Pandangan Dalam Kalangan Kaum Melayu dan Cina di Kawasan Sibu Terhadap Cukai Barang dan Perkhidmatan (GST)

Pelaksanaan GST merupakan satu strategi makroekonomi dalam merangsang pertumbuhan ekonomi di peringkat nasional. Pengumuman pelaksanaan Cukai Barang dan Perkhidmatan (GST) untuk menggantikan Cukai Jualan dan Perkhidmatan (SST) pada April 2015 yang lepas telah membangkitkan keresahan dalam kalangan masyarakat. Lebih keruh lagi apabila masyarakat terpengaruh oleh andaian negatif tentang GST dan pada masa itu, Barisan Nasional (BN) terpalit dengan skandal rasuah serta hutang negara melambung naik. Keresahan rakyat apabila terdapat persepsi bahawa GST berpotensi untuk meningkatkan kos sara hidup. Tingkah laku politik masyarakat juga berubah terutamanya semasa Pilihan Raya Umum ke-14 apabila pertama kali dalam sejarah UMNO-BN telah kalah dan diganti dengan Pakatan Harapan (PH). Tujuan kajian ini adalah untuk menganalisis persepsi kaum Melayu dan Cina terutamanya di sekitar kawasan Sibu yang berada di kawasan Democratic Action Party (DAP) iaitu parti pembangkang, terhadap pelaksanaan GST dari aspek pengetahuan am mengenai GST, kesannya terhadap taraf kehidupan dan sumbang saran dasar tersebut kepada mereka. Objektif kajian ini adalah menunjukkan bahawa terdapat persamaan dan perbezaan mengenai GST dalam kalangan kaum Melayu dan Cina serta mengenal pasti sama ada kaum Melayu masih setuju dengn pelaksanaanya jika kutipan GST untuk membayar hutang negara.

Do educators’ responsibilities stop at the classroom door?

Schools are crucial sites in the politics of social and cultural transformation. However, we should not limit our work to the internal structures, processes, and content of schooling. The struggles in schools should be organically connected to community-based struggles outside of schools. Therefore, critically democratic action in education needs to transform not only schools, but also the communities and societies in which these schools are situated. Actions in and around schools are even more powerful and long lasting when they are closely connected to real people and real movements and mobilizations outside as well as inside the places where so many of us work.

Bentong Constituency Study Before and After 14th General Election in Malaysia: A Preliminary Chinese News Analysis

Bentong constituency has always been the Malaysian Chinese Association (MCA) electoral stronghold and under the Barisan National (BN) coalition since Malaysia's independence in 1957. However, during the 14th Malaysian general election (GE14) political tsunami, the MCA has lost this parliament seat (P89 Bentong) to the Democratic Action Party (DAP), which is under the Pakatan Harapan (PH) coalition on 9 May 2018. Besides, Bentong is the traditional constituency of the MCA leadership, such as the first Member of Parliament (MP) for Bentong (1959-1989), Tan Sri Chan Siang Sun, retired as Health Minister cum MCA Vice-President. The second MP for Bentong is Tan Sri Lim Ah Lek (1989-1999), and he retired as Human Resources Minister cum MCA Deputy President. Before GE14, Dato' Sri Liow Tiong Lai was the third MP for Bentong (1999-2018) and retired as Transport Minister cum MCA President. Bentong is a district located in western Pahang, Malaysia. In 2005, Bentong officially declared as Bentong Municipal Council. According to Department of Statistics Malaysia (DOSM, 2011), Bentong population has reached about 115,000 people with administrative covered area of 335 square miles (868 square km) including Bentong Town, Genting Highlands, Karak, Telemong, Manchis, Sungai Dua and Bukit Tinggi. While its control area covered Sungai Gapoi, Simpang Pelangai, Kampung Shafie, Jambu Rias, Janda Baik and Sungai Penjuring. Keywords: Bentong, GE14, Sinchew, Economics, Chinese

Henry A.Wallace as Presidential Candidate: “Am I in America?”

Henry A. Wallace challenged the bipartisan foreign policy of President Truman in 1948. The Progressive Citizens of America opposed Truman’s “get-tough policy” (the Truman Doctrine, loyalty investigations, Universal Military Training, and the Marshall Plan) and founded the Progressive Party. Other “liberals” formed Americans for Democratic Action and supported Truman, who claimed that the Progressive Party was a Soviet construction. Wallace refused to participate in segregated meetings during his campaign in the South and was violently attacked. He advocated the need for federal measures to prohibit segregation, discrimination, the poll tax, and lynching. Wallace was resoundingly defeated but proved right in the long run: military means could not solve social problems. Instead, it spread hatred of the United States in many countries. The 1948 election determined U.S. foreign policy for over 50 years, resulting in missed opportunities to improve housing, education, and social security at home, which still has repercussions today. JEL Classifications: N42, F50

Jacques Rancière

This chapter demonstrates that Rancière’s journey to democratic theory started in the aftermath of May 1968 with his efforts to overcome the problematic transformation of political theory into “a theory of education.” For Rancière, unpredictability is integral to democratic politics. Thus, in an anti-Rousseauian move, he emphasizes the theatrical aspect of democratic action: taking on a role other than who they are, acting as if they are a part in a given social order in which they have no part, political actors stage their equality, disrupting the existing distribution of the sensible. Rancière’s focus on the moments of disruption, however, opens him to the charge of reducing democratic politics to immediate acts of negation. Insofar as he erases the role of intermediating practices in the stagings of equality, Rancière imposes on his accounts a kind of purity that his own work, with its emphasis on broken, polemical voices, cautions against.

