The launch of Jentayu (the name of a mythical bird in Malay epic tradition) is good news for the Malaysian left. A bilingual Malay- and English-language journal with explicitly socialist and progressive aims, it appears at a conjuncture the editors themselves describe as a critical crossroads: the “Unity Government” led by Anwar Ibrahim is under strain from communalist political pressure and the structural dislocations of shifting global geoeconomics. The inaugural issue gathers four essays under the broad heading of political economy. Jeremy Lim Jiang Shen, the journal’s editor and a PhD candidate at the University of Malaya, opens with an argument for rethinking Marxist theories of the state through the lens of corruption and political patronage. Alia Salleh, a PhD candidate in Human Geography at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), examines the proposed Urban Renewal Act and its implications for displacement and real estate capital accumulation. Audi Ali recovers the left-nationalist thought of Rustam Sani (1944–2008). Christopher Choong Weng Wai, Deputy Director of Research at the Khazanah Research Institute, sketches a research agenda for revitalising dependency theory in the Southeast Asian context.
Lim and Choong argue that existing theoretical frameworks are inadequate to the Malaysian case and propose extensions or research programmes to address this. Salleh applies adapted postcolonial urban geography to the Malaysian redevelopment context, while. Ali works within constructivist historiography of Malay identity, recovering a political tradition rather than proposing a theoretical instrument.
The postcolonial capitalist state: corruption as structure, not deviation
Jeremy Lim opens with a provocation: standard Marxist accounts of the capitalist state — whether the “executive of the bourgeoisie” formulation or the neutral arbiter between contending classes — have little to say about Malaysia. The Malaysian state was not forged through the pressure of an organised working class on a bourgeois democracy, as in the Western European social democratic trajectory. It emerged from colonial extraction, was consolidated through an anti-communist counter-insurgency that demobilised the Malayan left, and was subsequently reproduced through ethnic patronage rather than class compromise.
Lim’s argument is that corruption and political patronage are not residues of underdevelopment to be corrected by reform, but structural features of how the Malaysian state reproduces both itself and the political class. After independence, UMNO (United Malays National Organisation) replicated the welfare and service-provision tactics of the Malayan left to consolidate its support base, funding this through the MCA (Malayan Chinese Association) and subsequently through state resources directly. The racial riots of 1969 and the New Economic Policy that followed allowed UMNO to cast off the MCA as a funding source and make the state apparatus the primary site of capital accumulation. What Lim calls “political rent” — the augmentation of the rate of profit through direct access to politicians and state bureaucrats — became constitutive of the Malaysian capitalist class rather than incidental to it.
The best existing account of this dynamic, Lim argues, comes from Mushtaq Khan and Jomo Kwame Sundaram’s Rents, Rent-Seeking and Economic Development (2012), which maps flows of funds between politicians, bureaucrats, and capitalists across several Asian economies. But Khan and Jomo focus on economic and social outcomes rather than on the political consequences for class formation and state structure. Lim proposes that a complete account would treat political rent as an augmentation of the rate of profit within the M–C–M’ circuit — a proposal he describes as preliminary and deferred to future work.
The essay’s most productive section concerns socialist strategy. In a Malaysia where union militancy has been broken and communalism structures political discourse, the system of patronage by political parties in lieu of public goods provision leaves no space for a left capable of funding itself through these illicit means Understanding the patronage system structurally is, for Lim, a precondition for identifying which class fractions are neglected by it and where socialist consciousness might take root.
Lim has pursued related questions in his 2023 book Capital in Malaysia and in a March 2025 New Mandala piece on platform capitalism.
Urban renewal and the expanding real estate frontier
Alia Salleh’s essay moves from the state to the city. The proposed Urban Renewal Act has shifted debate over redevelopment from a local to a national register, with concerns focused on gentrification and the displacement of lower-income residents in Kuala Lumpur and other urban centres.
Salleh frames redevelopment through two theoretical lenses. The first is Neil Smith’s (1996) rent gap theory: gentrification occurs when ground rent is monetised to match its “highest and best use”, and capital gravitates towards dilapidated housing complexes precisely because their decline produces the largest gap between current and potential returns. The second is Matthias Bernt’s (2022) concept of the “commodification gap”: rent gap theory assumes a pre-existing free market in land, but in postcolonial contexts land at the edge of the real estate market requires legal and regulatory intervention before it can be commodified at all. It is this closing of the commodification gap — not market forces alone — that drives urban redevelopment.
