Thoughts on Labour Politics, NUS

I like Labour Politics, the fact that I prepared for it and people were actively bringing up issues and talking about them. Prof. Buchanan is especially insightful when he thinks out loud.

I am rather sad that we didn’t actually go terribly deeply into the readings. Olin’s inverse-J curve modelling the relationship between capitalist interests and workers’ interests is fascinating, especially because its based on game-theoretic modelling, which may also suffer from a functionalistic weakness. I also suspect that the assumptions that Olin makes in sketching the inverse-J curve may not hold in certain countries because of historical events.

Przeworski is brilliant because of how he develops Gramscian hegemonic theory. I guess that’s what Kate Nicholls was looking for when she told me my essay only takes Gramsci superficially. If I had got to these Przeworski readings much earlier last sem, I could have hit an A- for my essay on Malaysia because she had that understanding of how Gramscian theory develops. Putting consent as manufactured within the working class rather than the general public seems to be the point I missed.

On the other hand, when I think about contemporary Malaysia, it seems to be extremely difficult to intepret Malaysian politics within a Neomarxist framework. Somehow I can’t see the Malaysian general public as “workers”, or the conflict between Pakatan Rakyat and Barisan Nasional as completely structurally-driven either. On the other other hand, I can’t take the ordinary political rhetoric as given either.

Thailand’s got it even worse so as it reacts in a typically Marxist fashion as the peasant class constantly votes against the urban-bourgeois-dominated candidates, and the monarchy as a vestige of feudal economic relations transformed into part of the capitalist class.