Marxist thought on the relationship between socialism and nationalism.

Puthucheary on the national question

By 1957 such debates over the role of education, language, and popular struggle had left Puthucheary more distant from the left-wing of the PAP.Footnote ⁹⁵ Ideologically, by this time he had also made a fuller transition from a philosophical belief in communism towards a more democratic socialist position, a process accelerated by the Soviet repression of the Hungarian Revolution in 1956.Footnote ⁹⁶ He later understood his position as supporting ‘communism with a human face’, a hope crushed by the Soviet intervention.Footnote ⁹⁷ In his ‘Statement of Political Belief’, written to Lee Kuan Yew in 1957, he argued that to compete with the communists, a social democratic platform required a vision to transform Malayan society along socialist lines, requiring thinking akin to the role played by the Fabians in Britain.Footnote ⁹⁸ Upon his release from detention in 1959 he worked within the PAP to promote industrial policy in Singapore, emphasizing a politics of development over his earlier trade unionism, as well as running the PAP's study classes for civil servants.Footnote ⁹⁹ Yet his socialism continued to remain more radical than the social democracy of the moderates in the party.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Puthucheary declared himself a ‘Nennian’ socialist—after Pietro Nenni of the Italian Socialist Party—and noted that, while not politically a communist, he continued to accept the ‘Marxian political equipment’ and ‘a great many of the conclusions derived from this equipment’,Footnote ¹⁰¹ which shaped his own view on the national question in Malaya.

Marx's own view on nationalism was itself fractured, in a division that would influence later discussions of nationalism on the Left.Footnote ¹⁰² On the one hand, Marx possessed a developmentalist view of the nation, evidenced in his writings on the transition from feudalism to capitalism and on colonial India, as a process through which capitalist development destroyed old feudal ties and produced new identities, institutions, and forms of unity—in which the nation could be argued to be a progressive basis for the movement towards socialism.Footnote ¹⁰³ Yet in his writings on the Irish and Polish questions Marx offered a more political response to the question of nationalism, highlighting the way in which national oppression—and not only economic oppression—was emerging as essential to the reproduction of capitalism. Key here was the category of chauvinism which, in the case of Britain, produced not only the British oppression of the Irish, but also the means for the British bourgeoisie to divide British and Irish workers from one another, reinforcing the power of capital. It would be, then, the struggle of the Irish against the British along national and not purely economic lines, which for Marx would challenge the power of British capital and provide a socialist basis for nationalist politics.Footnote ¹⁰⁴

In Puthucheary's terms, in his writings in the late 1950s, the question of left-wing strategy in Malaya had to address both of these developmental and political aspects of nationalism. On the one hand, it had to account for the deviation of Malaya from the process of nation-formation Marx had diagnosed within capitalism. On the other hand, it had to address seriously the political question of national and communal antagonisms, and thus the relationship between nationalist politics and capitalism in Malaya.

In referring to this first problem in Ownership and Control Puthucheary highlighted the way in which Malaya's communal divisions rested on the limited nature of colonial capitalist development which, by leaving the Malay peasantry largely untouched and limiting secondary industrialization in the colony, had not transformed Malaya's social fabric either through processes of industrialization and proletarianization or by producing the basis for a strong national bourgeoisie. Rather than breaking up existing communities and feudal ties it had, in unevenly developing the country, only served to reinforce existing communal divisions.Footnote ¹⁰⁵

Politically, Puthucheary was arguing that this process of uneven development had made possible a politics of chauvinism that was central to the way in which communal elites had been able to politically sideline the socialist struggle. Chauvinism served both to divide the workers antagonistically along national or racial lines, producing a corporate (as against class) consciousness, and to unite the working class of particular communities with their particular bourgeoisies, privileging communal-nationalist politics over the politics of class. Yet this politics of chauvinism was not equal across all communities. For Puthucheary chauvinism was principally the means by which the emerging Chinese and Indian bourgeoisie mobilized their communities along national lines—through a focus on cultural-nationalist questions of education and language, and corporate group interests, while continuing to reproduce the economic structure underlying the underdevelopment of the Malay peasantry as well as the communal antagonisms between the Malay peasantry and the Chinese trader.

