Introduction

In the previous chapter, we argued that narratives of epochal political crisis are misleading in one particular sense: these narratives tend to portray the rise of social media as another (perhaps the key) morbid symptom of a public political discourse that is in collapse. This declinism does not care so much to identify how much energy, normativity, and discussion has emerged through social media and, inasmuch as they do, they do not treat it as analytically interesting. We identified a virtuality that we defined as PSM, in which a kind of hybridity between established protocols of political discussion (broadly deliberative) and the flat, fast, and ‘hot’ grammar of social media cohabit to generate considerable and considerably engaged political discussion. PSM enjoys the energy of social media as a technology but also broadly cleaves to a set of rules concerning political discourse that are well established and lead to the exercise of curatorial discipline.

Over the next two chapters, we will set out an agenda and analytical framework to explore PSM in detail. This requires two things in preparation. In this chapter, we will discuss the political tradition of Marxism/socialism. We will identify its properties, boundaries, and contours and offer some commentary on what makes this tradition of political thought unique and in some ways distinctively amenable to PSM. In the following chapter, we will offer an analytical framework within which one might begin to assess the nature of Marxism/socialism in PSM as a political force. We will do this by coining the notion of a proto-ideology, a concept that aims to ‘decontaminate’ the texts of social media from the noise of endless and often angry social media intercourse.

Some coordinates

Why socialism?

We have not yet made an account for our selection of a political tradition. The main reason is the author’s own political sympathies and to some degree academic specialism. The websites used as raw material in this book are those I frequently click to access news, commentary, and analysis.

During the course of the fieldwork research for this book, it was frequently stressed by my informants from different interest groups – Omega gang members, Chinese secret societies, social work and criminal justice agencies, community organizations and ethnic groups, among others – that the Omega gang was fundamentally different from the Chinese secret societies. This was because the latter have had a long and established presence in both colonial and contemporary Singapore, given their status as an embedded social institution since the early nineteenth century. In fact, Chinese secret societies have traditionally enjoyed a certain level of tolerance, even acceptance, as their activities have been so intimately intertwined with the everyday lives of the ordinary citizens that they are too commonplace, perhaps even too institutionalized, to be conspicuous. The fact that these secret societies are distinct from the Omega gang has some truth to it as the institutional, cultural, political, historical and ideological contexts in which they emerged and expanded are undoubtedly different. While on one level this difference is very real, on another, both Chinese secret societies and the Omega gang do share a commonality, in that both aspire to operate under the umbrella of ‘enterprise crime’ (Levi, 2002: 887). Their aim, therefore, is to make profits in the criminal underworld – though the Omega gang’s criminal ventures came much later, after the gang was exported from prisons to the wider general society in the 1990s. Referencing secret societies is both analytically and empirically helpful in determining whether the Omega gang qualifies to be an organized crime group similar to the likes of Chinese triads. More importantly, it serves to contextualize the emergence, expansion and consolidation of the Omega gang in both prisons and the criminal underworld. In other words, it is impossible to study the Omega gang without an examination of Chinese secret societies and the historical role they have played in the processes of social control via the quasi-symbiotic relationships they established with conventional mainstream institutions. Two objectives logically flow from this. The first is to explore the applicability of the term ‘organized crime’ to the Omega gang, and the second is to document the historical role of Chinese secret societies in colonial and contemporary Singapore in order to better understand the motivation driving Omega and its members to partake in the criminal underworld.

Following a series of gang clashes and knife violence in 2021 and early 2022, articles appeared in the mainstream press questioning whether the secret societies that plagued Singapore during the colonial and immediate post-independence periods were making a comeback to the now globally acclaimed modern, highly affluent, urbanized and cosmopolitan city state. Violence of any kind is seen as an anomaly in an otherwise safe, orderly and disciplined society. Having enjoyed phenomenal economic growth over the past 50 years or so and a crime rate that is conspicuously low relative to other industrialized societies, violence in ordinarily sanitized public spaces such as that reported in the articles came as a shock to the nation, to what Émile Durkheim termed the ‘collective conscience’. Gang members and the perpetrators of gang violence are often described by both media and criminal justice personnel as wayward and bored youth, lacking supervision from parents, thrill seeking with no aspirations or goals in life. Past gangsters and retired law enforcement officers interviewed for the media have described the gangsters of today as nothing more than a group of boorish boys and girls trying to demonstrate their bravado, in search of ‘glory’, and a far cry from those secret society members of the 1960s and 1970s who are often held up as the archetype of ‘real gangsters’.

