Situating raced capitalism in Malaysia: Colonial or anti-colonial?

Lisa Tilley and Robbie Shilliam’s conceptualisation of ‘raced markets’ shows that race, as a racial ordering system, is indispensable to global capital accumulation, evolving into different modes of organising difference/sameness in ‘the racialised division of labour, wealth accumulation, property ownership, environmental degradation and global debt’.Footnote ¹² These racial dynamics are often presented as non-racial, infusing the neoliberal global economic order with post-racialism or colour-blind racism.Footnote ¹³ Works on racial capitalism challenge post-racial/colour-blind assumptions of global capitalism by drawing attention to ‘deep connections between racism or racial inequality and capitalism’.Footnote ¹⁴ Emanated as a response to South African apartheid and subsequently popularised by Cedric Robinson as part of the ‘Black Radical Tradition’, the notion of racial capitalism is also articulated as a critique of Marxism’s neglect of ‘slavery’s role in capitalism or the ongoing importance of colonialism’.Footnote ¹⁵ While sometimes drawn from national contexts, such as the case of South African apartheid, racial capitalism primarily refers to the entanglements of race, capitalism, and colonialism as a global system, constituting but not confined to national capitalist projects.Footnote ¹⁶

How then do we conceptualise a national capitalist project that is constituted by racial/global capitalism? I turn to the case of Malaysia to reflect on this question. Malaysia’s developmental state project is aimed at restoring a Malay/Muslim civilisational history perceived to be eroded by British colonialism in the past and continuously encroached upon by Western imperialism in the present. The historical reality and living civilisation of Islam form the locus of Malay civilisational thought, a project often conceived in opposition to Western civilisation.Footnote ¹⁷ The imperative to embed a racial restructuring programme within the nationalist agenda in Malaysia stemmed from the British colonial practice of mobilising large-scale migration to fulfil labour demands of colonial capitalism, a process that had similarly upset the racial composition of former colonies like Fiji, Guyana, and South Africa.Footnote ¹⁸ Under British colonial rule, racial difference was solidified, premised on (now discredited) scientific racial theories.Footnote ¹⁹ This led to racialised hierarchies and power dynamics, where the British were forged as protectors of the Malays, the latter constructed as occupying the lowest rung in the colonial racial hierarchy.Footnote ²⁰

Race-based affirmative action in Malaya, which emerged alongside independence from British colonial rule in 1957,Footnote ²¹ started as a modest preferential treatment for the economically disadvantaged majority group politically delineated as Bumiputera (a gendered terminology referring to groups deemed as ‘native’ or ‘sons of the soil’) – with Malay constituting the largest and dominant subgroup. Nonetheless, the project was not merely an unimaginative reaction to British colonialism, but a deliberative formulation based on Japanese imperialism and its vision of Asian-led developmentalism. The New Economic Policy (NEP), a key moment in Malaysia’s political history/political economy, was rolled out in 1971 after the race riots of May 1969.Footnote ²² The NEP expanded racial restructuring to accelerate the goal of establishing a Bumiputera capitalist class. This was in line with the developmental model of the Japanese imperialist state, evident from documents presented in the Bumiputera Economic Congress (BEC) in 1965. While the project has indubitably inherited the racial categories of British colonialism, interactions with Japanese imperialism furnished the project with its racial logic and counter-hegemonic frame, an aspect not given enough attention in studies looking at the political economy of Bumiputera development.

Against this backdrop, there are two potential conceptualisations of Bumiputera capitalism that I find unsatisfactory and potentially misleading. One is strategic essentialism, a concept often attributed to Gayathri Spivak to mean the strategic mobilisation of essentialised categories to achieve certain political goals.Footnote ²³ But Spivak has no intention of turning essentialised categories into stable categories (unlike Bumiputera capitalism) and in fact later repudiated the notion of strategic essentialism,Footnote ²⁴ particularly the enactment of violence on women through its incorporation into nationalist projects.Footnote ²⁵ Jenna Marshall has similarly criticised Adom Getachew’s argument of anti-colonial nationalism as a strategy compatible with emancipatory worldmaking for its neglect of gender and class hierarchies inscribed onto these projects.Footnote ²⁶ Moreover, using an essentialised category (whether political Blackness or Bumiputera) as a catch-all phrase to capture distinct experiences of multiple racial minority groups has been pointed out to be limiting and non-strategic.Footnote ²⁷ Treating Bumiputera capitalism in Malaysia as strategic essentialism is therefore susceptible to these criticisms.

