Culture and Privilege in Capitalist Asia - Jurusan Antropologi ...

SINGAPORE AND THE NEW MIDDLE CLASS 155
1995). This has led to suggestions, in Parliament and elsewhere, that to maintain
equity, the government should also help to upgrade private housing estates
(parliamentary debate in March 1996). 17
To the extent that the national economy, which is still growing annually at very
robust rates, translates into incremental improvement of material life for all, the
potential class antagonism between the middle class on the one hand and the
working class and the poor on the other will not likely manifest in tangible ways
that would affect social order and stability.
CONCLUSION
Singapore has been immensely successful economically, under the PAP
government. Among the effects of this success is the spawning of a class structure,
amidst the vastly improved material life of the entire population. However, this
emergent class structure is seldom part of the public discourse because the success
has created an ideological aura which makes raising of issues of social inequalities
difficult, at both conceptual and empirical levels. Conceptually, as a consequence of
its collaboration with communists in the 1950s, the PAP may be said to realise the
ideological appeal of class analysis of social inequalities; hence, its ideological
vigilance against any suggestions of class, especially within a Marxist framework.
Empirically, the relative homogenisation of daily life, as a result of extensive and
standardised provision of collective consumption goods to the overwhelming
majority of the population, has glossed over class differences, giving the impression
that Singapore is ‘homogeneously’ a middle-class society; an idea which the PAP
government itself is promoting.
The government actively attempts to diffuse, rhetorically and administratively,
at many sites and layers, the potential politicisation of social inequalities. It
promotes ‘meritocracy’ as the basis of allocation of material rewards, so as to
individualise success and failure. It denounces criticisms against social inequalities
and suggestions of a more egalitarian distribution of wealth as indulging in the
‘politics of envy’; instead, it encourages individuals to compare their present
circumstances with their past rather than synchronously across class lines. It
promotes a new ideology of ‘communitarianism’ which elevates the family and the
ethnic group to the level of ‘primordial’ institutions meant to provide successive
levels of social support for the socially and economically needy. All these strategies
reinforce each other in displacing structural explanations and theorisations of social
inequalities.
Nevertheless, social inequalities are intrinsic to capitalist societies, Singapore is
not an exception. Furthermore, the cultures of the different classes can be
delineated relative to each other; indeed, these different ‘cultures’ are mutually
constitutive. What is significant in the Singapore instance is that contrary
to conventional theoretical expectations, the different classes appear to be rather
similar in their political attitudes and behaviour, as a consequence of the unbroken