The most productive element of Salleh’s argument is her deployment of geographer Tom Gillespie’s (2020) concept of the “real estate frontier”. Each time capital exhausts one frontier of urban accumulation, it requires new legal and political instruments to open the next. In Malaysia, the sequence runs from the British colonial introduction of the Torrens system (which transformed customary adat land tenure into record-based private ownership), through the National Land Code of 1965, the Land Acquisition Act (LAA), and now the proposed URA. Squatter settlement clearances in the Klang Valley from the 1970s to the 2000s constituted one frontier; the redevelopment of ageing strata-title buildings is the next. The URA would resolve a key legal obstacle — the current requirement for 100% owner consent to demolition in strata developments — by institutionalising the state as initiator, reducing the consent threshold by law, and legalising the relationship between state authority and “approved developer” from the outset.
The KL Urban Renewal programme and the Kampung Sungai Baru redevelopment case, which Salleh examines in more detail in her 2024 peer-reviewed article in Urban Geography, serve as concrete instances. The Kuala Lumpur Structure Plan 2040, gazetted in 2023, already identified 139 potential redevelopment sites in KL alone.
Salleh shows how the legal infrastructure being built by the URA concentrates power to shape the city in the hands of state planners and approved developers, progressively reducing the avenues through which residents can participate. Whether the URA becomes a tool that rectifies the history of displacement or extends the real estate frontier further depends, Salleh argues, on how affected communities and civil society engage with the lessons of previous redevelopment cases.
Left nationalism and the debt of 1947: Rustam Sani revisited
The third essay, by Audi Ali and published in Bahasa Malaysia, excavates the left-nationalist thought of Rustam Sani (11 August 1944 – 23 April 2008), using him as a lens through which to argue that “Melayu” as a racial and ethnic category is a modern colonial construction, and that this constructedness is the political resource the left has consistently failed to mobilise.
“Melayu” as a stable ethnic identity was produced through the colonial dialectic between the imperative to classify populations by race and the aspiration of those populations to liberation. It was not a pre-colonial given: the term referred at various points to a geographic region, a court society, a trading diaspora, and only later, through colonial administrative practice and the pressures of nationalist mobilisation, to a bounded ethnic community. What bound these identities together — Bahasa Melayu and Islam — were themselves historically contingent connections, not primordial facts. Rustam Sani’s contribution, in Ali’s reading, was to insist that because “Melayu” was made, it could be remade: that the historical responsibility for transforming Malay ethnic nationalism into an inclusive Malay(si)an political identity rested on the Malay political community itself.
The material basis of ethnic formation is not left unexamined. Ali draws on the colonial capital ownership structure — the Malay administrator and aristocratic class, the Chinese merchant and mining intermediary, the Indian plantation labourer, each positioned differently within colonial circuits of commodity production — to show that ethnic identification was not merely a cultural process but a function of differential access to capital. The colonial “divide and rule” structure did not simply freeze cultural differences; it produced economic identifications that have structured Malaysian politics to the present.
The 1947 PUTERA-AMCJA (Pusat Tenaga Rakyat — All Malayan Council of Joint Action) coalition enters the essay as evidence that synthesis was once possible: a left-led coalition that proposed citizenship on a jus soli basis while recognising Malay indigenous status, holding the Malay and Malay(si)an aspirations together in a single constitutional framework. Cold War realpolitik, British counter-insurgency, and UMNO’s subsequent consolidation of ethnic Malay nationalism eliminated this possibility before it could develop. Ali does not romanticise 1947 — he acknowledges the progressive character of PUTERA-AMCJA was conditioned by its historical moment, and that its statist developmentalist assumptions were not structurally different from what UMNO later implemented. What it demonstrated was the political possibility of synthesis, not a blueprint for the present.
The essay’s closing section, “Beyond Fighting Forgetting”, is where Ali makes his most direct contribution. The contemporary left’s recovery of 1947 as historical memory is legitimate and necessary, but insufficient. The structural conditions have changed: exploitation now crosses the boundaries of citizenship, ecological crisis has no national solution, and a multipolar world distributes new dependencies without necessarily offering liberation. Ali’s final question — what subject and what aspiration can now unify the struggle against elite power, ecological destruction, and a new multipolar order? — is left open. This is an honest acknowledgement that the answer cannot be read off from the history of Malay nationalism alone, however carefully recovered.
The essay takes its place in a tradition that runs through its subject’s own family. Rustam Sani’s father, Ahmad Boestamam (Abdullah Sani, 1920–1983), founded PRM and was repeatedly imprisoned by both the colonial and postcolonial state. The biographical and the theoretical are not separable in this tradition — a point Ali’s essay honours without sentimentalising.
Dependency theory and Southeast Asia: promise and deferral
Christopher Choong’s essay is the most explicitly agenda-setting of the four. Dependency theory — classically defined, after Dos Santos (1970), as a situation in which “the economy of certain countries is conditioned by the development and expansion of another” — has experienced a revival in recent years, driven notably by Ingrid Kvangraven’s work rehabilitating it as a research programme rather than a fixed theoretical corpus. But Southeast Asia remains largely absent from this revitalisation, a gap Choong finds “regrettable” given that the region was the site most intensively penetrated by metropolitan industrial capital at least until the 1997–98 Asian Financial Crisis.
