Why people keep losing no matter who wins elections

Malaysia’s persistent ‘people versus political parties’ divide is best understood through the different forms of capital that structure political power beneath electoral competition.

Drawing from political theorists Antonio Gramsci and Nicos Poulantzas, this essay maps how distinct fractions of capital – rentier, ethno-capital, comprador, state-bureaucratic and emergent digital capital – work through political parties and state institutions.

The result is a stable historical bloc that reproduces elite dominance while fragmenting popular opposition.

This class mapping clarifies why electoral change rarely produces material redistribution, and why popular disillusionment has become systemic rather than episodic.

Rentier capital

Location in the bloc: Property, finance, concessions, monopolistic rents

Rentier capital occupies a central position in Malaysia’s accumulation regime. It is anchored in property development, infrastructure concessions and financial assets. This fraction benefits directly from state guarantees, land conversion and financialisation.

Political parties across the spectrum protect rentier interests through zoning decisions, mega-projects and accommodative monetary-fiscal coordination.

Class outcome: Asset inflation enriches owners while excluding wage earners from housing and productive investment. Electoral competition leaves this fraction untouched. This reinforces public perceptions that parties defend property and finance before livelihoods.

Ethno-capital

Location in the bloc: Government-linked firms, politically connected small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), patronage networks

Ethno-capital refers to capital accumulation mediated through ethnicised policy instruments and political patronage. While often justified in redistributive language, in practice it consolidates a narrow elite stratum embedded within parties and state agencies.

Access to licences, contracts and protection is contingent upon political alignment rather than productivity.

Class outcome: Ethno-capital fragments class solidarity by translating economic privilege into cultural entitlement. Redistribution is symbolic rather than structural. This leaves the broader population excluded while shielding elite beneficiaries from scrutiny.

Comprador capital

Location in the bloc: Foreign direct investment brokers, export-oriented elites, transnational partnerships

Comprador capital functions as the domestic intermediary for global monopoly-finance capital. This fraction facilitates foreign entry into semiconductors, data centres, plantations and resource extraction. It captures commissions, joint venture rents and political leverage.

Political parties compete to signal openness and reliability to external capital.

Class outcome: While growth statistics improve, value capture is externalised and wages stagnate. The people experience dependency as precarity. This reinforces the sense that parties serve external interests over domestic labour.

State-bureaucratic capital

Location in the bloc: Sovereign funds, regulatory bodies, policy ministries

State-bureaucratic capital operates through government-linked firms, government-linked investment companies and regulatory agencies that blur public and private interests. While formally neutral, these institutions stabilise elite accumulation by socialising risk and privatising returns.

Party alternation rarely disrupts their strategic orientation.

Class outcome: More often than not, public resources are mobilised for capital preservation rather than social reproduction. Ordinary people encounter the state as disciplinarian rather than redistributor.

Digital and platform capital

Location in the bloc: Big Tech partnerships, data centres, surveillance infrastructure

An emergent fraction of digital and platform capital is rapidly integrating into Malaysia’s historical bloc. Enabled by incentives, regulatory accommodation and data governance frameworks, this fraction deepens surveillance, labour flexibilisation and data extraction.

Class outcome: Digital growth coexists with digital precarity. Political parties frame platform expansion as modernisation, while the people absorb new forms of exploitation and control.

Political parties as articulators

Function: Maintaining bloc coherence

Malaysia’s political parties do not represent discrete classes. Instead, they articulate unity among dominant class fractions. Electoral rhetoric manages contradictions within the bloc while preventing the formation of a class-conscious popular alternative.

Result: Ordinary people confront a closed political field in which party competition rearranges elites but preserves class hierarchy.

Why public disillusionment is structural

Mapping Malaysia’s class fractions reveals that popular disillusionment is not a failure of political education but a rational response to structural exclusion.

As long as political parties function to stabilise alliances among rentier, ethno-capital, comprador, bureaucratic and digital capital, electoral politics will reproduce inequality.

A counter-hegemonic project must therefore confront class power directly – beyond parties, personalities and electoral cycles.

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