Make Impossible Demands

 Weekly column written for the Singapore Unbound newsletter. Sign up here.

After last year's hullabaloo about the rising COVID infection rate among Singapore's low-wage migrant workers, what has now become of them? These workers come mainly from South Asia to work in the dangerous industries of construction and shipping. They number more than 300,000, and almost half of them contracted the virus because they live in crowded dormitories. Though most of those infected displayed mild or no symptoms, several continue to experience the long-term effects of the sickness, such as debilitating pain and fatigue, months after testing positive.

The authorities responded by ordering the private dormitory operators to control and restrict the workers' movement. The workers were not allowed to use communal facilities or gather in the hallways; they had to keep to their bunk rooms, which accommodated as many as ten of them. When the COVID situation in Singapore stabilized, nothing was more telling of the exploitative treatment of these workers than the fact that they were released to go to work six months before they were allowed to leave their dormitories for a monthly visit to a purpose-built "recreational center." Work is good for their mental health, you see. The authorities have also responded by rolling out seven Quick Build Dormitories. They have more spacious rooms, with en-suite bathrooms. In other words, more comfortable jails.

Activists working for migrant workers' rights have continuously called attention to these abuses. Their proposed solutions—allowing workers to live among the general population and to change employers—aim to give the same rights to migrant workers as those of native-born ones. The aim is laudable but insufficient. Because what is the condition of the Singaporean worker? For those who have received some material benefits from the current economic system, they are well-fed but overworked asses. One telling clue: the birthrate remains stubbornly low despite all kinds of official incentives. Another clue: 1 in 5 young Singaporeans want to emigrate. Then there are those who have been crushed by the system. At the last budget debate, the government still refuses to legislate a minimum wage. If you stop being productive because work in a capitalist system is alienating, and take up drugs, you are treated inhumanly in the prison named Drug Rehabilitation Center.

The solution must be more radical because the problem is deeper. And the problem lies in the present economic arrangements that oppress native-born and migrant workers alike. When the aim of the system is to maximize profit, you can tell the private dormitory operators what you like, they will still find ways to cut corners and costs. When local households are squeezed to be ever more productive, you can put in any safeguards for domestic helpers that you wish, the Singaporean householder will still make the helper do everything, including dangerous chores, that they themselves have no time for. A sensible, a human, system cannot be built on the profit motive. It must be built, instead, on some idea of the common good. It must put the fruits of the workers' labor into their own hands and abolish the distinction between workers and bosses.

Impossible? Listen to what Robert LaMonte, who worked as an editor for the International Socialist Review in the 1910's, had to say: "Old age pensions and insurance against sickness, accident and unemployment are cheaper, are better business than jails, poor houses, asylums, hospitals." These progressive reforms serve the purpose of capital in relieving class tensions and redirecting radical energies. Present-day progressives work for such reforms, but Socialists must make only what LaMonte called "impossible demands," demands that show up the limits of reforming the system.

Jee Leong Koh
April 8, 2021

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Goh Chok Tong's Visit to FCBC

Image
I am surprised by how much this incident is affecting me. I thought I have moved past my former religious life, left it behind in Singapore, but like tin cans tied to a dog it has followed me and is rattling me. I am posting the incident, and my response to it, here on this blog, because I want to remember that the past is not yet past. When Emeritus Senior Minister of Singapore Goh Chok Tong visited Faith Community Baptist Church on 13 January during a Sunday service, Senior Pastor Lawrence Khong took the opportunity to deliver a hateful anti-gay message . Among other things, he said: We affirm that the family unit comprises a man as Father, a woman as Mother, and Children. This is the basic building block of society, a value foundational for a secure future, a premise fundamental to nation-building. and warned ominously that We see a looming threat to this basic building block by homosexual activists seeking to repeal Section 377A of the Penal Code.   Example...
Read more

Wallace Stevens' "The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words"

Just read three essays from the "Poetics" section at the back of Volume One of The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry : "The Poetry and the Present" by D.H. Lawrence (1919); "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain" by Langston Hughes (1926); and "The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words" by Wallace Stevens (1942). The first is an artful polemic for free verse in contact with the "insurgent naked throb of the instant moment." The second is a spirited rejoinder to a young Negro poet who wanted to "write like a poet--not a Negro poet." The third, my favorite, is a wide-ranging meditation on the nature of poetry and the role of the poet. So many grand things said but I will only quote a few passages: I am interested in the nature of poetry and I have stated its nature, from one of many points of view from which it is possible to state it. It is an interdependence of the imagination and reality as equals. This is...
Read more

Steven Cantor's "What Remains: the Life and Work of Sally Mann"

Image
Sally Mann, The Perfect Tomato , 199 0 Since it is moving pictures, a film necessarily captures--produces--a process. It turns photographs into the making of photographs. It joins moments ("spots of time") into a Life. This I expected watching Cantor's documentary on Sally Mann's creation of the exhibit "What Remains." So photographs of a long-dead beloved greyhound "lead" to photographs of the Civil War battlefield of Antietam, to photographs of Mann's Virginian farm bloodied by the police killing of a runaway convict, to photographs of decomposing bodies in a forensic study site, as if each group of pictures forms an independent yet preparatory stage in the creative process. What I did not expect to see is the influence of the film-making on the photography itself. Mann begins to think of her exhibit as a "narrative," and wants the narrative of death to end on a more uplifting note. With such an idea in mind, she takes close-up pic...
Read more