Llosa Lanka and economic nonsense

"Llosa, has not been given the Nobel Prize for his economic theory, but deservedly for his deeply sensitive works of literature which identified with the underdog and the underprivileged."

by Rajpal Abeynayake

(October 13, Colombo, Sri ;Lanka Guardian) Mario Vargos Llosa, the Peruvian writer, has been awarded the 2010 Nobel Prize for Literature. There’s a story that hangs behind this — it is as if an arch reactionary capitalist lover of robber-barons such as J. R. Jayawardene has been awarded a Nobel Prize.

Fortunately, the only literature that J. R. Jayawardene wrote was his party manifesto, and that was bad as well.

But then we all know J. R. Jayawardene to be an unfeeling autocrat, and a ruthless Thatcher admirer, who believed that cosseting the rich and giving excessive concessions to the wealthy would by some trickle-down keep the large unwashed hordes, the masses, whom he according to one apocryphal story called the asses, happy.

But Vargos Llosa is not from that political cannon. He is a deeply sensitive man, who in his novels, showed empathy for the powerless, and identified faithfully with the underdog.

He wrote about repressive dictatorships and those who are suffering under the jackboot of such regimes, and he saw the absurd side of contemporary Latin American society, where every institution including the army is run by petty autocrats and strongmen at their whim.

But then as if he had abruptly learnt a lesson from J. R. Jayawardene, Llosa decided to run for the presidency in Chile in the early 1980s, on a platform of Tatcherite pro-market ultra right economic conservatism.

He also endorsed all US policies in Latin America which was astonishing due to past US actions in the continent including the ousters of democratically elected leaders such as Salvador Allende, among others.

Alberto Fujimori

Llosa lost to the populist Alberto Fujimori who ran on a semi socialistic ticket, and apparently today refers to his unsuccessful presidential run as a major career mistake.

But the question remains why a man sensitive to poverty and the lot of the underprivileged majority that constituted the social underbelly in countries such as Chile, thought — unless he was a rather crude hypocrite — that market conservativism and pro-American new Labour policies would uplift the economies of perennially underperforming Latin America nations?

Today too many good people have bought this political manthra, and we see in the developed economies in particular, that the Left in the political spectrum is in fact the Far Right.

It’s why those who do not agree with the Blairist New Labour agenda, such as the newly anointed Labour leader Ed Milliband, are referred to as ‘Reds’ (Red Ed) in the mainstream media though their politics are for the most part to the right of centre, compared particularly to the Labour welfarist policies that were known in Britain around two decades back.

It is not difficult to believe however that, after the so-called market revolutions of the 80s, and the apparent prosperity that these policies are said to have ushered into countries such as Britain, that every intellectual including a sensitive intellectual such as Vargos Llosa bought into the myth that the only recipe for prosperity was Conservative economics, where the rich were pampered in the notion that they would generate wealth for all including the poor.

These myths received validation from economies of countries such as Singapore and Malaysia, and South Korea, which also took to the market route, while taking the larger mass of labour industrial and blue-collar workers for a breed of cattle who could expect few rights. The captains of industry in these countries, subsidised and encouraged by the state, were pampered ostensibly in order to provide for poor people’s economic well being.

But why would any Vergos Llosa of today, or any sensitive intellectual be it in Sri Lanka or Chile endorse this far Right economic model when almost every economy in which it was practised is in extreme dire straits, UK and the USA being of course the most visible examples?

Rural constituency

It’s why when the Rajapaksa administration which is supposed to be representing a rural constituency speaks of a Singaporean/Malaysian economic model, it sounds laughable, considering how out of touch the policymakers must be to swear by such outdated formulae such as this.

Of the economies that have to some extent turned around in the midst of the global economic meltdown, those that have to be counted are in countries such as Argentina which totally repudiated the ultra-right Right economic prescriptions that had been handed down by global lending institutions such as the IMF.
Those such as Vargos Llosa who gave some currency to Tatcherite ultra right economic polices that cosseted and battened the rich, are these days considered as quaint eccentrics who got it all wrong, even if they probably did not mean to.

Llosa, has not been given the Nobel Prize for his economic theory, but deservedly for his deeply sensitive works of literature which identified with the underdog and the underprivileged. Today, countries such as Argentina are fast learning, as UK and the USA would surely learn in the short to long term future, that if the deprived categories in society stay poor for too long, there would be no hope for the economies of their countries as a whole. That lesson would not be lost on Llosa or the Lankans.