The alternative is to view the project as replicating the racial logic of colonial capitalism, portrayed as a ‘hand-me-down’ from British colonialism.Footnote ²⁸ This view tends to negate the agency of Malay nationalists and cannot explain the broad-based support of non-elite Bumiputeras for the project,Footnote ²⁹ 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).Footnote ³⁰ 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 Footnote ³¹ – in other words, a racial programme operating in a national/global economy that has transcended race. Racialisation of the national/global accumulation processes is confined to the cage of historical periodisation, a past that has left some inconvenient legacies for the present, but these racial dynamics are no longer foregrounded as active and operational.Footnote ³² The modernity of global capitalism is something to be aspired to, its racial underpinnings not criticised or interrogated.Footnote ³³ 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.

It is within this tension of not misreading the national capitalist project in Malaysia as strategic essentialism nor as a post-colonial replica of British colonialism that I articulate Bumiputera capitalism as anti-colonial raced capitalism. I use the term ‘raced capitalism’ (the use and appropriation of race in a national capitalist project) to differentiate it from ‘racial capitalism’ (racial/global capitalism constituting national capitalist projects). Raced capitalism interacts with racial capitalism, but the two processes cannot be conflated. The anti-colonial racial logic of Malaysia’s national capitalist project points to the agential role of Malay nationalists in navigating and adapting the logics of British colonialism and Japanese imperialism. This articulation, I suggest, does not romanticise anti-colonialism as unproblematic but reestablishes it as a political space with competing visions, imaginations, and agendas. I take the position that problematic elements in anti-colonial projects must not be defined out of them, that is, to construe them as ‘de-Westernisation’ instead of anti-colonialism.Footnote ³⁴ I differ from conceptual schemes that equate East Asian capitalism with Western capitalism, for instance, L. H. M. Ling’s depiction of the former as hypermasculinity in disguiseFootnote ³⁵ – this arguably conceals historical processes and distinct racial logics at work. Instead, my submission here is for a more nuanced view of anti-colonial raced capitalism as an endeavour stationed on the contradictions of being oppressed and oppressing, exploited and exploiting, dominated and dominating all at the same time.

However, unpacking anti-colonial raced capitalism necessitates a confrontation with male elite bias in existing studies on the political economy of Bumiputera development, currently fixated on male politicians, bureaucrats, and corporate figures performing in the theatres of state, markets, and politics. For example, Tan Tat Wai highlights the ‘conscious’ British colonial policy of prioritising Malay men to work in the colonial administration, some of whom would go on to become pioneers of Malay businesses, a hint at the gendered emergence of the Malay capitalist class.Footnote ³⁶ But this anecdote was not explored further by Tan. Terence Gomez and Elsa Lafaye de Micheaux sum up five institutional forms that underpin the capitalist economyFootnote ³⁷ but exclude the household as a gendered site of capitalist production/social reproduction. Such omission has been criticised in feminist writings, most pertinently in the domestic labour debate,Footnote ³⁸ and stifles understanding of how the gendered (unwaged) remainder of capitalismFootnote ³⁹ and social reproductive labour more broadly are organised/reorganised amid ongoing restructuring of the national/global economy.Footnote ⁴⁰

Gendering the British colonial suppression of Malay capitalism

The capitalist project in Malaysia entailed a grandiose racial restructuring of economic production and a profound reordering of household structure and gender relations. Both production and social reproduction were reconfigured to constitute the totality of social relations in the post-colonial capitalist economy. To appreciate why the reorganisation of social reproduction was fundamental to the emergence of Malay capitalism (and later Bumiputera capitalism), the historicising has to be brought back earlier to British colonial policy towards feudalism and peasant households in Malay society. Therein lies the potential to recover the conversation between race and gender, not because the household is equivalent to gender and social reproduction, but because the dismemberment of the household from the totality of social relations is itself a gendered construction.

Prior to British colonialism, the structure of Malay feudal society is characterised by an exploitative relationship between the Malay aristocrats and peasants. The sultans and rulers controlled the river basins and extracted tributes from freights trafficked on rivers, particularly those arising from tin mining.Footnote ⁴¹ In addition, they actively invited Chinese miners to establish operations in the vicinities, from which they profited through the supply of food and materials and the collection of taxes on tin ore.Footnote ⁴² Charles Hirschman describes the sultans and rulers as ‘major entrepreneurs’ and a ‘trading and warrior class’,Footnote ⁴³ while Syed Hussein Alatas observes that ‘the dominant standard of Malay society from the 16th century to the turn of the 19th century … was that of the warrior kingship’.Footnote ⁴⁴

These entrepreneurial Malay rulers not only exacted tributes and corvée labour from peasants but also confiscated any surplus production from them.Footnote ⁴⁵ As Hirschman infers, for peasants, ‘[given] the futility of material acquisition, productive work beyond what was necessary for survival made little sense’.Footnote ⁴⁶ Instead, they subsisted on agriculture, fishing, and foraging, economic activities that involved going out to sea, plantations, and forests but which were organised around the household as the primary economic unit.Footnote ⁴⁷ Peasant society was thus governed by a fundamentally different set of social relations, one in which subsistence rather than capitalist logic cohered. For the Malay peasants, the distinction between production and social reproduction was not clearly demarcated, fused within the household as the primary site, in the same way that the gender division of labour was not sharply defined.Footnote ⁴⁸

