WITH Najib finally going to jail, the liberals are having a field day claiming it was only through voting for them that this great achievement was won. Perhaps it is undeniable that they did play a role in this victory, though it is only a pyrrhic one. Yes, Najib who had been found guilty is now in jail, but are we sure that another Najib won’t arise?

The Pakatan Harapan victory may have led to the imprisonment of Najib, yet it also led to the consolidation of the fascist forces in the coalition between UMNO and PAS. Bolstering these was the rogue division of Bersatu that split itself from Pakatan Harapan, alongside a sizeable chunk of PKR leadership, to undemocratically overthrow the Pakatan Harapan government in just 22 months.

What can we learn from this? The liberals will cry that they were betrayed by those they trusted. But it is they that trusted those most untrustworthy. We remember how they raised Mahathir and his ilk into the highest seats of power. We remember how they assimilated those from Barisan Nasional into their ranks to bolster political power. The fault remains within the shortcut taken.

Today we see even more emphasis on battling corruption from the liberals. Witness the recent uproar over the LCS scandal. While these remain important issues, they are but manifestations of a decaying superstructure protecting a rotting base, proverbial leafless branches arising from a rotten core. Are we to satisfy ourselves by merely pruning branches, leaving the core to decay?

Combating the superstructure called corruption needs a cleansing of the core base. This should be done through organising workers into functional units, such as unions, to first push for better work conditions and then slowly to take over the means of production.

These units must have a say in the direction of a company’s profits, wages and benefits, giving some oversight into how what they have produced is used. It is important that these structures are democratic and collective in nature, as, after all, profits are achieved collectively.

Apart from growing these into organisations managed and owned by workers, parallel structures to organise common people into councils in residential areas must be established to build solidarity between individuals within a community.

With the growth of these organisations, over time, common people can ask where their tax monies went. As they see the cracked pavement, run down clinics, and decaying infrastructure, they can ask of their local government why these have not been fixed.

Their voices will carry much more power. Building on these, the masses can push for inclusion in auditing and deciding what the money allocated for their needs should be spent on. With enough of this kind of organising, eventually even federal funding can be questioned effectively.

Of course, all of this is easier said than done, but it must be done. If we are to rely on bourgeois democratic shortcuts to win power, what we will see is similar to the Pakatan Harapan rule. A government unable, unwilling or both in addressing the core rot of capitalism, resulting in the strengthening of further reactionary elements.

If Pakatan Harapan had built the proper organisations of the masses, those organisations would have banded together the second they lost the seat of power and delivered it back to them through a show of force against the conspirators of the Sheraton Move.

However, Pakatan Harapan, being servants of capitalism themselves, did not see the value in building this solidarity, focusing only on attaining power through whatever means necessary, hence the rehabilitation of Mahathir.

We must break with these halfway measures. For this, we have no choice but to organise, and then organise even more. Only then will the decay of capitalism be overthrown and a new dawn for the common people be realised. – August 29, 2022.

* Arveent Kathirtchelvan is Chief of the Pemuda Sosialis, Parti Sosialis Malaysia.

* This is the opinion of the writer or publication and does not necessarily represent the views of The Malaysian Insight. Article may be edited for brevity and clarity.