As a social scientist reading many of these reports, two issues are of concern but remain largely unaddressed. First, is the real or perceived relationship between youth gangs and adult criminal organizations in the processes of gang formation? Youth gangs portrayed in early research and in the popular media were seen as predominantly an adolescent phenomenon, formed spontaneously or purposefully by youths and largely isolated from community influences. Does this characterization of youth gangs accurately reflect reality? Do youth gangs have close ties with adult criminal organizations and, in particular, with secret societies? Is there a functionally structural relationship between youth gangs and adult organizations, through which youth gangs are being recruited by adult secret society members for lucrative work, such as protecting illicit businesses and working as ‘street soldiers’ in economic and territorial affairs? Are secret societies so deeply institutionalized in legitimate society that we fail to even notice them in local spaces, their possession of criminal social capital that straddles both under-and upper-worlds, which facilitates as much as it conceals their (organized) criminality?

The appropriation by Omega members of a hybridized racialized identity of Malayness and Chineseness has to be set against their ongoing experiences of structural marginality, both in prisons and in the free world. As discussed in Chapter 3, collective violence of an underclass racial group often serves as a substantial resource for its members’ accomplishment of and compensation for masculinity. Messerschmidt’s (1986: 58) observation that marginalized men may be materially deprived, but that they remain a formidable force in terms of gender is important for helping us appreciate the relationship between violence, masculinity and marginality, and the role that violence plays in the lives of the marginalized men in this study as they negotiate and navigate status attainment in Singapore’s racially plural and economically competitive society, pivoting at the intersectionality of race, class and gender. Jewkes (2005: 44–5) posits that the forms and ‘codes of overtly masculine behaviour that characterize working-class cultures are implicated in the replication and perpetuation of imprisonment’ and further argues that while ‘criminal behaviour in society may be regarded … as a learned response to the imperatives of masculine hegemony, [in the context of] prisons, masculinity may be seen as a learned response to the imperatives of the criminal inmate culture’. To put it simply, while the consequence of testing and asserting masculinity may be behaviours and actions that lead to prison, the same behaviours and actions may dictate how successfully an inmate adapts to prison. Inmates can thus bring their externally formed ideologies of manhood and consequent behaviours and actions into the prison, which are further embedded and strengthened within that environment. In this regard, Gilmore puts it in the following terms: ‘the harsher the environment and the scarcer the resources, the more manhood is stressed as inspiration and goal’ (Gilmore, 1990: 224, cited in Jewkes, 2005: 51).

Omega, prison masculinity and violence

While the shared experience of incarceration unites prisoners as a collective social group as they attempt to navigate the universal ‘pains of imprisonment’ (Sykes, 1958), what is of interest to this study is the range of strategies employed by racial minorities to survive prison and adapt the convict code for the street, given their pre-prison backgrounds of stigmatization and marginalization.

This chapter will make a selective excursion through the literature on political ideologies. It does so in order to set out an analytical framework for the case study chapters that follow. In Chapter 2, we made a case that PSM has enabled the development of a rich body of political ideas and debates. What we need to do here is make some clearly delineated steps to treat these ideas and debates analytically. We are not simply arguing that people still debate politics or that the internet is a vibrant and exciting place. Rather, what we are aiming to do is treat bundles of ideas as more substantive than simply a set of texts, signifiers, or discourses. In other words, there has been a qualitative development in politics as a result not only of growing content provision on social media but also that PSM has in turn nurtured these bundles of ideas. PSM has served as a seedbed for the cultivation of sustained and concerted ideological innovation.

