A couple weeks back @xiaohongshu@hexbear.net asked me about the Democratic Action Party (DAP) and I was a bit too brief about the party and why any genuine scientifc socialist would not ever rally behind the party so I’m here to rectify it.

At first I would like to highlight a 2 part article that holistically addresses the party, in which I will also quote heavily from with further commentary below.

Kit Siang and DAP – a response to Lim Teck Ghee

DAP and a multiracial Malaysia – a response to Lim Teck Ghee

The main issue that the Malaysian Left grapples with today is that the “left” in this country are chauvinists. In other words, they themselves perpetuate racialism and deradicalized “socialism”. This has been persistent issue since the start of the 20th century. For reasons that have been extensively discussed by many here, communist and socialist politics (in form) never took root outside Chinese and Indians. This meant Malays, but also large parts of other ethnic groups, whether Orang Asal or even mixed Peranakans.

This then sets the stage for the DAP, the favourite scapegoat for some parts of the mainstream elite, who continuously accuses them of being Chinese communists. The problem is of course that the DAP itself has never strayed too far from the neoliberal mainstream even as the “key opposition” of “Malay supremacy”. (Quick note, it is often translated as “supremacy” but ‘Ketuanan’ also is commonly translated to “dominance” or “premiership”).

Kit Siang [the leader of DAP for most of it’s life] has been a dominant figure in the DAP for a number of reasons. One, it had the support of the urban Chinese voters in the urban Chinese belt stretching from Perak to Negeri Sembilan and with pockets of Chinese support in Melaka and Johor.

…He was able to articulate the Chinese electoral concerns in a forthright manner, in some cases openly courting a Chinese chauvinist line, both inside and outside the Dewan Rakyat [parliament] and as an editor of the Rocket from 1965-1969.

…The Malay chauvinism was countered by the blunt Chinese chauvinism of DAP. This was despite DAP’s lip service for a democratic and socialist Malaysia

No party in the current coalition are truly anti-racialism. Even for the “progressives”. That is the nature of bourgeois parliamentarianism.

…Teck Ghee falls into the same trap that Kit Siang has made for himself, a pretence of DAP’s multiracialism and then hidden undercurrent of unadulterated Chinese chauvinism. There is no point in making passing references to the late Karpal Singh to show that DAP has non-Chinese credentials.

… There were no Chinese legal firms that were courageous or competent to take the legal briefs from DAP. If they were, I am sure DAP would have turned to them. There was none forthcoming and hence that relationship was a relationship of convenience, between Karpal and (now his family’s legal business) and DAP.

The superstructure of the Chinese capitalist economy in Malaysia is an important consideration to know here. It involves clan associates, paternal relationships, conscious disengagement with other ethnic groups and in a lot of aspects, right-wing Chinese nationalism. This is because the 1949 Chinese revolution, or even a 1966 cultural revolution, never took place in this country.

Instead, Chinese capital became a useful “opposition” of Malaysian capitalism, in which race becomes the focal point instead of class struggle. This is why of the top 50 richest people in Malaysia, 48 are Chinese. This is where you get stories of Chinese landlords refusing rent to non-Chinese people.

The usual rant about discriminatory NEP and discrimination has outlived its political usefulness as an intellectual narrative. The questions now posed are what did DAP do when it was in power? Not just in Penang or some of the states where it shared power, but at the federal level when it was in power, albeit briefly.

This can be said even more now that the DAP forms a large part of the unity government in power. Just recently, a member of DAP argued for a two-tier minimum wage structure between migrant workers and citizens. I guess this is the bare truth of their slogan “Malaysian Malaysia”.

In the end, class struggle continuously remains the only avenue for anyone seeking for genuine anti-racism and social justice. “Multiculturalism”, in actuality, remains to be bourgeois social contract theory, lacking the scientific materialist outlook necessary for revolutionary and lasting social change.