The silent workers: Identity and resistance in Singapore’s controlled society

by Srikandi Karma

Singapore is a nation in exile from itself, alien to its own self. An academic friend used to ask her students whether they were Southeast Asians. In a room of five hundred, ten or fifteen would raise their hands, usually internationals from other Southeast Asian countries. Singaporeans have been drilled into believing that they are lucky not to be their primitive neighbors, who live in poor and dirty fishing villages.

Mass media recently propagated articles about Singapore being the happiest country in Asia. However, a 2012 survey revealed only 36% of Singaporeans feel any emotions on a daily basis, the lowest figure worldwide. No happiness, no sadness, no anger: just an empty machine.

The suicide rate in 2022 was 8.44 per 100,000 people, over triple the Indonesian figure.  In the same year, Singapore was named the most overworked nation in Asia Pacific. According to the HealthHub website, “Singaporeans are amongst the most sleep-deprived worldwide.”

Singaporeans are some of the most unfortunate people in Asia today. The anthology Psychology in Singapore begins by stating that Singaporeans are afraid of creativity.

If anything distinguishes Singapore from its neighbors, it seems to be fear: afraid of speaking out, afraid of self-expression, afraid of honest conflict, afraid of who they are. Increasingly, the population speaks less Malay and dialect in favor of English. Chinese culture is reduced to tea drinking ceremonies and convenient rewritings of Confucian philosophy.

Sun Yat Sen proclaimed Lao Tzu the father of anarchist philosophy, the doctrine that people don’t need governments and hierarchies to cooperate in building an orderly society.

Confucius wrote that wealth is not worth pursuing and possessing wealth in an unjust society is shameful. The Chinese culture in Singapore is a castrated mess, sterilized from everything that opposes the interest of capital and government. People wear the same mass-produced Japanese shirts and obsess over Korean pop while happily consuming Western culture on the internet.

There is more awareness of the latest farce in American politics than the violent dislocation of Malays from their kampungs in Batam to build a solar panel factory. Light skin color is glorified and people dye their hair blonde to become white. Streets are still named after colonial British leaders.

When I asked students what being Singaporean is, the most common response was, “I’m not Singaporean.” Singaporeans are wearing a mask and running away from themselves.

Labor Day will see enormous protests and celebrations throughout the streets of Nusantara, from Java to the Philippines, with one exception: Singapore.

While Indonesian soldiers gladly shoot live ammunition into protests and activists in the Philippines are tortured by the military government, progressive political movements flourish under impossible circumstances. The common excuse that Singaporeans don’t resist because they can’t is nonsensical.

There is no meaningful resistance in Singapore, no grassroots political threat to the incumbent, and no attempt to create a better world because there is no life without self-knowledge. Gramsci wrote that “the starting-point of critical elaboration is the consciousness of what one really is, and is ‘knowing thyself’ as a product of the historical process to date, which has deposited in you an infinity of traces, without leaving an inventory.”

Self-knowledge comes from tapping into the histories and cultures of Nusantara, her colonization and revolutions, that is, the history of your family and surroundings, why you feel, think, and live in the way that you do.

Having lost the plot, Singaporeans don’t know where to go next. Too much ink has been spilled over government intervention in private lives, state surveillance, widespread repression, and so on, which blames the problem on an external party outside the Singaporean working class and her internal developments. This tradition comes from the Western academic focus on social structures as rigid walls detached from agency and relationships.

In fact, when you repeat how omniscient and powerful the government is, the government is in your head, speaking through you, moving your tongue through the invisible strings called fear to spread the disease.

Gandhi wrote that “[the British] are not in India because of their strength, but because we keep them” and “to blame them for this is to perpetuate their power.”

Likewise, as Pramoedya wrote, “lacking courage is why foreign entities can enslave us.” A free person cannot be enslaved. Conversely: without courage, you are no different from livestock.

Brief transgression on Pramoedya: he is the greatest writer of the Indonesian revolution, read widely through Nusantara by Vietnamese trade unions and Indonesian hackers alike. Yet he is nearly unknown amongst Singaporeans, even the progressives, who know almost nothing about the region and prefer copying Western theories.

The key to a liberated Singapore is a total revolution, which must first take place in the spirit and psychology of the people, starting from yourself. Not tomorrow, not next decade, but right now.

No authority figure is going to descend from heaven and fix your life, tell you who you are, and what must be done. Initially, this piece was on the political economy of Singapore and what interventions the writer thinks would be effective. That would have been the wrong ladder to sketch.

As long as Singaporeans fear the creative turbulence within yourselves, as long as you lack initiative and wait for authorities to command you, as long as you don’t act like a citizen of the free humane world you wish to live in, you will be nothing more than joyless overworked slaves living off drugs and breeding even more cattle. Multatuli wrote that the duty of a human being is to become a human being.

The basic foundation of effective revolutionary activity – not terrorist martyrdom and not necessarily violence, which is a dangerous last resort – is how you exist in relation to the people around you.

Suppose you are a student. You don’t live in solidarity with other students and the workers on campus, helping out and learning from each other.

Every weekend, you write social media posts to raise funds and every year, you hold picnics to protest government policies. Very quickly, you’ll find yourself burnt out, cynical, and probably depressed, though you might run away from your emotions by overworking yourself.

Not only is that ineffective politics that hasn’t and won’t lead to the change we need – a complete rehaul of our economy, politics, and relationships in service of dignified good living instead of the endless pursuit of capital – it is a miserable way to live.

Or suppose you’re a worker with the same ideology of activism. Your ideology, after all, is how you live your life. If you say you believe in strikes and unions but spend your time building NGOs, that is either hypocrisy or self-deceit. You don’t share food with your neighbours, you don’t organize your workplace to buy medicine for the sick, and your ghost friends whenever convenient.

Forget changing the world, start from yourself. Learn how to treat people as equals with respect. Everyone is your teacher. The writer treats her trade union and collective friends across Nusantara like her own family, and vice versa. When the right person lives in the right circumstances, the right practices will organically follow. You don’t choose where you’re born and during what historical moment, but how you live in relation to these conditions is up to you.

The secret of modernity is that only the individual can free her own self and digest her own history. Revolution is in you and I – otherwise, it is just another opium of the people.