Why Has Asian Socialism Failed?
Yew, Lee Kuan
There was a time not so long ago, at the end of the Second World War, when people expected the whole world to go Socialist. Throughout the world there seemed to be an inevitable trend toward...
...But in my own state, I have to concede that because it takes a long time to inculcate the high value of public duty and sense of service to the community, performance has been best only when workers are offered high incentives for high performance...
...When a Socialist Government in Britain, shortly after it assumed office in 1945, decided to liquidate its empire in Asia, there were hopes that the future would mean a more just and equal world where governments of Socialist leanings varying from progressive liberal, Social Democrat or democratic Socialist, to Communist, would soon take charge of the destinies of mankind in nearly all countries of the world...
...It has not changed our belief in the basic tenet that no man should exploit his fellow man...
...The democratic Socialists who were in charge of some of these governments in South Asia lacked the managerial and technical expertise in administration, management and the technological and industrial skills to be able to realize their plans for economic transformation...
...For in the last analysis the better life is produced only by sustained and intense effort...
...Our building programs have progressed rapidly because we allowed the individual worker to earn as much as he can over his fellow workers by working as hard as he likes...
...Why then did not the advanced countries in Europe with Socialist governments give corresponding assistance to their counterparts in Asia...
...But what of the democratic Socialist governments in Europe...
...So we must seek a formula that will first make it possible for the South Vietnamese to recover their freedom of choice which at the moment is Lmited to either Communist capture or perpetual American military operations...
...On the other hand, we know that any extension or escalation of the war is dangerous and contrary to the ideals we claim to espouse...
...But in order to get economic growth we have had to base our policies on the principle "From each his economic best...
...Indeed some of this was done on an appreciable scale as in India, with technical assistance from both U.N...
...Democratic Socialists in the advanced countries are fortunate in that the relatively comfortable state of their societies makes it possible for them to maintain their tenets of tolerant but progressive society against more totalitarian creeds...
...As democratic Socialists we should uphold all individual human liberties...
...The capitalists make people work through monetary incentives which we call sweated and exploited labor...
...They have foretold doom and perdition awaiting us when the moment of exposure comes, when, as they predicted, we would stand before the eyes of the masses stripped of all pretense, revealed as stooges of foreign capitalists, imperialist interests, and then rejected and destroyed...
...The ultimate ideal "From each his best, to each his need" can only be relevant after we have moved away from ignorance, illiteracy, poverty, and economic backwardness...
...agencies and direct from government to government...
...We know that what is happening is wrong...
...Many of the leaders who foregathered on that occasion are now no longer able to lead their countries toward Social ism...
...We have been unable to advance a more constructive alternative than to talk of unconditional negotiations hoping that negotiations may lead to a neutral South Vietnam...
...The lack of these instruments of pol icy implementation could have been made up by borrowing expertise from abroad...
...For what is required to keep the rest of South-East Asia free from going through similar tribulations i:e not just a neutral South Vietnam...
...For us in...
...Even between the industrially advanced nations of Europe and America, almost all capitalist in their economic system, there is a clear divergence of interests and of views between the Western allies...
...As democratic Socialists we must insist that the South Vietnamese have the right not to be pressured through armed might and organized terror and finally overwhelmed by Communism...
...However, we know that this is hardly likely to be the end result of neg3tiations...
...We knew that the Communists would never help the democratic Socialists...
...The biggest contribution we can make of course is to the peace, progress and prosperity of the peoples of Afro-Asia...
...This could have helped these countries tide over the period of transition when local men were acquiring the training and skills...
...True, the capitalists, and in particular the Americans, have poured in aid and investments—and perhaps a part of this massive economic transfusion has to some degree benefited the workers—and for a long while Americans preferred to support only antiCommunist governments...
...If we re-evaluate and reformulate our thinking and policy to make a more effective contribution in the next decade, we can still make a contribution to Asia's and Africa's advance...
...We know that if the Communists are able to advance their frontiers to envelop South Vietnam it will be only a matter of time before the same process of emasculation by military and political techniques will overtake the neighbouring countries...
...Asia and even more so in Africa the acute pressures and conflicts of mass poverty, hunger and despair, and, worse, the obscene and often also the ostentatious display of individual wealth in the midst of grinding poverty, is a constant incitement to sudden and violent revolution...
...Perhaps we have underestimated the human problems of finding the techniques of organizing men for production, and of persuading men to accept the disciplines of modernized agricultural and industrial production, if we are to fulfill their dreams...
