25.07.2024

Flip-flopping programmatically

Marcus Strom reviews David Lockwood The politics of the Malayan Communist Party from 1930 to 1948 NUS Press, 2024, pp248, £31

Australian historian David Lockwood has provided a great service to the contemporary left - not just for those trying to deepen their historical understanding of Malaysian and Singaporean politics, but those grappling with how the modern workers’ movement relates political programme to the tasks of rebuilding a mass movement for socialism.

While the book might sound like an obscure speciality subject for ‘Mastermind’, it is a little ready reckoner for debates over a range of modern as well as historical questions. How does the workers’ movement regard mass democracy? How should Marxists regard insurrectionary politics? What type of government are we fighting for? What alliances do we build and with what classes? What is the relationship between our minimum and maximum programme? What is the nature of the ‘semi-colonial countries’ and imperialism? How should a party deal with opportunism on the left and the right? How do you maintain revolutionary politics in a non-revolutionary period?

It is useful to read the book and seek to understand the political shifts it covers through the framework of Mike Macnair’s Revolutionary strategy.¹ On display we see a party that shifts from what might be called a strategy of revolutionary patience up to World War II, to adopt one of unprincipled coalitionism (with the British), to finally end up embracing a type of Bakuninism in the form of insurrection and ‘people’s war’ without majority support.

Comrade Lockwood’s premise is that the Malayan communists took a small party, formed in 1930 (at a congress attended by Ho Chi Minh), to build a legal mass workers’ party that emerged as the only national party in Malaya after World War II. He argues this was done via a patient Kautskyian or Gramscian mass strategy of “attrition” (Kautsky) or “position” (Gramsci), building mass legal unions, navigating the zig-zags of Comintern policy and the rise of Mao in China, dealing with the vicissitudes of British imperialism and fighting a largely guerrilla war against the Japanese from 1941-45. (He notes, of course, that the comrades would not have had access to the writings of either Gramsci or Kautsky.)

Then, comrade Lockwood says, in 1948 the party threw away its patiently built, if tenuous, hegemonic position in the workers’ movement for a suicidal and adventurist militarist policy - a strategy of “manoeuvre” (Gramsci) or “annihilation” (Kautsky). In part triggered by a British crackdown on legal unions and mass organisations, this took the form of the party abandoning all its legal work in urban areas for a ‘people’s war’ against the British, for insurrection and guerrillaism. This ended in complete defeat and disaster.

In this short review, I will not go into the fascinating historical slalom of the Malayan Communist Party, as they dealt with shifts in Comintern. I will not touch on the question of whether Lai Teck, MCP general secretary from 1939 to 1947, was an imperialist agent (which most historians accept, but Lockwood challenges). I want to briefly focus on the programmatic shifts.

While comrade Lockwood is painstakingly methodical in his sources and argument, he seems to have missed the importance of the fact that the Malayan communists’ attitude to programme drifted considerably under the pressure of global politics and internal stresses.

Not a Malaysia expert, my source for this drift is largely in comrade Lockwood’s book itself. The Malayan communists started with a maximum programme for communism and a minimum programme for an independent Malaya without imperialism. Yet towards the end of the war, communism fell from the maximum programme and the minimum programme slipped to an accommodation to the ongoing presence of British imperialism.

This opened the door to the militarists, insurrectionists and left opportunists to denounce this right opportunism, which comrade Lockwood seems to gloss over in his defence of Lai Teck and the MCP’s previous strategy of building a mass, democratic movement.

Ten big demands

At its founding congress in 1930, the Malayan communists issued “Ten big demands of the Malay revolution” - its minimum programme, its bridge to taking power, where

the party’s aim was to drive out the imperialists … and achieve self-determination for the peoples of Malay in a federal-republican state. This would achieve all the freedoms plus the eight-hour day and other improvements in working conditions and expropriate the landlords, princes, officials and priests (p25).

Elsewhere, Lockwood states: “The MCP’s maximum programme was communism. But that could only be achieved through the completion of the bourgeois-democratic revolution in Malaya - the destruction of colonialism and the establishment of democracy” (p63). This programmatic approach is well within the orthodoxy of consistent, democratic and revolutionary Marxism. What comrade Macnair might call the revolutionary strategy of the centre.

There were periods of flip-flopping in the early years, as the MCP tried to keep up with the left-right shifts coming from Moscow. But, while the ‘third period’ created a sectarian split in the European working class, it had little effect in Malaya.

The MCP during the 1930s built a successful mass movement in the unions and a wide range of civil-society organisations. Much of the urban working class was ethnically Chinese, which dominated the MCP cadre. But the party was always striving to win Indian and Malay workers and farmers, albeit with limited success.

In 1941, after the British fled, forced out by the Japanese, the MCP launched a guerrilla war against the new occupying force as part of a people’s front. But it did not surrender its urban bases - it saw this as part of Comintern’s popular front period. However, from having had a minimum programme up to 1940 that aimed to drive all imperialism out of Malaya, towards the end of the war it saw the return of the British as inevitable - and dropped opposition to British rule from its minimum programme.

“From December 1941, the bedrock of the minimum programme was the expulsion of the Japanese as the occupying colonial power,” Lockwood writes (a position consistent with the earlier minimum programme). However, “the second fundamental point in the minimum programme was cooperation with the British” (p64).

By 1943, comrade Lockwood writes, “the MCP’s ultimate goals [maximum programme] were governed by what they believed was possible at this stage of the revolution - an independent, democratic republic in which they would work for communism.” Its minimum programme accepted the continued role of Britain in Malaya (p68).

This sowed the seeds of division in the party. At the end of the war, the communists and its united front armed wing, the Malayan People’s Anti-Japanese Army, surrendered (most of) their weapons to the British and sought to take up solely legal forms of struggle.