In the Street

The 2010s were a decade of protests, and if the initial few months of 2020 are any indication, various forms of street politics, including spontaneous protests, demonstrations, acts of civil disobedience, and occupations are here to stay. Yet, contemporary discussions on the democratic significance of such events remain limited to questions of success and failure and the relative virtues of spontaneity and organization. In the Street: Democratic Action, Theatricality, and Political Friendship moves beyond these limited and limiting debates by breaking the hold of a deeply engrained way of thinking of democratic action that falsely equates spontaneity with immediacy. The book traces this problematic equation back to Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s account of popular sovereignty and demonstrates that insofar as commentators characterize democratic moments as the unmediated expressions of people’s will and/or instantaneous popular eruptions, they lose sight of the rich, creative, and varied practices of political actors who create those events against all odds. In the Street counters this Rousseauian influence by appropriating Aristotle’s notion of “political friendship” and developing an alternative conceptual framework that emphasizes the theatricality of democratic action through a critical engagement with the works of Antonio Negri, Jürgen Habermas, and Jacques Rancière. The outcome is a new conceptual lens that brings to light what is erased from contemporary discussions of democratic events, namely the crystallization of political actors’ hopes in the novel ways of being that they staged and the alternative forms of social relations that they created in and through the intermediating practices of political friendship.

Enacting Political Friendship in Gezi

This chapter deploys the alternative conceptual lens developed in the book, according to which democratic action is a theatrical experience created and sustained through the intermediating practices of political friendship, to analyze the Gezi protests of 2013. What emerges from this analysis is a richer account of events that moves beyond the limiting frameworks of success/failure and spontaneity/organization by bringing to light both the on-the-ground practices of political actors and the messiness and impurity of democratic politics even in the moment of its staging. Focusing on such intermediating practices as deliberation, judging, negotiation, artistic production, common use, and the organization of the mundane aspects of everyday life, the chapter demonstrates that those who took part in Gezi borrowed from past struggles, including May ’68, re-activated political habits, and, acting in unexpected ways, created new, if imperfect and fragile, forms of commonality among diverse figures, showing that another way of doing things is possible.

Democratic Action, Spontaneity, and the Intermediating Practices of Political Friendship

This chapter accomplishes two goals. First, it critically engages with the contemporary debates on the last decade’s democratic uprisings to demonstrate the ongoing influence of Rousseau’s emphasis on immediacy in democratic theory. By casting organization as that which precedes politics and moments of spontaneous action as sudden explosions, contemporary accounts reduce spontaneity to immediacy. Thus, they both erase on-the-ground practices of the political actors, and, taking an antidemocratic Rousseauian turn, construe the transience and unpredictability of democratic events as problems to be resolved under the guidance of the theorist. Second, the chapter appropriates Aristotle’s notion of political friendship, laying the groundwork for the conception of democratic action developed in the book, and arguing that democratic events are created in and through “intermediating practices,” including deliberation, judging, negotiation, artistic production, and common use. Through intermediating practices, people establish relations with strangers, constitute a common amid disagreements, and stage their equality as political friends.

Prologue

Through an interpretive analysis of the surprising refiguration of the iconic May ’68 poster “Beauty is in the Street” in Istanbul during the Gezi Protests of 2013, the Prologue sets the stage for the book by making three closely related points. First, it draws attention to the emancipatory potential of such refigurations of past struggles in the present and highlights the importance of keeping a record of democratic events. Second, it establishes the centrality of 1968 in democratic theory by demonstrating how Negri, Habermas, and Rancière formulated their own unique conceptualizations of democratic action in response to the questions that first emerged in the aftermath of the experience of 1968 and continue to shape current debates. Third, it argues that to rescue contemporary democratic events from their ongoing trivialization, it is necessary to develop an alternative conceptual lens that reveals what other accounts erase, namely the on-the-ground efforts of political actors.

Jürgen Habermas

This chapter argues that Jürgen Habermas’s engagement with the debates on the German student movement of 1968 led him to question the common tendency to consider the transience of spontaneous popular action a failure. Habermas’s democratic theory construes the ephemerality of such events as an asset that ensures they remain unrestricted by existing norms. The “wild” and “anarchic” moments of direct citizen action constitute the radical core of deliberative democracy. Yet, even as he emphasizes the democratic moments’ unrestricted quality, Habermas, like Rousseau, is also wary of their unpredictability. In his discussions on civil disobedience, Habermas turns to “constitutional patriotism” as a normative criterion to contain the dangers that emanate from the unpredictability of spontaneous action. In doing so, however, Habermas risks transforming political theory into a disciplinary mechanism whereby the theorist, à la Rousseau, takes on the role of an authority figure charged with guiding democratic action.