...Quite a number are in jail, put there by governments that assert themselves as equally if not more Socialist and nationalist than the people they have displaced...
...I am an unrepentant Socialist...
...Those who want a social revolution without destroying individual human values find this setting makes the task an intensely difficult and delicate effort...
...For decades the Communists have maligned the democratic Socialists or Social Democrats as betrayers of the working classes because of their petty bourgeois shortcomings...
...Today, two decades later, we have a much more sober realization that automatic progress toward an equal and just world is not something that • Extracts from the opening speech made atthe Conference of Young Asian Socialist Leaders held in Bombay on May 6-9...
...We have had to recognize these faults...
...And if we approach Asian problems of poverty and underdevelopment through the rosy spectacles of the Western European Socialists we are sure to fail...
...But however disappointing it has been to those who seek the ideal world where all men are brothers, these developments have given corroboration to the major premises of democratic Socialism...
...They have been twelve years of many disappointments and few successes for democratic Socialists...
...Indeed they used to find it difficult to distinguish Socialists from Communists...
...Then after the South Vietnamese are able to exercise their collective will without duress from either side, ultimately, be it after five, ten or twenty years, they must have the right to decide their final destiny, whether or not they choose to be reunited with North Vietnam and on what terms...
...Why have the hopes of inevitable progress toward a Socialist world so lamentably failed to materialize in Asia...
...It is twelve years since the first Asian Socialist Conference in Rangoon in 1953...
...But we are conscious that the world consists of more classifications and permutations than just the capitalists, the Communists and the Socialists...
...We meet as Asian Socialists, first to reestablish our bearings, next to find common ground and common interests, and then to formulate not dissimilar attitudes on world problems...
...Throughout the world there seemed to be an inevitable trend toward a more egalitarian society...
...If we want to mobilize human resources, to pitchfork our countries and backward economies into the industrial and technological era, then no person has the right to slack...
...Like you, my colleagues and I have been vilified as betrayers of the working class by the Communists in Malaysia...
...Reflecting on the past decade of few achievements and many omissions is a sobering exercise...
...Throughout the world, national survival, the advancement of purely sectional interests within a nation, have confused the course of developmentIt is not only in emergent nations that nationalism has found its strong expression...
...As Asians we must uphold the right of the Vietnamese people to self-determination...
...The Communists do it by regimentation and exhortation and a systematically induced state of semihysteria for work, using both the stick and the carrot...
...Yet ironically enough, true to form, it is the Communists in Malaysia who are leading Indonesian saboteurs and guerrillas into the country in subservience to a line laid down by foreign powers, helping to undermine the integrity of their own country, helping to sell out the workers they claim to lead, all in the name of Communism...
...But the fault was nearer home...
...How is it that some manifestly nonSocialist governments in the region have made more economic progress and increased their Gross National Product more rapidly than countries in Southeast Asia that have had Socialist governments...
...The democratic Socialist is less ruthless and consequently less efficient, torn between his loathing for regimentation and mass coercion and his inhibition to making more effec tive use of the carrot by his desire to distribute the rewards more fairly and equally too soon...
...Our lowest productivity level is in many sections of our own government services such as our publicly owned dockyards where managers are on salary scales instead of the profit-sharing and bonus schemes of private industry, and where our workers are on wage rates which apply equally to the proficient hard-working man and the mediocre and not-so-hard-working man...
...We believe it is immoral that the ownership of property should allow some to exploit others...
...The War in Vietnam It is no use talking of the ideals of democratic Socialism when the situation has degenerated into naked brutality between competing power blocs as in South Vietnam, with both sides engaged in brutality and cruelty all in the name of the highest ideals for the freedom and liberty of man...
...Perhaps they did not have the abundance of resources to have helped the enormous populations of South Asia to any appreciable degree...
...And at the other end of the spectrum, we have discovered that even with Communists whatever their ideological claims to international brotherhood, the working class is riven by even deeper claims as national Communist groups attack each other in ferocious dialectical ritual to justify the pursuit of their own separate national interests...
...But the fact that we are today gathered in Bombay to discuss these problems is in a small way a tribute to the tenacity of the democratic Socialist...
...But the most grievous indictment against the democratic Socialists for their failure to put up a better showing is that in preaching individual human liberties and human freedoms, they forgot to insist, as the Communist and the capitalists did, on the individual human duty to work hard and give his utmost...
...to each his economic worth...
...Even here in Bombay the shadow of what is going on in that corner of South-East Asia casts gloom over all of us...
...Why have these things happened...
...can be taken for granted...
Vol. 12 • September 1965 • No. 4