Making this argument requires two things: in the first place, an identification of evidence; secondly, a procedure through which the traffic of social media is extrapolated from its immediate environs and analysed. The commonest way of analysing a body of concepts and ideas is to treat them as an ideology. We shall see how this term is both very frequently used but also treated with no small amount of license. Nevertheless, the term offers the best starting point both to identify how concepts, arguments, and terminologies articulate and also to set out a clear way of assessing their properties. Thinking about ideologies nudges us away from the intellectual culture of social media within which ideas are generated.

What does it mean to be an artist? An art researcher? Or a researcher who uses art? Is the definition of an artist someone who ‘makes art’, or is artistic expression an integral aspect of human identity open to everyone? If artists draw from their experiences to facilitate their own and others’ creative processes, how and where is this process different from or the same as the ideas of reflection, awareness, and relationship I have discussed? How is it different from using creative research methods with participants? Just as using research methods that can have unintended therapeutic effect does not make a researcher a therapist working with therapeutic intent, using arts-based methods does not automatically make a researcher an artist.

Being an artist

There was a time, before I re-entered academia, that I described myself as an artist. In addition to the textile art I described in the introduction, my movement practice included creative work that served no extrinsic purpose other than to facilitate my clients to explore their body, the way it moved, and how it interacted with the environment around it. I acted as a consultant for bodies including Local Health Authorities, Primary Care Trusts, SureStart Centres, and Birmingham Royal Ballet, using my intuition and expertise to provide workshops and trainings (McMillan 2015). I used movement in many different ways to allow people to find out more about themselves and the ways in which they engaged with the world around them. My work spanned that of an educator, therapist, and participatory artist; using movement as the medium by which I engaged my audiences with the creative process and exploration of self and others rather than creating art for exhibition or performance. I was not a researcher.

When I began my doctoral studies and started my journey into research, my creative and artistic practice suffered. Coupled as it was with a turbulent and demanding time in my private and home life, I found that I did not have the capacity or space to feed an artistic practice beyond that funnelled into my creative research methods and writing. I was not completing a Practiceas-Research PhD, this was not an accepted form of doctorate in education.

Introduction

A great deal of time has elapsed since Marx first laid down his ideas on alienation in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts in 1844. A considerable volume of scholarship, theorization and empirical work on Marx and alienation has occurred since then, alongside various waves of theories and other work within the social sciences. Different theories and philosophies have raised interesting and challenging questions for how Marx understood alienation. Post-structuralism and post-modernism have posed questions as to what it is to be human. In those philosophies (and I am speaking very broadly here) any reference to some form of essence, a human nature, was eschewed for a fluid relative subjectivity that emerges from discourses and technologies of power. Essentialism is now a cardinal sin, to the point of it being ‘a dirty word in the academy’ according to Nussbaum (1992: 205). Anything that hints of some form of fixity or essence is automatically deigned to be faulty. The accusation of essentialism can be levelled against alienation theory, and, given the prominence I placed on human nature in Chapter 1, that charge requires a response. More recently, post-humanism and neo-materialism have queried the relationship between humans and nature, alongside the modernist impulse to privilege and centre humans (and a White, heterosexual, able-bodied, cis-male human at that) in understanding societies or environmental change. Those perspectives have sought to reorientate nature, from a passive inert entity that does nothing without human input to one that possess its own agential potentials. Those are good points and again require a response.

The challenges to alienation theory I just mentioned sit outside the Marxist tradition. Challenges also exist from within the Marxist literature as well. The intervention of Althusser and his project to rid Marxism of any of what he regarded as the damaging vestiges of Feuerbachian Humanism is the obvious one. He claimed, borrowing from Bachelard, that an ‘epistemological break’ exists in Marx. This break occurs in 1845 when the focus of Marx’s problematic shifts from a focus on the damage visited by capitalism on a human essence to a problematic concerned with the relations and means of production. The break has consequences for alienation theory.