In understanding the power of communal politics in this way Puthucheary was returning to more fundamentally Marxist questions of the way in which national antagonisms could be used to overcome class antagonisms. Central to this was the way in which workers, in allying with their national bourgeoisies, could accrue certain benefits and privileges, at the expense of developing working class power more generally.

In the tradition of Marx, Puthucheary's understanding of the colonial economy and the structure of chauvinism formed the basis for a differentiation between progressive and reactionary ideas of nationalism in Malaya. Progressive nationalism in Malaya was one which sought to overcome the structure of communal chauvinism, to unite the workers of different national groups, and to mobilize them against Malaya's uneven capitalist development, confronting the role played by communal elites as sources of disunity. It is in this sense that Puthucheary argued that the struggle against European capital could not produce sufficient unity between the Malays and Chinese, but the struggle of both against Chinese capitalists could.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Reactionary nationalism, on the other hand, continued to exist in the uneven nature of Malaya's development, where advanced groups pursued their corporate group interests, empowered their national bourgeoisies, reproduced existing communal divisions, and left unresolved the wider question of the economic oppression of other national groups.

Puthucheary went on to describe such a reactionary role in terms of the inhibiting of the progressive role of capitalist development and nation-formation in Malaya. Capitalism, Puthucheary argued paraphrasing Marx, ‘is the destroyer of old nationalities. It destroys old nationalities by facilitating the large-scale movement of communities and their fusion with others. It creates conditions for new nationalities to come into being.’Footnote ¹⁰⁷ ‘This is exactly what capitalism has done in Malaya.’Footnote ¹⁰⁸ For Puthucheary, then, capitalist economic development played a progressive role: tearing up the traditional basis for existing nationalities on the Peninsula and providing the basis for a new Malayan nationality. Yet, echoing Marx's developmental understanding of capitalism, as well as the position of prominent members of the Third International such a M. N. Roy,Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Puthucheary went on to argue that those ‘cultural autonomists’ who were seeking to defend existing rights, cultures, and languages were pursuing a purely defensive and reactionary nationalism, ‘trying to arrest this historical progress of Malaya’, which he termed a fundamentally ‘anti-historical attitude’.Footnote ¹¹⁰ ‘It is no use,’ he argued, ‘our hankering back and seeking identification with the nationalities of which our fathers were a part.’Footnote ¹¹¹ With the material basis for such nationalities having been destroyed, the basis for a new Malayan nation was already, objectively, being set.

Yet merely allowing communal identities to continue and to ‘wait for history and time to weld our people into a nation’ was a choice that, Puthucheary argued, would form the basis for a violent and bloody process of nation-building in Malaya.Footnote ¹¹² The role of socialists, he maintained, was to take the lead in forging a new nation, by completing the process of modernization and economic development which colonial capitalism in Malaya had only partially and unevenly begun. This perspective became central to his advocacy of state-led development in Ownership and Control.

In this focus on socialist nation-building, Puthucheary's perspective echoed that of the leadership of the PAP, something that is evident in the policy statements of the party as well as the writings of S. Rajaratnam from the period, which similarly highlighted the divergence of the Malayan situation from Marxist doctrine.Footnote ¹¹³ Yet the more conservative and gradualist focus of the right-wing of the PAP limited the way in which this programme of economic and cultural reform would be realized. Its approach centred around the Singaporean state, the Ministry of Culture, and moderate economic reform, a fact which played out in the politics around Merger. Puthucheary, on the other hand, argued for a more radical approach to nation-building, one that remained Malayan in scope and was not subordinated to a realpolitik but which envisioned a more radical transformation of Malayan society.

For Puthucheary, the peasantry were central to this project of nation-building, a perspective he shared with other members of the University Socialist Club.Footnote ¹¹⁴ Conceptualized as the group marginalized and excluded by Malayan capitalism, he argued that the economic marginalization of the peasantry also entailed their sense of communal oppression by more ‘advanced’ communities. It would only be in confronting the structural roots of this phenomenon that communal disunity could be suppressed. To leave it untouched would only enable communal political parties.Footnote ¹¹⁵ As he noted, in the Indian case:

What was required, then, for nation-building in Malaya was an approach that broke the marginalization of the Malay peasantry, and here Puthucheary can be seen to follow Marx's arguments regarding Ireland. On the one hand, he argued that the crux of the national question and the oppression of Chinese and Indian workers in Malaya rested on the peasant question, and, on the other, that the mobilization of the Malay peasantry would not be a directly economic struggle but also would take the form of a national and cultural struggle, which, by empowering the Malay peasantry, might make possible a united front between workers and peasants aimed against Chinese and Indian capitalists.