Choong’s survey of dependency scholarship in Malaysia is the essay’s strongest section. He recovers a lineage running from James Puthucheary’s Ownership and Control in the Malayan Economy (1960) — written in prison, arguing that Malayan underdevelopment was produced by capital development already taken, not by natural resource scarcity — through Shamsul Amri Baharuddin’s 1979 adaptation of Walter Rodney and Andre Gunder Frank for the Malay peasantry, to Lim Mah Hui’s 1982 analysis of the debate over Bill Warren’s claims for imperialism’s progressive role, and Hua Wu Yin’s 1983 Class and Communalism in Malaysia, which foregrounded the mobilisation of “the super-exploited class of women” from rural areas as central to metropolitan capital’s crisis management. This lineage has engaged race and gender as structural dimensions of dependency, not as cultural supplements to it — a distinction Choong identifies as the Malaysian tradition’s distinctive contribution to the broader field.
The essay then argues for two “potentialities” that Southeast Asian dependency scholarship opens: first, the opportunity for critical reassessment of the region’s industrial achievements in light of current deindustrialisation; and second, the recovery of a global historical materialist understanding of racialised and gendered dependency relations. Choong’s own PhD — The Everyday Political Economy of Raced Capitalism in Malaysia: Reinscribing Malay Women’s Lives, Labour, and Households (2024) — demonstrates what such an account might look like in practice. The essay itself, however, remains at the level of programme: the race-gender analysis it calls for is described but not enacted. This is an honest acknowledgement of scope — a 3,000-word essay cannot do the work of a monograph.
What Issue 1 establishes
The coherence of the first issue lies less in any single argument than in a shared diagnosis: that Malaysian capitalism is racialised at its foundations, that this racialisation is not a cultural survival but a structural product of colonial and postcolonial capital accumulation, and that the left cannot build effective strategy without a materialist account of how race and class articulate. The four essays approach this diagnosis through different methods — Lim and Choong through explicit argument about theoretical inadequacy, Salleh through application of adapted urban geography, Ali through constructivist historiography of identity — but they converge on the same terrain.
Returning to the question the introduction poses: do the two essays that argue for new frameworks succeed in producing them? Lim identifies political rent as the missing category in Marxist state theory and proposes treating it as a structural augmentation of the rate of profit — but he flags this as preliminary, and the essay does not demonstrate the framework so much as call for it. The diagnosis is convincing; the instrument remains to be built. Choong is more explicit about what a revitalised Southeast Asian dependency research programme would look like, and his own doctoral work demonstrates it in practice — but the essay in Jentayu operates at the level of agenda-setting rather than application. Salleh’s use of Bernt and Gillespie is the most analytically complete of the four essays: she applies an adapted framework to a concrete case and reaches a determinate conclusion about the URA. But the framework is borrowed and adapted, not generated from the Malaysian case — a limitation she does not claim to have overcome. Ali’s contribution is of a different order: not a theoretical instrument but a political epistemology, arguing that the constructedness of Malay identity is the precondition for left strategy rather than an obstacle to it. The journal is consequently more successful at establishing what is theoretically at stake than at resolving it — which is an honest position for a first issue to occupy.
The four essays together also expose a tension they do not resolve. Lim’s state theory shows that patronage demobilises class consciousness and reproduces communalism as the dominant political form. Ali’s nationalism essay shows that the Malay political community carries a historical responsibility for inclusive nation-building that it has not discharged, and that the political subject adequate to the present cannot simply be read off from past struggles. Salleh shows that the legal instruments of urban redevelopment concentrate power against residents who have no institutional channel through which to resist. Choong calls for a race-gender political economy that does not yet exist in programmatic form. What none of the four essays addresses directly is the question implied by all of them: who is the political subject of the socialist project in Malaysia today, given that patronage has broken class solidarity, communalism has fragmented ethnic alliances, and the organised left remains electorally marginal?
That question is not a criticism of the journal — it is the question the journal has set itself. Jeyakumar Devaraj, PSM chairman, has addressed it directly from within the organised left, and his account of why the left was defeated twice and what conditions might allow it to rebuild is worth reading for foreigners wanting to understand what Jentayu is attempting. The announced themes for future issues — social movements and Malaysia’s place in global capitalism — are precisely where that question will have to be answered in practice.
Mark Johnson is an editor of Europe Solidaire Sans Frontières.
This article first appeared on the website of Europe Solidaire Sans Frontières.
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