BY: JOEL LAZARUS
What is ‘development’?
It’s October 2005 in Oxford – the first class of my Development Studies Masters degree. We’re all asked to take pen and paper and write down our definition of the word…’development’. I have no idea what I wrote back then. Ask me now and I guess I’d say that it depends on your perspective: Who is doing the developing? To whom? To what? On what grounds/by what right? For what/whose purpose? This isn’t a post-modern cop out. It’s the recognition of development as a relational concept and practice, largely determined in word and deed by power.
Singapore: the development king!
Back to June 2014 in Singapore, where I find myself living as my wife spends a year here working as a doctor. All that stuff I learnt about in my Masters – Import-Substitution→ Export-Oriented Industrialisation; all those indicators – life expectancy (14th in the world), education (ranked 2nd), per capita incomes (3rd) – at all that stuff, Singapore is development king! In two generations, this tiny city-state has transformed itself from colonial outpost to globalisation powerhouse: the world’s second largest port; Asian corporate HQ; key global financial centre; one ultra-modern, hi-tech city. Forget ‘First World’, Singapore is ‘Premier World’!…
So, then, how would we answer the questions I deemed central to defining and understanding ‘development’ in the Singaporean context?…
Q: Who is doing it?
A: A small, powerful insulated elite at the head of a still dominant post-independence ruling party.
Q: What is being developed?
A: Land and labour.
Q: On what grounds/by what right?
A: A fervent nationalism is used as political legitimation with existential threats incessantly raised; and a bourgeois culture of intense competition and the cult of the entrepreneur is fostered.
Q: For what/whose purpose?
A: Predominantly and increasingly, for the purpose of domestic and transnational capital accumulation.
In short, Singapore is the example par excellence of the historical macro-political-economic transition of successful post-colonial development: from Cold War nationalist-statism to globalised neo-liberalism.
The developmentalist push delivered real rewards for all Singaporeans. The same cannot be said for its neo-liberal turn. It’s been the usual globalisation agenda implemented aggressively with the usual ‘exemplary’ results. In terms of inequality, the richest 10% of Singapore’s population were 45 times richer than the poorest 10% in 1980. Today, they are 275 times richer! According to one estimate, the income share of the richest 15% almost doubled in a decade – from 15% in 2002 to 28% in 2013.
As for poverty, the percentage of those receiving less than half the average monthly income (S$1500 – £750!) has exploded over the last decade from 16% to 28%! That’s in the city recently crowned most expensive in the world. It gets worse. Singaporeans also work longer hours than any other developed nation.
At the top, excellent macro-economic management has surely sustained Singaporean growth. Yet, at the bottom, it is nothing but exceptionally exploited labour – the Filipino and Indonesian maids, the Chinese and Indian construction workers, the (often elderly) service and catering staff, and the pan-Asian agricultural labourers growing the food from afar – that really keep this model of capital accumulation and underlying social stability going.
Sad Singaporeans
Unsurprisingly, very many Singaporeans are miserable. In a 2012 Gallup poll, Singaporeans ranked bottom out of 148 countries for positive emotions! Even Iraqis polled 4% higher!
Singaporeans work so long that very many don’t even have enough time for basic personal and social reproductive functions: sleeping, cooking (they eat out), and even having sex and babies. Their children are equally sleep-deprived as parents push them relentlessly to study. ‘Kiasu‘, a Hokkien Chinese word meaning ‘fear of losing’, is the dominant ethos here. And what do Singaporeans do with the little leisure time left? Why, they go to the ubiquitous shopping malls, of course, in which the commodification of the banal and environmentally destructive has been turned into an art-form.
Alien-nation
If, following Marx, we understand life for our ‘species-being’ as freedom expressed within our productive relationship with nature, then we begin to understand the profound alienation of Singaporean society. Most Singaporeans are alienated both from the product of their labour and from nature itself. In the first sense, workers are estranged from the product of their own labour as wage-labourers with minimal control over their (oh so long) working lives. Far from a positive life-affirming experience, work is a negative, mere life-sustaining compulsion. Such ‘estranged labour’, particularly in the large, faceless corporations that dominate here, is a ‘labour of…mortification’. This is made concrete in estrangement from one another. I witness all this daily when confronted by the weary monotony of the labour of the shopping mall; by the soulless anonymity of its commodity exchange; by the gated ‘communities’ without community; by the ancient army of cleaners whose Sisyphean endeavours sustain Singaporeans.
In the second sense, nature, our own ‘inorganic self’, is reduced to mere ‘tools and subsistence’. Nature is rendered invisible or repressed here: waste is disposed of via a chute in one’s apartment; myriad global commodities ‘appear’ in supermarkets; planned, pristine parks express a modernist dominance over the natural world. There is minimal connection to our Earth.
Finally, this alienation compels us to look for meaning and self-worth beyond our work lives. This, coupled with the economic necessity for ever-increasing consumption, lures us ever lower into the spiritual mire of the commodity fetish. Again, reflecting this, Singapore has been ‘developed’ into the ultimate shopping paradise (hell!) on Earth!
Singapore: developed to death
Singapore, as über-developed city state, constitutes perhaps the most mature process of capitalist alienation: from each other, from nature, and from ourselves. Marx argued that ‘the devaluation of the human world grows in direct proportion to the increase in value of the world of things.’ Under the near total dominance of globalised bourgeois politics, economics, and culture, life for too many here is a living death; a deadening life.
Singapore and Singaporeans have achieved so much, but now the fruits of people’s excessively hard work are increasingly enjoyed by the few. In recent years, there have been some stirrings among the island’s population: the ruling People’s Action Party has lost its total electoral dominance; there have been protests over workers’ pay and rights (and, worryingly, over immigration); and prominent public figures have criticised the government. These are (largely) encouraging signs. It will require the participation of all Singaporeans to develop the island toward a more sustainable and democratic future.
[This article is dedicated to Roy Ngerg, a brave young Singaporean blogger, whose excellent graphics I have used here, and whose campaign for transparency over Singapore's Central Provident Fund has led to dismissal from his job and a defamation suit from PM Lee Hsien Loong. His graphs are constructed from data from OECD, HDR, and Govt of Singapore.]
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Joel Lazarus has been teaching at various UK universities and working on community education projects since getting his PhD from Oxford University in 2011.
*Article first appeared on http://www.columnf.com/singapore-developed-to-death/