The advent of British colonial capitalism brought sweeping transformations to feudal relations in the Malay states, but in a way that further entrenched the Malay peasantry. The British eliminated the conditions necessary to sustain the exploitative relationship between the Malay aristocrats and peasants. Driven by the need to manage scarce resources precipitated by an expanding empire, the British signed treaties with the Malay rulers and adapted the Residential system used in India, which did not require as many personnel and resources as the Straits Settlements.Footnote ⁴⁹ The treaties involved pension payments to the Malay rulers – the amount far exceeding their feudal-based income – in exchange for designating the Malay states as British protectorates.Footnote ⁵⁰ This removed the necessity to extract tributes and corvée labour from the Malay peasants, effectively turning the Malay aristocracy ‘from a trading and warrior class to a dependent rentier class’.Footnote ⁵¹ At the same time, the British mobilised a large, disproportionate number of Chinese and Indian immigrant labour to work in tin mines and rubber plantations in the colonial capitalist economy, dramatically changing the racial composition of the Malay States.Footnote ⁵² The immigrant workers were brought in through a system of indentured labour – a system in place until 1914 when it was abolished – where their exploitability and deportability were secured through immigration laws.Footnote ⁵³ Such harsh working conditions were not acceptable to the Malay peasants, whose everyday lives, though no less impoverished, had been released from the shackles of feudal exploitation.

Nonetheless, the entrenchment of the Malay peasantry cannot be sufficiently explained without reference to the more intentional aspects of British colonial policy. There are at least three reasons why the British had opted to bring in immigrant workers instead of incorporating the Malay peasants into the colonial capitalist economy. First, the wages needed to induce the Malays to leave their peasant production would be higher than what was being paid to immigrant workers.Footnote ⁵⁴ Second, the proletarianisation of the Malays carried more risk of political revolt and unrest, a situation the British would rather avoid.Footnote ⁵⁵ Third, the Malay peasantry played an important role in the production of food for the growing immigrant workforce.Footnote ⁵⁶

The third consideration is particularly salient here and should be given more weight, because it amplifies Quijano’s insight into the Eurocentric mode of knowledge production, which tends to present a pre-capital/capital duality in the historical conception of capitalist development.Footnote ⁵⁷ Eurocentrism promotes a ‘distorted-temporal relocation’ by ‘relocating non-Europeans in the past’ through the linearity of the pre-capitalism-to-capitalism transition.Footnote ⁵⁸ But the role that the Malay peasants played in reproducing the colonial immigrant workforce via food production suggests that some features of Malay feudal society were not only compatible with colonial capitalism, but intrinsic to its functioning – a point also made by Rosa LuxemburgFootnote ⁵⁹ and found to be the case even for more contemporary forms of capitalism.Footnote ⁶⁰ In fact, the British did not just ignore the Malay peasants who wanted to plant rubber on their smallholdings but overtly discouraged their participation in the colonial capitalist economy by prohibiting the conversion of rice lands to rubber plantations.Footnote ⁶¹ This was fortified by the Stevenson Restriction Scheme, which only allowed the planting of rubber on reserve land predominantly accessible to larger estates.Footnote ⁶²

The preservation of the Malay peasantry as a necessary feature in the functioning of colonial capitalism carries the implication that, despite broader changes in the relations of production, a large segment of Malay society maintained a way of life where production and social reproduction were inextricably fused. The gender division of labour around the household remained malleable, not sharply defined. It underscores Maria Lugones’s argument that there is a coloniality of gender at the heart of Quijano’s more race-centric coloniality of power.Footnote ⁶³ Instead, the more perceptible change for many of the Malay peasants was that they had to contend with Chinese middlemen who took over from the Malay aristocrats in acquiring food and other supplies for immigrant workers.Footnote ⁶⁴

Besides the maintenance of the peasant household form, another important implication derived here is the suppression of Malay capitalist development. In an economy where supply chains, transport networks, credit sources, and market access were all organised along racial lines, fostered and encouraged by the colonial policy of divide and rule, the inability to tap into a pool of cheap Malay wage labour proved to be a severe handicap for Malay entrepreneurs aspiring to develop their own businesses.Footnote ⁶⁵ It affirms the case that the suppression of Malay capitalism, while driven by the racial reordering of production by the British, was also deeply tied to the preservation of a historically specific way of combining production and social reproduction among Malay households, encapsulated in the embodied, gendered lives of the Malay peasantry.