Culturally, for Puthucheary, this took the form of a more radical approach to supporting the Malay language than had thus far been pursued either by the PAP or the Alliance government above the Causeway.Footnote ¹¹⁷ Puthucheary encouraged the full adoption of Malay as a national language for all groups and a common schooling system to produce a singular Malayan identity. Building upon his argument that capitalism was key to the breaking up of old identities and the formation of new ones, Puthucheary emphasized the role of the English educated as a group who had been removed from existing national identities and could therefore help form new ones. ‘We have broken away most from the communities. In many ways this has been a disadvantage. We lost much of our contact with the people to whom we belong.’ Nevertheless, ‘We have an advantage … We are drawn from the different communities. We have some common experiences. We have the means of communication with each other… True, we speak a foreign language today but there is no reason why we cannot learn the national language and go among the peoples of this country, helping towards unity.’Footnote ¹¹⁸ Placing the English educated in opposition to the position of the Chinese educated, he argued that, without loyalty to any particular community, the English-educated socialists could contribute more than any other group towards nation-building.Footnote ¹¹⁹ Yet this nation-building was not to follow the standard model of capitalist development in which ‘backwards’ pre-capitalist nationalities were broken up and absorbed by ‘advanced’ nationalities. Rather, it was premised on the idea that—led by socialists—those culturally and economically modernized groups would build a new nationality by working among marginalized groups and adopting their language. Such a perspective, while still prone to allegations of elitism, remained premised on a desire among the English educated to sacrifice their ‘singular elite status for national identity’,Footnote ¹²⁰ encouraging other minority groups to pursue similar sacrifices to link up with the peasantry. This suggested that solidarity was to be constructed on the peasantry's terms, and not on those of elite groups. This recalled his earlier argument for students to go into the kampungs to address problems of illiteracy and poverty,Footnote ¹²¹ as well as the wish of many students in the University Socialist Club to build solidarity between students and peasants.Footnote ¹²²

Although Puthucheary did not use the term, his concern with mobilizing the Malay peasantry had much in common with the understanding of socialist hegemony put forward in Antonio Gramsci's own discussions on the leadership of the peasantry of the Italian South, in the context of similar cultural and economic divisions.Footnote ¹²³ Thus while Lee Kuan Yew and the right-wing of the PAP were increasingly willing to let the Tunku assume the leadership of the Malay peasantry for the purposes of Merger, Puthucheary was arguing for a longer process during which the Malay peasantry could be brought around to the socialist position, thus giving a prominent role to cultural and intellectual struggles.

Yet beyond the politics of culture, Puthucheary argued that socialists would also need to transform the economic structure of the Peninsula through a programme of state-led development, economic planning, and industrialization. However, as in the cultural domain, this process of economic development and modernization was not to be the disruptive and dislocating process of capitalist accumulation that many societies had undergone—a process similarly based on the economic destruction of ‘backward’ nationalities and their incorporation into progressive ones. Insofar as it was to be a socialist programme of development, it was to be centred on the uplift of marginalized economic groups, paying special attention, therefore, to the eradication of rural Malay poverty. Although the leadership of the PAP increasingly emphasized a more market-oriented vision of economic development, for Puthucheary, as in the cultural arena, special attention had to be paid to the Malay question. As he famously argued in Ownership and Control:

It was to be through a radical programme of cultural and economic planning, then, that socialists would resolve the national question in Malaya.

