The complicated road to Singapore

I BELIEVE the Socialist road is the only road for our people,” stated David Marshall, the English-educated Jewish lawyer who became Singapore’s first elected chief minister in 1955. “Our unique position as a heavily populated entrepot port without natural resources calls for considerable adaptation of socialist methods while maintaining socialist ideals.” Scholar Carl Trocki writes in Singapore: Wealth, Power, and the Culture of Control that in the 1950s and 1960s, “it seemed almost certain that Singapore would adopt a socialist if not a communist form of government” and that “except for a small group of conservative lawyers and businessmen backed by British firepower, there seemed to be no serious obstacle to such an outcome.”

How then did Singapore over just one generation become the capitalist metropolis one sees today? The multiracial, managed, middle-class society is, indeed, an adaptation of socialist ideals to Singapore’s unique position, as well as an adapted product of the polity’s negotiations for independence and of Lee Kuan Yew’s drive for control, reform, and implementation of what scholar John Clammer describes as “quasi-Marxist materialism.”