Introduction: Authoritarian Governance in Singapore’s Developmental State

Singapore’s Extreme Neoliberalism and the COVID Outbreak: Culturally Centering Voices of Low-Wage Migrant Workers

“…As was evident during the C19 outbreak in dormitories housing low-wage migrant workers, state capital plays a key role in building the infrastructures for migrant workers ( Dutta, 2020a ). The authoritarian state is an active participant in the model of “hybrid development” ( Rahim & Barr, 2019 ), organizing to extract labor and catalyze primitive accumulation, and managed by a small group of interconnected elites. The participant narratives point to the communicative erasures that constitute Singapore’s management of migrant labor.…”

“…State capitalism as the vehicle for accumulation works alongside the repression of labor to catalyze capitalist expansion ( Bruff & Tansel, 2019 ; Dutta, 2020a , 2020b , 2020c ; Rahim & Barr, 2019 ; Tansel, 2017 ). An entire industry of communicative capital, from academia to think tanks to research institutes to communication agencies to discursive platforms such as dialogues and symposia, is set up by the authoritarian state to communicatively invert, “turn materiality on its head” ( Dutta, 2016 ), the labor repression.…”

COVID-19, Authoritarian Neoliberalism, and Precarious Migrant Work in Singapore: Structural Violence and Communicative Inequality

“…The strong state-based interventionist model, evident in the state-run corporations and the climate of authoritarian repression of collective organizing form the architectures of Singapore's extreme neoliberalism. The model of "hybrid development" (Rahim and Barr, 2019) serving the frontiers of capitalist expansion strategically crafts an account of "Asian values" to render as Asian forms of repression and disciplining that serve the expansionary interests of transnational capital. The ideology of "Asian values" strategically manufactured, planted and circulated by Singapore's ruling elite, concocts a mixture of narratives of meritocracy, pragmatism, and communitarianism into brand Singapore that drives the nation state's political economy.…”

“…Since the 1980s, Singapore's public sector spending has continually declined (Low, 2014). The state's expenditures on healthcare and social services are among the lowest in developed economies globally (Rahim and Barr, 2019). capital accumulation (Tansel, 2017;Bruff and Tansel, 2019).…”

Neoliberal recontextualizations and legitimations in a post‐Confucian state

“…Despite the much‐vaunted technocratic competence of the Singapore state and its (insistently self‐professed) pragmatic, rational approach to policy‐making (Low & Vadaketh, 2014; Soh, 2015; Tan, 2017), Singaporean governance has not been exempt from trends of a neoliberal‐oriented, affectivized political engagement and communication – though not necessarily with the same contours or intensity observed in other polities. Adopting a critical discourse‐analytic approach, the paper hence probes the discursive moves and tropes that are deployed to communicate and legitimate neoliberal‐oriented governance and policies in what is simultaneously one of the world's wealthiest nations and one of the most unequal societies among developed economies (Rahim & Barr, 2019). In particular, I show how Singapore's ‘Asian’ sociopolitical context and its post‐Confucian heritage are amenable to the strategic melding of a more conventional self‐interested, neoliberal individualism with a more locally‐situated traditionalist collective/communitarian ethos, with the latter functioning as a discursive‐moralizing trope to encourage acquiescence to a market‐oriented agenda for the greater/common good or ‘national interest’.…”