The 1960s: Trajectories of the national question

By the early 1960s, Puthucheary's thought could be said to have gained little traction in either the right-wing of the PAP, nor the left-wing which went on to form the Barisan Sosialis. His brand of democratic socialism remained too radical for the right-wing of the party, and increasingly differed from the position taken by the Left around Lim Chin Siong. After his release from detention in 1959 he took up a key role as manager of the Industrial Promotion Board, directing the PAP's industrial strategy around state-led development. However, he soon found himself sidelined as Goh Keng Swee formed the Economic Development Board and pursued a liberal development policy led by the United Nations and based around foreign direct investment.Footnote ¹²⁵ Increasingly turned off by politics, cynical about infighting in the party, and realizing that he ‘did not fit into the mould of the People's Action Party’, he resigned his positions and took up the study of law at the University of Malaya.Footnote ¹²⁶ In the midst of the Barisan Sosialis's split from the PAP, Puthucheary continued to advocate for consensus between both sides, believing that unity was vital for the Left.Footnote ¹²⁷ When the members of the Barisan Sosialis were finally expelled from the PAP, and disillusioned with the PAP's leadership, Puthucheary joined the Barisan, but remained a peripheral member. He offered to resign from the Barisan if Lee Kuan Yew could produce evidence that Lim Chin Siong was a communist, yet no evidence was forthcoming.Footnote ¹²⁸ He eventually gave up on active party politics as he ‘felt that he could no longer find a home for his political ideas’.Footnote ¹²⁹

In Singapore, the earlier debates on the national question were transformed by the debate over Merger. The Barisan Sosialis, building on the Afro-Asian anti-colonialism of the left-wing of the PAP, continued to emphasize the importance of the Malay question alongside an ongoing commitment to vernacular languages and education.Footnote ¹³⁰ Yet the terms of Merger disrupted the division between anti-colonialism and nation-building that had developed on the Singaporean Left in course of the 1950s. While both sides had earlier assumed the need for Malayan unity and highlighted different routes to achieve this, with their proposals for Merger the PAP came to focus on the preservation of Singapore's difference within Malaysia, while the Barisan could be said to emphasize the priority of anti-colonialism over the national question. For Puthucheary's part, he argued within the Barisan, alongside his brother Dominic, for the priority of Merger over the Barisan's argument for independence before Merger.Footnote ¹³¹ This shows again his focus on Malayan nation-building, but what this meant in the context of the complexities of Merger was increasingly unclear.

In the aftermath of Merger and his detention in Operation Coldstore in 1963, Puthucheary was exiled to Kuala Lumpur where he continued to avoid active politics. Nevertheless, at the invitation of Tun Abdul Razak he joined the Malaysian wing of the Afro-Asian People's Solidarity Organisation (AAPSO), representing Malaysia at its conference in Ghana in May 1965,Footnote ¹³² and he was invited to attend the Second Afro-Asian Conference in Algeria in June of that year.Footnote ¹³³ In doing so Puthucheary actively accepted the reality of Merger and the new terms of national politics in Malaysia which meant that he was also out of step with Barisan Sosialis's attempts to challenge Merger at such conferences.Footnote ¹³⁴

Yet amid the political infighting in Singapore from the late 1950s, above the Causeway Puthucheary's concern with the national question resonated with the discussions taking place within the Socialist Front. Its 1959 policy statement ‘Towards a New Malaya’Footnote ¹³⁵ sought to resolve the national question in Malaya through an approach that would mobilize the Malay peasantry along socialist lines. Puthucheary was himself a friend of Parti Rakyat leader Ahmad Boestamam,Footnote ¹³⁶ and those who had been close to Puthucheary, like Abdullah Majid and M. K. Rajakumar as well as other members of the University Socialist Club, went on to play important roles in the Socialist Front.Footnote ¹³⁷ The Front was a pact between Parti Rakyat, which pursued an inclusive Malay nationalism from the perspective of the Malay peasantry—emphasizing Marhaenism and, like Puthucheary, a single system of national education based on the Malay languageFootnote ¹³⁸—and the Labour Party which, akin to the Barisan Socialis, prioritized multiculturalism and supported Malay as the national language, alongside support for vernacular languages and education. This reflected the division between ideas of anti-colonial unity and nation-building on the Singaporean Left. Yet in order to produce an anti-colonial united front they sought to resolve their different approaches to the national question.