Although the structure of Malay peasant households was largely preserved, it should be emphasised that the meaning underlying it was changed, reinterpreted within paternalistic and racialised colonial values. British colonial ideology depicted the Malay peasants as indolent (conversely, the Chinese and Indian labourers as hard-working and docile), when it was in fact a representation of their reluctance to participate in colonial capitalist exploitation afforded them by their subsistence peasant production.Footnote ⁶⁶ This is perhaps the more recognisable contention in Alatas’s The Myth of the Lazy Native, whose works and perspectives are gaining attention in scholarly engagements with racial/colonial capitalism outside of the Western canon.Footnote ⁶⁷ But there is another under-discussed point made by Alatas on how the colonial ideology was just as flawed for its gendered reinterpretation of women’s work in the household:

Alatas echoes the perspectives articulated in the Wages for Housework campaign in the 1970s and the domestic labour debate that ensued.Footnote ⁶⁹ To what extent Alatas was informed by the campaign/debate is unclear, but suffice it to say that the suppression of Malay capitalism entailed not only a structural preservation of the Malay peasantry for the purposes of sustaining colonial capitalism, but also an ideological subjugation that was racial and gendered to legitimise colonial domination. It was a subjugation sculpted differently onto the embodied lives of Malay women and men and encompassed the intertwined elements of devaluing domestic labour and affixing women’s position to devalued labour.

Reclaiming the Japanese imperial origins of Bumiputera capitalism

How then did the post-colonial developmental state take the eventual form of Bumiputera capitalism? Diana Wong makes the astute observation that: ‘The Emergency, and not the Japanese Occupation, has come to hold the place of founding myth of the modern Malaysian state.’Footnote ⁷⁰ A parallel can be drawn here with Bumiputera capitalism, where the Emergency, and not the Japanese Occupation, has come to hold the place of its founding myth. In this section, I challenge this founding myth and argue that the origins of Bumiputera capitalism must be resituated from the Emergency in 1969 to the Japanese Occupation in 1941–5.

Kazuko Suzuki articulates Japan as a Pan-Asian empire that emerged in the decades leading up to World War II, encumbered with two strategic considerations: first, the need to safeguard national security against Western threat, and second, the ambition to expand its empire over Asia.Footnote ⁷¹ More saliently, Suzuki highlights race as central to the Japanese imperialist project, albeit operationalised with a different logic, what Suzuki calls ‘Orientalism by the Orient’.Footnote ⁷² This racial logic was shaped by the need to distinguish itself from white supremacy and lend legitimacy to its imperial expansion in Asia. Hence, Japanese racial logic was not premised on the universalism of white supremacy, but the particularism of Japanese essence that ‘could serve as the guiding light for Asian peoples that were similar to them’.Footnote ⁷³ While not completely delinked from Eurocentric racial theories and race science, Japanese intellectuals and scientists created a ‘Japanese-centric racial order against the colonized’,Footnote ⁷⁴ imagined as an East Asian racial hierarchy with the Japanese at the top.Footnote ⁷⁵ The Japanese racial essence fused together racial, ethnic, and cultural signifiers,Footnote ⁷⁶ constituting itself as a ‘biocultural category’Footnote ⁷⁷ and positioning the Japanese as ‘biologically closer to Europeans than other Asians’.Footnote ⁷⁸

As such, Japanese imperialist policies yielded an oppression that was simultaneously exclusionary and inclusionary: stratifying Asians according to their proximity to Japanese essentialism while forcing colonial subjects to assimilate into Japaneseness, the pinnacle of Asianism.Footnote ⁷⁹ Japanese racialisation did not entail the production of new racial groups but operated ‘in conjunction with already racialized assumptions of particular populations’.Footnote ⁸⁰ Japanese imperialist policies culminated in the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity sphere, which rallied Asia together using the rhetoric of racial, cultural, and geographical ‘closeness’ and liberating the region from the West.Footnote ⁸¹ The existence of Japanese racial hierarchies highlights the importance of paying attention to racial logic at work in non-white, non-Western societies, underpinned by the broader point that there is more than one empire, more than one logic in empires, and more than one racial logic in the making of empire.

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. Lim Mah Hui makes this lucid point:

While Japanese policy was to maintain existing British administrative structure as much as possible,Footnote ⁸³ it adopted a different racial strategy of instilling ethno-nationalism instead of merely mitigating social conflicts with divide and rule. The Japanese policy of fostering ethno-nationalist sentiments was aimed at the Malays, designed around the idea that they would be the ‘principal racial group’Footnote ⁸⁴ in occupied Malayan territories, couched within the broader rhetoric of Pan-Asianism and colonial liberation. But the Japanese pro-Malay policy was based on a line of intellectual racial thought that had promulgated some extremely racist views of the Malays as a degenerate race, ironically as ‘progenitors of the Japanese’ who had descended into irrationality and idleness due to the ‘biological fixity [nature] moulded in the tropical climate’.Footnote ⁸⁵ Tomohito Baji’s lengthy commentary on Nangokuki, one of the bestselling books in the late Meiji period, is worth citing here:

To reverse the ‘degeneracy’ of the Malays, Nitobe Inazo, a renowned Japanese colonial scholar and technocrat, advocated for a ‘civilised government’ to improve their living conditions and incorporate them ‘as wage labourers into an empire-wide industrial capitalist system’.Footnote ⁸⁷

Armed by these racial views, the Japanese augmented early Malay nationalist sentiments which had already existed at the time, for example, among the anti-colonial pan-Islamist Kaum Muda, with strong connections with the Middle East, and the left-wing group Kesatuan Melayu Muda, which was inspired by nationalist movements in Indonesia.Footnote ⁸⁸ To achieve its pro-Malay policy, the Japanese established leadership training schools known as the Koa Kunrenjo in the Straits Settlements of Singapore, Penang, and Malacca,Footnote ⁸⁹ which went on to become the bastion for producing elite Malay leaders instrumental in developing the architecture of Bumiputera capitalism later on. Some of the Malay leaders who attended the Koa Kunrenjo include Abdul Razak, who became the second prime minister of Malaysia, and Raja Mohar, a close ally of Abdul Razak, both of whom went on to serve as counterbalance to the more Anglo-centric leanings of Tunku Abdul Rahman (the first prime minister).Footnote ⁹⁰

As discerningly captured by Wong, when the British returned to Malaya after the surrender of Japan in 1945, they had to launch an ‘ideological offensive’ to arrest the Japanese propaganda that ‘the British had failed to defend Malaya’.Footnote ⁹¹ While this was partly to deal with the practical problem of worsening Sino-Malay antagonisms,Footnote ⁹² it was no less motivated by the need to restore ‘native loyalty’, which the British mistakenly thought they had secured prior to the Japanese Occupation.Footnote ⁹³ Wong postulates that this ideological offensive paralleled the Japanese rallying cry of liberation but adapted to a variation of the ‘White Man’s Burden’ of liberating civilians from the communist/Chinese ‘terrorists’. The ideological offensive also reinforced the notion that Islam and socialism/communism were fundamentally incompatible.Footnote ⁹⁴

Malay attitudes towards the British definitely took a downward turn, fuelled by their inflamed nationalist sentiments, no longer mystified by the invincibility of the British empire.Footnote ⁹⁵ However, they had to strategically navigate their relations with the British as ‘winner’ of the war, buttressed by the British ideological offensive against Japanese propaganda and compounded by Japanese reticence in remembering the war in Southeast Asia.Footnote ⁹⁶ All these worked in tandem to produce the Japanese Occupation as ‘an unfortunate anomaly of history’, an interregnum, rather than ‘a watershed in the history of the country’.Footnote ⁹⁷

Nonetheless, Japanese imperial influence did not disappear. Malay nationalists adopted and adapted ideas from Japanese imperialism vis-à-vis British colonialism in forwarding localised visions of Malay nationalism and development.Footnote ⁹⁸ One of the most unambiguous manifestations of this can be found in the working papers prepared for the first BEC in 1965, an influential state-connected platform for mobilising Bumiputera causes and resources. In line with Abdul Razak’s aspiration,Footnote ⁹⁹ BEC 1965 was organised on the back of increasing Malay discontent with their economic conditions, particularly among the Malay petite bourgeoisie.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ With political independence, the Malay peasants became a major force in electoral politics, commanding ‘more than 80% of the Malay electoral votes’.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Discontented with their impoverished conditions and fuelled by the appeal of urban affluence, the Malay peasants assumed a political clout that had to be mobilised by the Malay petite bourgeoisie to push for the development of Bumiputera capitalism.Footnote ¹⁰²

At the same time, the large-scale influx of immigrant workers that could further unsettle the racial composition had to be halted, rendering the Malay peasantry as an attractive source of labour. Hence, the emergence of Bumiputera capitalism was only possible with the disintegration of the Malay peasantry, which necessitated the reconstitution of a large segment of Malay households and its associated gender division of labour. Peasant disintegration was picked up in BEC 1965 as a lesson distilled from the Japanese experience:

Raja Mohar, Abdul Razak’s close ally mentioned earlier, was in two of the committees in BEC 1965, responsible for the working papers on capital formation as well as business and commerce, while Wan Hamid, a manager with the Rural Industrial Development Authority (RIDA) under Abdul Razak’s purview, drafted the working paper on Bumiputera participation in industry. The dissatisfaction with the government’s laissez-faire policy, seen as a continuation of the British colonial administration, was unequivocal:

In calling for more direct forms of government intervention, the influence of Japanese imperialism was clear, captured in a section subtitled ‘The Japanese Example’:

The Japanese empire was not only invoked as a justification for direct government interventions, but as a specific model of the ‘developmental state’ to emulate. The role of the developmental state was not merely to address market failures but to actively promote and cultivate the modern capitalist class:

It is striking that the paper went further to revere the Japanese strategy as having ‘contributed to the development of Japan as an imperialist State’,Footnote ¹⁰⁷ resembling what Suzuki describes as the ‘duplicitousness of the Pan-Asian rhetoric’, where ‘domination of Asians by Caucasians was colonization, but domination of Asians by Asians was colonial liberation’.Footnote ¹⁰⁸

Following BEC 1965, Abdul Razak announced that the important RIDA would be reorganised, empowered, and renamed as Majlis Amanah Rakyat (MARA), as well as launching Bank Bumiputera, formed with the aim of providing credit assistance to the Bumiputeras.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ The Japanese imperialist state invoked in the landmark BEC 1965 points to how this specific formulation of Bumiputera capitalism – direct state intervention with the goal of transferring assets to private hands as a mode to create a Bumiputera capitalist class – has preceded the NEP and reflects a broader political base and deeper ideological aspiration than intimated in extant historicising of the Bumiputera agenda.Footnote ¹¹⁰

The process of transferring state-owned assets to private hands accelerated in the 1990s under Mahathir Mohamad, who became prime minister in 1981, but it was an element intrinsic to the design of the Japanese imperialist/developmental state. Mahathir, brought back into the political fold by Abdul Razak, did more to unfurl ideas from Japanese imperialism. During his first administration (1981–2003), Mahathir enacted his signature Look East Policy in 1982, looking to Japan as a role model for work ethics and cultural values. In the early 1980s, he pursued heavy industrialisation by establishing joint ventures between the state-owned Heavy Industries Corporation of Malaysia (HICOM) and Japanese firms in a wide range of industries, most notably in the production of Malaysia’s first national car.Footnote ¹¹¹ Mahathir was also a keen supporter of the zaibatsu system mentioned in BEC 1965.Footnote ¹¹²

Registering contradictions under anti-colonial raced capitalism

Grounded in Japanese imperialism, Bumiputera capitalism emerged as a regime constituting and sustaining the totality of social relations to make a specific form of capital accumulation rational, i.e. to achieve the goal of putting ownership and control in the hands of the Bumiputeras. This builds on Alatas’s exposition of capitalism as not merely the impulse for accumulation, but the broader reordering of society that makes accumulation rational.Footnote ¹¹³ But the reordering (and disintegration) of the Malay peasantry to bring about Bumiputera capitalism was initially fashioned after the idea of getting Malay men to participate in ‘modern’ sectors of the economy, both in terms of entrepreneurship and wage work, while envisioning Malay women’s role to be at home.Footnote ¹¹⁴

Malay women continued to be the backbone of the ‘traditional’ household-based peasant agriculture from 1957 (Malaya’s independence) to 1970 (one year before the NEP).Footnote ¹¹⁵ In fact, there is no mention of women at all in the Second Malaysia Plan (1971–5), which first outlined the NEP. This particular articulation of an androcentric raced capitalist project was shaped by the combined effects of British colonial domestication of women’s household labour, intrinsic to its racialised suppression of Malay capitalism, and the Japanese-inspired model of assigning the state to be the principal agent in dismantling British colonial racial (but not gender) structures. Onn Jaafar, the founder and first president of the United Malays National Organisation (UMNO), the dominant Malay nationalist party, remarked in 1959:

In one sense, attaching women’s role at home to a broader nationalist project rescues women’s domestic labour from colonial devaluation, underscoring the point of not overlooking the seduction of anti-colonial raced capitalism and its capacity to mobilise desires and produce subjectivities.Footnote ¹¹⁷ The sense of meaning and purpose rendered by the opportunity to participate in ‘nation building’ through gendered acts of caring and nurturing at home, woven into the racial/religious self, can bring sublime fulfilment to bear upon the mundanity of everyday life. Anti-colonial raced capitalism extends deep into the lifeworlds of pre-colonial Malay society, tapping into the sense of loss delivered by colonial erasures and offering a grammar of racial/religious redemption through the gendered reconstitution of the home as a space for nation building, and the self as an agent within this post-colonial edifice.