At one point in 1947, when the party started to debate again whether to take up arms, as the democratic space for operation under the British became more pinched, a leading proponent of the ‘legal path’, Chang Ming Ching, told the Singapore Free Press: “I do not think the British should be thrown out of Malaya, but I would like to see a big increase in pay and conditions for the workers” (p124). Classic economism.

The adoption of legalism, dropping all underground work and looking to build a tense coalition with the returned British, was a decided shift from a revolutionary strategy of the centre. In 1947 the MCP’s minimum programme was for ‘self-government’ within the British commonwealth and cooperation with the British Labour government.

This position, in part, seemed to be reinforced by the ‘official’ CPGB before Moscow ushered in a more hostile position to the western social democratic parties, as the cold war began.

Comrade Lockwood refers to the ‘Conference of Communist Parties of the British Empire’ in 1947, where Rajani Palme Dutt gave the keynote speech on behalf of the CPGB. It did not call for the “immediate destruction of British imperialism” (p132). While arguing that empire and socialism are irreconcilable, he also suggested a trusteeship system under the United Nations as a device for decolonisation, while the communist parties built up a “united front for national liberation”. In some countries, this would mean complete independence (such as India), in others not.

The motion passed on Malaya did not call for independence, but rather condemned British repression and called for a constituent assembly, albeit still under the British.

Back in Malaya, as the British ratcheted up pressure on the democratic movement, the long-simmering faction fight resumed between those from the former military wing led by Chin Peng and the ‘peaceful road in cooperation with the British’ wing, led by Lai Teck (who was later denounced as an imperialist spy and murdered by Thai communists in 1948).

It was the section around the demobilised armed wing that eventually gained ascendency, after two bruising internal fights. The ‘Malayan Emergency’ began and the ‘People’s War’ was launched.

I shall not go into the debates over whether Lai Teck had been an agent of French, then Japanese and British imperialism. Lockwood argues it is probably immaterial to the outcome and was used more as a smear tool. Possibly. Lai Teck did flee Malaya in 1947, with his opponents accusing him of stealing party funds.

Scylla or Charybdis

However, Lockwood seems to accept that the only two choices available to the MCP at this point were a legal road to bourgeois democratic ‘normality’ under the leadership of Lai Teck or a Maoist People’s War under Chin Peng. The strategy of revolutionary patience, of long-term hegemony, of combining legal with illegal work, with a programme to expel imperialism through a strategy of position and internationalism - all seem to vanish. Only the choice between the Scylla of British collusion or the Charybdis of insurrection remain.

Unsaid in the book, but perhaps referred to in some of comrade Lockwood’s earlier work,² is a lingering Menshevik and latter-day Stalinite idea that a bourgeois-democratic revolution of national independence must lead to the rule of the bourgeoisie - or at least a governing alliance with the national or ‘progressive’ bourgeoisie. However, a more developed Marxism - and the history of the 19th and 20th centuries - have shown that such democratic revolutions are most consistently led by the ‘subaltern’ classes, as Gramsci would express it. The bourgeoisie will not share power with the working class.

Where the bourgeoisie and reactionary forces triumph, it mostly leads to counterrevolution and the oppression of the working class, not the shortest route to socialism.³ In a country like Malaya in the middle of the last century, a strategy of revolutionary patience would mean a minimum programme for a democratic republic and the expulsion of the imperialists (like the programme the MCP started with in 1930) and a struggle for the formation of a government of the working class and poor farmers.

It is entirely consistent with Marxism that, given the nature of Malayan society at the time, such a democratic revolution would not immediately lead to socialism. By necessity it would maintain capitalist production and exchange relations for a period determined by the pace of the global shift to socialism, albeit under the rule of the workers and famers. The point of departure for advanced socialism must be from the most advanced capitalist economies.

Transition

The transition to socialism can only ripen with the development of and at the pace of a global transformation to socialism. There were debates in the MCP of a possible post-imperialist democratic union with Indonesia. And, given the successful anti-imperialist war for liberation in Vietnam, who knows where that could have led … but history did not take such a course.

I am no expert on Malaysian history (and the game of alternate histories, while fun, is a fairly arid field to sow). However, it seems that, while comrade Lockwood’s analysis starts with tremendous promise, it seems to lose track of the programmatic shift in the MCP. His initial argument for the patient strategy of position and attrition, as set out by Gramsci and Kautsky, is well put. And he correctly identifies the suicidal adventurism that seeks a short cut through insurrectionism and a general strike without the democratic backing of the majority. This all chimes with the arguments of comrade Macnair for a strategy of revolutionary patience. However, he misses the other opportunistic shortcut sought - a peaceful road to “bourgeois-democratic normality” in coalition with British imperialism and sections of the local capitalist class - also a dead end.

Nonetheless, the book is tremendously valuable in prompting these debates, and in setting out the case for a working class programme and strategy based on popular and democratic hegemony.

Comrade Lockwood, it is worth mentioning, is no typical university historian. In the 1970s he was a founding member of the Cliffite International Socialist tendency in Australia. Now a Marxist in the Australian Labor Party, comrade Lockwood’s politics have developed beyond the economistic limits of Cliffism, to one that takes political programme and the fight for the democratic rule of the working class seriously.

A healthy and welcome direction indeed.

1. See communistparty.co.uk/resources/library/mike-macnair.↩︎

2. Eg, Cronies or capitalists? The Russian bourgeoisie Cambridge 2009.↩︎

3. Some of these issues have been raised in the context of the protest movements of the 2010s, including the Arab Spring, in the book If we burn by Vincent Bevins, who said in an interview with Jewish Currents (jewishcurrents.org/vincent-bevins-if-we-burn-mass-protests-2010s) that “the counterrevolution always comes”.↩︎