This approach was outlined by Lim Kean Siew, the principal author of ‘Towards a New Malaya’, in a speech given to the University Socialist Club entitled ‘The Role of the Socialist in Malaya Today’ in December 1959, a few months after Puthucheary's own speech, ‘Socialism in a Multi-Racial Society’ in July.Footnote ¹³⁹ Highlighting the communal-economic and cultural divides produced by imperialism, he argued, in a manner similar to Puthucheary, that these divides could not be bypassed in favour of a class-based analysis. Rather, socialists had to challenge communal and cultural divides through nation-building: by producing a ‘national integration’ which moved beyond a unity of different parts to produce a single ‘national consciousness’. To do this, it would need to prioritize the Malay language and resolve Malay poverty, as Puthucheary advocated. As Lim argued, ‘The unity of the peasantry and the proletariat is essential for the growth of democracy and the ultimate triumph of socialism… In order to achieve this unity however, we must not forget the fact that the peasantry is both Malay and Muslim.’Footnote ¹⁴⁰ Nevertheless, this commitment to socialist nation-building still left open the more concrete questions regarding the sacrifices that would be necessary for a national consciousness to be built.

The Front came to emphasize the learning of Malay through its language schools and an Islamic basis for socialist thought, and sought to mobilize peasant economic struggles. Although it had success in urban areas, it remained unable to mobilize rural Malay votes.Footnote ¹⁴¹ One perpetual problem faced by the Left was state repression: the closure of the Socialist Front's Malay-language schools, anti-socialist propaganda in the kampungs, the role of Special Branch, the arrest of its leaders, and the use of the state machinery by the ruling coalition—a trend that has continued into the present. Yet at the same time the Front was unable to fuse its different approaches on the national question into a single socialist position; it was only able to formulate an agreement between divergent factions which continued to be unable to agree on key issues: the special position of the Malays and educational and language questions.Footnote ¹⁴² This in turn contributed to a long-held sense among the Malay peasantry that socialism was not in keeping with Malay culture.

Although the compact outlined by Lim Kean Siew continued to form the basis for cooperation until 1965, soon after the Front began to decline, as did attempts to mediate between socialism and nation-building.Footnote ¹⁴³ Reflecting on defeat, Parti Rakyat moved away from Boestamam's Marhaen socialism in favour of scientific socialism,Footnote ¹⁴⁴ while members of the Labour Party became radicalized under a new doctrine of militant struggle, in reaction to the state's detention of its leaders, and increasingly took an ultra-leftist position on the issue of language rights.Footnote ¹⁴⁵ The led to branch closures and arrests by the Malaysian state. By 1969 a new understanding was reached between the two parties to ‘hold to “scientific socialism”, “working class solidarity” and “the unity of the people of all nationalities” against “chauvinism and narrow nationalism”’.Footnote ¹⁴⁶ This set out the new terms on the national question within which they were operating, but no political action emerged from this and by 1972 the Labour Party of Malaya had been deregistered.

Against the backdrop of the radicalization of the socialist struggle, another reaction to the failure of socialist electoral politics was to argue for the struggle to be taken into the ruling Alliance Party. This was a position already taken earlier in 1958 by Puthucheary's friend A. Samad Ismail who had then moved from the PAP to the United Malays National Organisation (UMNO) in Singapore.Footnote ¹⁴⁷ Samad Ismail argued, in the context of Malaya's independence, that against the challenge of the Left, UMNO was likely to remain the centre point of Malay politics. Malay society remained, he argued, largely feudal in character, and the Malay peasantry, conservative, while Parti Rakyat's ‘socio-national-democracy’ was remote from the lived experiences of the Malay peasants. The possibility for progressive politics through the mobilization of the peasantry was more likely, then, to take place through reform within UMNO than from a direct challenge from the Left, something he continued to address in his journalism.Footnote ¹⁴⁸ Such a realization was also evident in an article entitled ‘Is Socialism in Malaysia dead?’ published by Puthucheary's friend Sidney Woodhull in Venture, the journal of the Fabian Colonial Bureau, during his stay in the United Kingdom in 1966. In it, Woodhull, who had also been detained in 1963 and exiled to Kuala Lumpur, reflected on the historic failure of the Left in Malaysia. Arguing that the ‘frame of mind’ of most Malaysian socialists remained ‘alien’ to Malaysian society, he pointed to the rejection of socialism among the Malays as key to this failure, but maintained that the Malays had only rejected the socialists and not the ideology of socialism as such. The fact that the Malay peasantry continued to be underdeveloped and exploited by middlemen, he argued, might be enough to force the hand of UMNO and turn it in a left-wing direction.Footnote ¹⁴⁹