Introduction

Identitarian Socialism is a proto-ideology in which a range of social injustices are drawn together through an association of oppressed identities with a left-of-centre politics. Its critique of capitalism is that it is based in an elitist politics that exploits, oppresses, and marginalises a society composed of various social groups. Its aspirational world view is that a diverse coalition of identities will push the political centre of gravity radically to the Left through a multi-sited and diverse set of political activisms. Deploying the core concepts of socialism, intersectionality, and populism, Identitarian Socialism would construct a socialism that understands class as a property expressed through situated cultures or resistance and activism.

Identitarian Socialism is oriented around a group of individuals who share some connection with Novara Media. Novara Media was set up in 2011 by Aaron Bastani and James Butler. It is perhaps the best known and most popular socialist news media outlet, which started as a podcast and has grown into a network of political commentary, driven by its Facebook and Twitter profiles. These social media profiles are not only disseminated by Novara’s own accounts but also the accounts of its main spokespeople who have achieved considerable public profiles that have brought them into TV appearances and columns in The Guardian. Identitarian Socialism also weaves into the content of other websites such as Tribune, Stats for Lefties, Left Foot Forward and New Statesman.

Core concepts

Socialism

In Chapter 3, we explored how the term socialism was both historically changeable and therefore varied in its relations to Marxism. At the end of the spectrum, socialism seems like a synonym for the rather vague and relativistic ‘Left’; at the other end, it seems like a synonym for Marxism or communism. We distinguished between a Socialism that was not Marxist – the anarchism, social democratic, and romanticisms of those seeking to find a better life beyond industrial capitalism – and a socialism which was broader, encompassing these trajectories as well as all the variations of Marxism. Identitarian Socialism’s socialism is lower case. Indeed, as we shall explore, there is a discernible ecumenicalism to Identitarian Socialism that evokes Marx, even if it does not go far beyond the act of evoking itself.

This chapter continues the discussion on the paradoxical nature of a hybridized masculinity pursued by members of the Omega gang. While the previous chapter illustrated how they adopted a protest stance through violence to counter and resist what they considered to be Chinese hegemonic masculinity, this chapter charts how Omega members appropriated Chineseness that centred on notions of consumerism, economic success and competitiveness, pragmatism and the principle of guanxi (social connections) to challenge Chinese dominance of the criminal underworld. In other words, Omega members emulated Chineseness to challenge Chinese control of the criminal underworld (Ganapathy and Balachandran, 2019). Omega’s appropriation of money success – an organizational goal that is accepted as quintessentially Chinese – saw immense returns for the gang in terms of human, social, symbolic, reputational and, not least, money capital. Upon their release from prison, Omega members used ‘convicts as a reference group’ to influence the culture of free society and in the process shape the religious, racial, political and criminogenic ideologies of their ethnic peers (Irwin and Cressey, 1962: 154). Prison sociologists have long observed that prison gangs play a significant role in exporting prison subculture and values, acting as a conduit for inmates’ internalization of both the prison’s and the gang’s value systems (Laub and Sampson, 1993). Pyrooz et al’s (2017) argument for treating prison gangs and street gangs as symbiotic rather than purely dichotomous entities finds a compelling case in the analysis of the Omega gang, where shared racialized experiences before and during incarceration shape and bound minority Malay Muslims to this symbiosis between the prison and the streets. When Omega members were released from prison, the gang’s presence, and therefore its membership, expanded onto the streets and then back in the prisons, as those members were re-arrested. Omega’s presence and dominance among the prisoner population allowed it equal say, alongside the Chinese secret societies, in the co-creation of the rules of the game that affected the criminal underworld of the free society, a pattern of informal social control that has been observed consistently with prison gangs elsewhere (Skarbek, 2012, 2014; Pyrooz and Decker, 2019).

What the Omega gang did, upon exportation to the free society, was to ‘corporatize’ itself (Taylor, 1990).

The first part of this book touched on ways in which qualitative research borders onto psychotherapy, education, and embodiment. In Part II, I will explore the lessons that can be learned from art, the challenging terrain that represents the no- man's land between science and qualitative research, and the practical and ethical implications of creative and embodied research.