Malaysia is a country little known about in Australia. But it shouldn’t be.
It has been an area of Australian sub-imperial investment and strategic interest for more than 125 years, from the time of the former British colonies of Malaya and Singapore, through independence and into the present.
Today, at least three major Australian corporations have investments there—Lynas, the rare earth mineral miner and producer, the packaging and recycling conglomerate Visy and the property developer Walker Corporation.
David Lockwood, an Australian academic, has written a history of the Malayan Communist Party (MCP) from 1930-48. While it is a short work—173 pages—it is invaluable for both the Malaysian and Australia Left.
The Malaysian Left knows little of the MCP other than its role in the armed resistance to Japanese imperial occupation in the Second World War.
And the Australian Left knows little either of the MCP’s role in the war or its leadership of a union federation in militant strikes which smashed the racist Australian tropes of supposedly “docile” Asian workers.
Rebellion
Lockwood’s work covers the period from the MCP’s origins to the cusp of the “Malayan Emergency”, declared in June 1948 by Britain to crush a working class-led movement for national liberation.
Two years later, the Australian government would send troops and equipment to assist Britain in putting down the rebellion. It would send more troops, planes, warships and equipment throughout the mid-1950s.
Australia did so not as a “colony” or “puppet” of Britain but because at that time the Australian ruling class’s strategy was to shelter under the wing of British imperialism, even though that empire was in decline and exhausted from the Second World War.
It was the beginning of Australia intervening, militarily and politically, across south-east Asia—in Malaya, Korea, Indonesia, Vietnam and Timor Leste.
For Britain’s many colonies, the post-war era was their chance for national independence in a world order which had supposedly fought for “democracy”.
For the rulers of the empire in London the colonies were like a woven garment which stopped British capitalism catching a cold: a single thread might seem of little importance, but if it snapped the rest could start unravelling.
Britain would stop colonial independence where it could by any filthy means necessary.
Raw materials
Britain had claimed parts of Malaya, including Singapore, as colonies since 1819 and plundered them for tin and rubber.
Those two raw materials were also central to Australia’s industrialisation from Federation, in 1901, onwards.
The official company history of the Australian-owned Pacific Dunlop’s rise as an “industrial conglomerate” testifies to its plunder of Malaya.
Lockwood argues that by 1946 the MCP “had become one of the most successful Communist Parties in Asia”.
Despite fierce British repression from its foundation in 1930, the MCP built up a membership of “some thousands”, mainly Chinese workers in the tin mines and urban service industries and Indian workers on the rubber plantations, in the railways and in the lower ranks of government service.
This was no mean feat given two British imperial policies.
The first was “divide and-rule”, aimed at splitting the Malayan, Chinese and Indian nationalities living in Malaya.
The first two nationalities made up 49 and 38 per cent of the population respectively, with Indians making up almost the balance.
Colonial policies created an economy where occupations were closely associated with a supposed “race”.
Chinese Malays dominated commerce, construction and industrial employment. Malays were confined to farming. Indians provided the labour for the rubber plantations.
Second, all Malayan working-class parties were banned, as were unions. Left-wing books and magazines were banned. Militant workers were often deported even if they were “naturalised” citizens.
Despite these barriers, Lockwood writes of the MCP, “It had forged a mass trade union movement which it led to battle against the colonial authorities and employers.”
Armed resistance
After the Japanese invasion of Malaya in December 1941, the defeat of the British and the “fall of Singapore” two months later, it was only the MCP-led Malayan People’s Anti-Japanese Army (MPAJA) which continued armed resistance.
The MPAJA engaged in more than 340 battles with Japanese soldiers, killing and or wounding more than 5500 enemy soldiers and destroying Japanese war materials.
Britain co-operated with the MPAJA in fighting Japanese occupation of its colony by supplying arms and training.
By 1945 and before the return of the British, the membership of the MCP had increased from between 3000-4000 members to 6000-7000. The MCP had also created a broader support network.
After the defeat of Japan, there was no question in the minds of the British Labour government that they would return to Malaya.
Before the war, Malaya produced 40 per cent of the world’s rubber and 50 per cent of the world’s tin.
In 1947, Malayan rubber was the British Empire’s biggest dollar earner, bringing in $US200 million, compared with the $US180 million earned by the British manufacturing industry.
In August 1945, the newly-elected Clement Attlee Labour Government ordered the British re-occupation of Malaya.
It created a British Military Administration (BMA) to reimpose British imperial rule.
The BMA’s job was made easier by the MCP, which unlike the Vietnamese Communists and Indonesian nationalists, decided to cooperate with the colonial power in the hope of securing a place in the post-war order.
The MCP disbanded its guerrilla army and concentrated on building a strong and militant trade union movement and a left-wing nationalist front party.
The MCP did not fully understand that even these would not be tolerated by the BMA.
General strike
The BMA and employers began to hem in the MCP and its union federation. Rising class tensions meant the MCP-run trade union federation called a one-day general strike in January 1946 and another one-day general strike in October 1947. That year there were 300 strikes in Malaya.
The BMA’s response to Malayan workers getting pay rises and better conditions and calling for immediate independence closed off any peaceful road to independence.
British troops and police were used as strike-breakers, beating and sometimes opening fire on striking workers.
Lockwood recognises this objective factor in weighing up the debate inside the MCP over the “peaceful road” versus the “guerrilla warfare” road. “Hopes that cooperation would lead to independence were soon dashed by Britain’s economic and strategic realities.”
Then he seems to argue that the MCP could have continued down the “peaceful road” indefinitely when he laments, “But in 1948 the MCP surrendered all these achievements, left its mass organisations to their fate, and took many of its members underground or into the jungle to launch a disastrous insurrectionary war against the British.”
In his two books on the British empire, British Counter Insurgency (2002) and The Blood Never Dried (2006), British socialist historian John Newsinger argues cogently that the MCP made the fatal error of abandoning the cities and its working class base and isolating itself from its mass support, making it easier for the British to destroy the MCP guerrillas in the jungle.
The British were brutal in their policies of scorched earth, food rationing, killing livestock, aerial spraying of herbicides including Agent Orange, extrajudicial murders of civilians and in rounding up whole villages into concentration camps.
Between 1948 and 1957, when Britain finally granted independence to a pliable Malayan capitalist class, the British interned nearly 34,000 people without trial.
Britain deported thousands of Chinese, who were seen as Communist sympathisers—nearly 10,000 in 1949 alone.
Fatalism
Lockwood’s premise is that there were only two options: the “peaceful road” or “jungle guerrilla warfare”. He comes down on the side of continuing the “peaceful road” because it had been successful until 1948.
Lockwood falls into a kind of fatalism when he argues the MCP didn’t build up enough “counter-hegemonic” opposition to British rule even though he knows, “Time proved too short for this to develop to its full potential.”
That “time” was cut short by BMA repression. It banned the MCP-run trade union federation on 12 June 1948 and a week later declared a state of emergency.
The BMA’s acts took the MCP by surprise despite its leadership voting for armed insurrection in principle in late 1947 and again in early 1948.
The third option of workers’ defence or militias in the working class urban areas of Malaya and Singapore was not even considered by the MCP. But it was just such a strategy that could have created the space for workers’ struggles to break the back of British imperialism.
The paucity of knowledge about Malaysia’s communist history prior to 1948 means Lockwood’s book invites the Left, both in Malaysia and Australia, to uncover the history of the building the MCP. For that reason alone, it is worth reading.
By Tom Orsag
The Politics of the Malayan Communist Party from 1930-48, by David Lockwood. National University of Singapore Publishing, 2024.