Such views resonated with Puthucheary's earlier developmentalist arguments regarding the incomplete transformation of Malayan society by capitalist development, the maintenance of communal and feudal loyalties, and the need for a state-directed programme of development to break up communal identities.Footnote ¹⁵⁰ Yet if Puthucheary's earlier belief was that cultural and economic solidarity with the Malay peasantry would bring them around to a socialist perspective, the experience of the years after 1957 suggested that the maintenance of feudalism and of communal economic divisions had kept the Malay peasantry tied to Malay communal elites—along the lines of the Indian Muslim League's capture of the Muslim peasantry—as Puthucheary had earlier feared.Footnote ¹⁵¹ While this could be attributed, in part, to a political failure of the Left, Puthucheary's thinking on uneven development and communalism, as Samad Ismail and Woodhull's arguments also suggested, pointed towards the more fundamental role played by feudalism and communalism in Malay politics, a role now being reinforced by the Alliance government's unwillingness to economically transform the Malay peasantry.Footnote ¹⁵² Faced with the continuing link between economic underdevelopment and the power of communal elites, it became increasingly necessary for socialists to engage with the ruling Alliance Party to move it in a progressive direction, and to pave the way for a politics beyond communal divisions that could emphasize economic and national unity.

Such a perspective might have helped to inform Puthucheary's own political trajectory after 1963: his membership of the National Consultative Council and the advisory role he had in relation to the New Economic Policy. Recognizing the failure of left-wing electoral politics and the need to work within existing institutions, including UMNO, Puthucheary followed a trajectory taken by other members of the University Socialist Club (close to or acquainted with Puthucheary) who also worked closely with Tun Razak on questions of nation-building, economic modernization, and the economic development of the Malays—notably Abdullah Majid, Agoes Salim,Footnote ¹⁵³ Ahmad Mustapha Hassan,Footnote ¹⁵⁴ as well as A. Samad Ismail. Many were later caught up in accusations of being involved in a communist conspiracy by the Old Guard of the party, as was Puthucheary.Footnote ¹⁵⁵ Meanwhile others such as Lim Kean Siew and Sidney WoodhullFootnote ¹⁵⁶ worked within the Malaysian Chinese Association (MCA), where Lim established a workers’ and peasants’ section.Footnote ¹⁵⁷

This activism did not resolve the terms of the national question, however. As is well known, the New Economic Policy (NEP) accelerated the capitalist development of Malaysia and sought to challenge a race-based division of labour and poverty, but it did not realize the kind of social revolution through capitalist development that Puthucheary had seen as central to nation-building. Against the urbanization and proletarianization of the peasantry, the realization of a multiracial working class, and greater cultural contact between workers and peasants, the NEP reproduced the peasantry and the governing category of race, and marginalized the trade union movement.Footnote ¹⁵⁸ Economic development and a national cultural policy were therefore not to be enough: both continued to develop unevenly in a context in which forces of unity were counteracted with forces of disunity. What the NEP increasingly came to highlight—and what had been underplayed in left-wing analyses in the post-War period—was the power of elites and the post-colonial state to enact programmes of cultural and economic reform while counteracting the formation of an economically and nationally homogenous working-class movement.

Although in the late 1950s James Puthucheary had sought to provide a socialist response to the national question in Malaya, in practice his political vision was frustrated twice. The first was in the 1950s and 1960s with the failure of a Malayan Left to gain state power through a popular socialist movement which mobilized the Malay peasantry, and the second was in the failure to realize a progressive national programme from within Malaysia's ruling elite in the early 1970s. If those who pursued the ‘theory of the unity of all classes and races against foreign capital’ were frustrated by the political realities of Malaya, so too were those socialists who advocated a progressive programme of nation-building and a more programmatic politics of national unity. Malaysia, then, was not to become a socialist state and its politics thereafter became more, not less, dominated by communal elites. Such elites would be hegemonic over the politics of development and nation-building for decades to come.