“One has only to reflect on the World Bank, the IMF, the ‘Washington Consensus’, and the WTO — all of which have suborned all governments since 1977, to realize that the issues are still alive for us. In fact these gave rise to further issues too as have arisen from the innovation — the Executive Presidency.”_________________________
by Batty Weerakoon.
(May 27, Colombo, Sri Lanka Guardian) Dr. Colvin R. de Silva studied the politics of his time in the live context of western imperialism spread out between the last two world wars and the four decades thereafter. An exceptionally gifted parliamentarian he served that institution as a representative since the 1940s. The socialist movement in Sri Lanka recognized the valuable contribution he can make to Parliament at a critical time when he was named the National List MP for the only placing the United Socialist Front got in its first parliamentary election.
His parliamentary contribution on the language issue of the 1950s has already been brought out in the recent publication Two Languages One Nation.... There he dealt with the country’s communal or ethnic issue with remarkable prescience. Nearly thirty years later in his The UNP Government and the Crisis of the Nation, reviewing the erratic handling of the matter at the time, he concluded that it is only a government which is unswervingly committed to a peaceful solution to the problem that can be relied on to solve it. He added, "It will, more over, have to be something more than a merely progressive government characterized by good-will. It will need to be a government committed to implementing a wide ranging and deep going social transformation. Without such transformation there cannot be a lasting solution but only patch work."
As to whether the truth of this statement has been understood by even the parties of the left of today is an open question.
Those who in the 1980s and the 90s fondly repeated such esoteric phrases as the ‘end of history’ should learn from Dr. de Silva’s handling of the subject of socialism, and the socialist transformation of capitalist society, why their hurrahs have been so short-lived. The economic anarchy of capitalist society which Albert Einstein mentioned in 1949 as the source of the evil of the time has only become increasingly bare fisted with the passing years.
"Nowhere have we overcome," he wrote then, "What Thorstein Veblen called the ‘predatory phase’ of human development." Dr de Silva’s preoccupation with socialism was as the way out of this predatory phase which had not spared this country.
A confirmed Marxist, active in the mass movement since the 1930s, and with no love for quick-fix revisions he showed a remarkable gift for taking the appropriate and well informed political message to the masses as well as its intelligentsia. His ability to defend ideologically the Russian workers’ state against its bureaucratic distortion won for the LSSP its political integrity within the world socialist movement.
It could fairly be said that the enactment of the Republican Constitution and the take over of the British-owned plantations in the country are principally and essentially the contribution of Dr de Silva when he was Minister of Constitutional Affairs & the Plantation Industry. Attempts were made to thwart the plantations take-over by getting rid of the LSSP from that government. But by then the process the minister had set in motion was irreversible and his worthy successor Hector Kobbekaduwa carried through this wide-ranging measure.
When Dr de Silva exercised the privilege of addressing Parliament on the removal of the LSSP ministers from the Sirima Bandaranaike led government, he identified the source of the inspiration for this move which paved the way for the 1977 debacle. He said that this country has become the focus of activity of international forces in the wake of imperialism’s collapse in the former Indo-China region with the resulting change not only in the Pacific but also in the Indian Ocean.
It could have been no more than a premise at that time, but today we see its operation as the real politik in the whole of South Asia. Dr de Silva’s article Sirima’s Blitzkrieg could not have been written in 1977 if he retained any belief in the SUP being the instrument of progressive social change with its leadership being avowedly wedded to the ‘Bandaranaike principles which he characterized as "an uncertain body of unsystematised thoughts and ideas."
Other visions and personal credo have intervened since then at that leadership level, but so long as these end at a mere populist political level the needed change would be long in coming. Populism by itself is no answer to the challenges of economic underdevelopment in our part of the world and the exploitation of that situation by imperialism in its devious ways.
In a sense J. R. Jayewardene, like his successor, faced the hustings in 1977 as a populist. It was Dr de Silva that exposed his real politik. He saw the new PM-President as a threat to bourgeois democracy itself This system he knew provides the most favourable conditions for struggle against it. He wrote in November 1978. "The struggle in defense of democratic rights and freedom and for their expansion is already a principal sector of when the revolutionary struggle in Sri Lanka. It is not excluded that it is in this sector the masses will begin to move into direct action of course under the stimulus of and in reaction to blows directed at the principal achievements of the post-war period- it will be not one single issue that will move them but a complex of economic and political issues though prices and inflation may tend to dominate."
Here he placed in sharp profile what he saw as the political agenda before the people - the resuscitation of Parliamentary democracy and the preservation of a tolerable standard of living for the masses in general. His criticism of that government’s first budget that introduced its "New Economy" is proof enough of the fact that the battle lines were being drawn not in one sector only but in all.
What is significant for us today is that those lines still stand with the same starkness that De de Silva attributed to them, and as real is the presence for us of what he evoked: "behind the local class foe, aligned with the local class foe and even in the very battlefront, the revolutionary masses of Sri Lanka will find themselves facing, so directly as makes a difference, the power and might of international imperialism. It will be a foe in world retreat nevertheless; and therefore, a more cruel one than in the days of its world advance."
One has only to reflect on the World Bank, the IMF, the ‘Washington Consensus’, and the WTO — all of which have suborned all governments since 1977, to realize that the issues are still alive for us. In fact these gave rise to further issues too as have arisen from the innovation — the Executive Presidency.
The last decade of Dr de Silva’s life was devoted to this new set up and what flowed from it. In July 1978 he wrote, "The UNP., open agency of the neo-compradores, whose only ambition is to be servitors of big foreign private capital, has moved further and faster than was perhaps anticipated even by some on the Left . ............ The struggle for political independence against imperialism has to start anew. The first need in that struggle is to fight this anti-national, neo-compradore UNP government relentlessly to the end."
This was achieved in 1994, but what then? The governments that followed have all religiously signed on the IMF’s dotted line and accepted solemnly its ‘conditionalities’. It may be assumed that the real struggle though not round the comer is yet to come.
- Sri Lanka Guardian
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