The insertion of gender, social reproduction, and the household into the political economy of Bumiputera development resembles the discourse on the ‘Women’s Question’ in India, which characterises the post-colonial nationalist project as ‘modern but different’ (from colonialism), negotiating modernity and tradition by reconstituting the household and inscribing a distinctive patriarchy onto the embodied lives of women.Footnote ¹¹⁸ Suzanne Bergeron postulates that the navigation of the modern and traditional imbued in these gender narratives is intertwined with and often framed within the interest of an imagined national economy, fabricated as a project that can be cohesively managed by the state.Footnote ¹¹⁹

However, the distinctive patriarchy underlying Bumiputera capitalism cannot be severed from the racial logic used to constitute it as a specific nationalist project, something to be prioritised over competing nationalist imaginaries in Malaysia. In fact, I contend that the more embedded Japanese element within Bumiputera capitalism lies not so much in the developmental state model inspired by Japan, but in the racial logic underpinning the Japanese imperialist project. This is perhaps best illustrated with reference to Mahathir’s racial views in his now classic (but formerly controversial) book, The Malay Dilemma,Footnote ¹²⁰ espousing a racial logic that must be understood as having resonance beyond a single personality. Mahathir maintains the view that race is not just biologically marked, but intertwined with culture and value systems:

Such a conception of race is similar to the way Japanese essentialism is circumscribed by the biocultural fusion of racial, ethnic, and cultural signifiers.Footnote ¹²² Mahathir has always viewed Western domination as having roots in its racial values, not primarily economic nor religious, and thought that the answer for the East lies with Japanese leadership.Footnote ¹²³ He holds Japanese culture and value system in high esteem,Footnote ¹²⁴ epitomised in his Look East Policy aimed at emulating the Japanese value system, which he sees as non-racial.Footnote ¹²⁵ But Suzuki points out that nationality in contemporary Japan includes a racial formulation:

The racial formulation that equates race with nationality can also be found in Mahathir’s lengthy exposition of the Malays as the ‘definitive race’ of Malaysia.Footnote ¹²⁷ He asserts that ‘to be truly indigenous one must belong to no other race but that truly identified with a given country’, and therefore, ‘the Malays are the original or indigenous people of Malaya, and the only people who can claim Malaya as their one and only country’.Footnote ¹²⁸

Mahathir’s definitive race is an articulation of Malay essentialism drawing on the double-sided exclusionary and inclusionary oppressions found in the Japanese racial logic. On the one hand, the summoning of nationality, expressed as people who ‘formed the first effective governments’,Footnote ¹²⁹ is meant to exclude the indigenous peoples in Peninsular Malaysia (known as the Orang Asli) from claiming the status of ‘definitive race’. On the other hand, the Malays as the definitive race serves as the pinnacle of nativism just as the Japanese essence serves as the apex of Asianism, rallying together various racial and ethnic subgroups under the umbrella category of Bumiputera. It is also similar to Japanese racialisation in the sense that Mahathir assigned new cultural meanings to colonial-inherited racial categories rather than producing new ones.

The close resemblance of Mahathir’s definitive race to the racial logic of the Japanese imperialist state suggests that, while Bumiputera capitalism is often viewed as a form of Malay hegemony (notably amongst non-Malay Bumiputeras in East Malaysia),Footnote ¹³⁰ it is not a hegemony premised on the universalism of the West but the particularism of the East. Malay supremacy (ketuanan Melayu) is not a claim to universal racial superiority but the mobilisation of a racial particular (Malayness) around notions of racial and cultural ‘closeness’, crucial for fortifying numerical strength and ‘liberating’ an imagined civilisational space from Western threats – in which non-Malay/non-Bumiputera presence remains a colonial legacy.

But this raced capitalist vision of confronting British colonial legacies, which necessitated a specific way of reorganising gender and race relations, also entailed another contradiction which can be delineated as follows: to expand ownership and control of Bumiputera wealth, capital must be concentrated in the hands of a few (whether Bumiputera individuals or institutions), to the extent that it achieves economies of scale, competitive leverage, and economic power (vis-à-vis global and domestic non-Bumiputera capital). However, capital concentration must not jeopardise the broader socio-political base given the inherently exploitative and unequal tendencies in this process.Footnote ¹³¹ The tension between capital concentration and diffusion was particularly acute in the years prior to the NEP, given the extremely small size of the Malay capitalist class, proxied at 1.5% share capital in limited companiesFootnote ¹³² when Malay constituted 50% of the population in Peninsular Malaysia in 1969.Footnote ¹³³ The other 98.5% share capital was mainly distributed between foreigners (62.1%) and (Malaysian) Chinese (22.8%).Footnote ¹³⁴

The ability to build legitimacies around these contradictions is therefore central to the reproduction of Bumiputera capitalism, where the state is featured as having a pivotal role.Footnote ¹³⁵ Mahathir argues in his book, The Malay Dilemma, that this trade-off latent in the expansion of Bumiputera capitalism was necessary for the Malays to endure, enacting it as both an economic and a racial dilemma.Footnote ¹³⁶ Contrary to Mahathir, Alatas opposes Bumiputera capitalism for its exploitative and unequal tendencies but affirms the task of ‘uplifting the Malay community’ through non-capitalist forms of preferential treatment,Footnote ¹³⁷ suggesting that anti-colonial strategies do not necessarily have to be formulated based on capitalist imperatives, and that a rejection of raced capitalism must not be conflated with a repudiation of race-based affirmative action – the latter has been used in other parts of the world to fix historical racial discrimination.Footnote ¹³⁸ Alatas also criticises The Malay Dilemma for reproducing the colonial image of the indolent Malays, seeing race and class as avenues for deconstructing the post-colonial condition.Footnote ¹³⁹

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,Footnote ¹⁴⁰ 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 studiedFootnote ¹⁴¹ – 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.Footnote ¹⁴²

The extensive reconfiguration of Malay women’s role was also imbricated with the goal of expanding Bumiputera household savings needed to facilitate state-led capital accumulation while keeping wages low for foreign investments, crucial for balancing the needs of racial restructuring and economic growth.Footnote ¹⁴³ In other words, the gendered reconstitution of Malay women as an income-contributing member of the household was essential to sustaining a raced capitalist project typically designed around Malay men. It points to the limitations of the liberal feminist paradigm of conceiving emancipation as the extrication of women from the oppressive space of the ‘home’ into the liberating space of ‘work’. Wage work may be able to decouple some women from devalued labour, but it renders the majority of women exploitable and ultimately does not improve women’s position in society.

Moreover, the shift in gender strategy to paid/wage work did not completely transition away from affixing women’s position to the ‘home’. Instead, it took the form of reconciling (but also dichotomising) women’s roles at ‘home’ and at ‘work’. For example, the Fifth Malaysia Plan (1986–90) distinguishes between ‘women in family development’ and ‘women with respect to employment’ in its gender narrative of national development.Footnote ¹⁴⁴ Mahathir views Malay women’s diligence, shrewdness, and saving tendencies as qualities that can be leveraged to help the Malays in the two spheres of ‘home’ and ‘work’. Women’s ‘natural industry’, which combines production and social reproduction within a single spatial unit, i.e. the household, is thought of as something that can be leveraged to support Bumiputera capital accumulation, articulated as a gendered vision of Malay men doing wage work and Malay women managing urban shophouses.Footnote ¹⁴⁵

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. The resurgence of Islamist revivalist movements among the Malay-Muslim community in the 1970s increasingly put pressure on the state for more Islamisation of public life.Footnote ¹⁴⁶ To accommodate this exigency and prevent it from getting out of control, Mahathir co-opted Anwar Ibrahim (who went on to become his deputy and later nemesis) into UMNO in 1982. Anwar was then a key leader of the influential Malaysian Islamic Youth Movement. His entry into the political mainstream expedited the development of the Islamic knowledge base underlying Bumiputera capitalism, most prominently in institutionalising the works of Anwar’s intellectual mentor, Syed Naquib Al-Attas, widely known for his notion of ‘Islamisation of knowledge’ as the basis for an alternative post-colonial order.Footnote ¹⁴⁷

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’ capitalFootnote ¹⁴⁸ 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.

It should be noted that the epistemic project of (Syed Naquib) Al-Attas, which equips Bumiputera capitalism with its Islamic underpinnings, is broadly recognised as a constituent part of the decolonial lexiconFootnote ¹⁴⁹ but differs from (Syed Hussein) Alatas’s alternative repertoire of combining Islam and socialism.Footnote ¹⁵⁰ It has also been pointed out that Al-Attas’s writings distort pre-Islamic Malay history and provide fodder for discrimination against minority groups.Footnote ¹⁵¹ Moreover, the Islamic knowledge base underlying Bumiputera capitalism has merely enabled the flourishing of ‘Islamic capitalism’ but not fundamentally challenged the economic system on issues of social justice and equity.Footnote ¹⁵² Instead, its epistemic project, framed as a challenge to Western hegemony, leans towards demonstrating compatibility between Islam and global capitalism, ultimately legitimising and maintaining the global economic order.Footnote ¹⁵³

By locating productive and social reproductive relations within the racial/religious frames of Bumiputera capitalism, the different gender strategies of combining ‘home’ and ‘work’ provide a ‘naturalised rationale’Footnote ¹⁵⁴ and a moralised frame for differentiating households and workers within the Malay community. It serves as a racialised/gendered mechanism to regulate access to economic resources/privileges and incarcerate the racial/religious self to capitalist modes of being. Women are increasingly being differentiated into female elites who are highly educated/in decision-making positions and those relegated to ‘flexible’ home-based work, i.e. housewives, single mothers, and female-headed households.Footnote ¹⁵⁵ The Malay household as a gendered site for mobilising racial/religious desires and enacting naturalised/moralised differences reveals how gender and race are tightly knit in stabilising and reproducing Bumiputera capitalism. The racial logic of constructing difference with Western capitalism is activated through a gender strategy fastened to a racial particular, a combined process that continuously adapts to changing dynamics of the uneven geopolitics of multiple empires, yielding the opportunity to showcase alternative ways of doing capitalism that do not necessarily subscribe to Western racial and gender logics.