In his essay “The Ex-Communist’s Conscience”, Isaac
Deutscher lambasted those he felt to have abandoned their
youthful inclinations for extreme Marxism in favour of a rightwing economic and social
philosophy that was as bad, if not worse. He argued, cogently I believe, that
with the betrayal of the stateless society (for which the Russians had fought
in 1917) by Joseph Stalin, the ex-Communist, or the Communist who became a
renegade, sought solace in a variant of rightwing politics that was, at the end
of the day, no better than the totalitarian excesses of Stalin.
Deutscher’s essay, incidentally, was a review of The God
That Failed, a book brought out by a group of ex-Communists (Louis Fischer,
André Gide, Arthur Koestler, Ignazio Silone, Stephen Spender, and Richard
Wright), all of whom (in particular, Koestler) had been idealists who’d looked up to the Russian
Revolution and what it stood for even as Stalin forced out Trotsky in the
power struggle that ensued after Lenin’s death. I hardly need to add that,
never mind the withering of the state that socialism was supposed to bring
about, not even Stalin could prevent the institutionalisation of bureaucracy
that Marx had cautioned against in his writings.
As for those six ex-Communists, they weren’t the only
renegades who’d later made a mark in what I termed in my column last week as a “dark
decade” in American history (the fifties), but they were the most vocal back
then. Among the others who would joined them were John dos Passos (whose
poetry, despite his being a renegade, stands out remarkably fresh even today),
Whittaker Chambers, James Burnham, and Max Eastman (a
close associate of John Reed, one of three Americans buried at the Kremlin). Because of what they felt to have been a betrayal of
their ideals, they all made a circuit from the Left to the extreme Right.
Deutscher did not condemn their anger against Communism.
What he condemned was the refuge they sought in their attempt to ward off their
inclinations for the Left. He succinctly tracked down their route: having
broken away from the Communist Party, they’d
declare loyalty to their own sect and creed of the doctrines which they felt
the Party should stand for, before breaking away from Communism altogether. I
think Deutscher put it best: “He (the ex-Communist) no longer throws out the
dirty water of the Russian revolution to protect the baby; he discovers that
the baby is a monster which must be strangled. The heretic becomes a renegade.”
The world is littered with renegades who pass themselves off
as heretics. Party politics, personalities, ideologies: these congeal in the end to mere rhetoric. It’s all about power and clinging to power. If at
all, the history of the Left, marred as it is by ideological shifts and
divisions, is a good indicator of how far we have
ventured out and come back. We are all heretics who become
renegades, and for that reason, no Left movement in today’s world has been
immune to breakages and slip-ups.
Last Sunday (December 18) marked the 81st anniversary of the
oldest political force in the country, the Lanka Sama Samaja Party (LSSP). “Force”
is a strong word, so strong that it can’t be used to refer to a party that, in
the opinion of some, has outlasted its glories, but for the moment let’s forget
that. Whether or not one agrees with its principles, one can’t disagree with
its past. There were, as is typical of such parties, shifts and breakages, but these were resolved (until relatively recently) in favour of an
all-encompassing ideology that made up the most powerful Trotskyite party in
the world. This week’s column is not about the LSSP but about the Left in Sri
Lanka: not the (lowercase) god that failed us, but the god that we failed.
Historians, in their attempt to compare Sri Lanka with other
colonial countries, frequently and falsely contend that the period from 1815 to 1948 was
one in which capitalism bloomed. This is not a tirade against every historian:
there have been some who’ve identified this period for what it was: one in
which schools, Universities, and every other institution considered today as a
public service catered to a stunted, hybrid bourgeoisie. No less a person than
Professor Kumari Jayawardena, with her landmark research on the colonial
bourgeoisie, argues that even in a supposedly capitalist society as the one we
were supposed to have had, caste considerations did not erode away. In Nobodies
to Somebodies, she refers the caste rifts rather wittily as symbolising a
transition from the “Old Mudliyars to the New Misters.”
The colonial bourgeoisie tried their hand at tolls and
rents, monopolising the paalam paruwa in an attempt to curry favour with
the coloniser. Needless to say, they were paid for their loyalty. As the
British solidified their stranglehold, the aspiring bourgeoisie rose,
graduating from the plantation sector to mining, arrack rents, and eventually
the post of the Mudliyar. Practically every school financed and built during
this time, at least those considered as “elite” today, were there for one
purpose: to help the “native” landowner and rentier obtain a Westernised education
for his children. The irony of this, if you can spot it out, is that 12 years
were spent in these schools and another four or five in University (preferably
Oxford or Cambridge) for the purpose of getting employed as translators,
clerks, and civil servants in a menial government office.
The truth then is that this burgeoning capitalist class was
not capitalist at all. All they did was mine, extract, and sell. They were not
businessmen. They were extractors. They were not interested in making profits.
They were more interested in making a quick buck. In other words, the colonial
bourgeoisie were never the productive commercialists they’re touted as today.
What they earned they got easily, if not because of a
monopoly over natural resources then because of cheap labour and colonial patronage.
In the rush to rake up profits that naturally resulted from
this, not everyone made it big: as Nobodies to Somebodies makes it
clear, families such as the Telge Peiris ancestry from Panadura were afflicted
by the vagaries of demand and supply which were part of the primary sector they
were operating in. The few that did make it big, however, literally gave birth
to an anomaly: their offspring became social, political, and economic
agitators. Their sons became prodigal, their daughters took to the feminist
movement, and all in all, a largely Western education supplied
them the very tools of social change the parents had held back.
Leopards, however, don’t change spots and these offspring, even after the religions riots of 1883 and the racial riots of 1915, congealed into the elite their parents had been: aristocratic to a fault, yet mindful about superstition and tradition and wary of modernity.
This latter contradiction, a reflection of their hybrid
(confused) identity, spilt over to 1948 and our post-independence history, when
key political figures from the colonial bourgeoisie became both elitists and
demagogues: ignorant of the aspirations of the majority, yet pandering to their
chauvinist, self-destructive demands as and when it was expedient to do so. As
I observed in my article on poverty and the (political) periphery in September,
no class has done more harm to this country than the meritocrats, i.e. those who conflate economic power with intelligence.
It was in this context that the LSSP was formed, in 1935.
Long before the UNP was formed and S. W. R. D. Bandaranaike brought about
swabasha, the stalwarts of the Left – Philip, N. M., and Colvin – were agitating
for complete independence. It was Philip Gunawardena, not those touted as
national heroes today, who asked for an independence that went beyond Dominion
status. While I personally feel that the transition from colony to Dominion
helped ward off much of the ethnic unrest that heralded India’s independence in
1947, I also feel that by artificially concealing a political structure that
catered to the British under a veneer of populism, our leaders managed
to bottle up the hopes, fears, and ideals of the majority, all of which broke
out so violently later on that we are still paying the price for the short-sightedness
of our leaders.
Regi Siriwardena, in a series of essays, tried to answer a
perplexing question: why, even after taking the front in our independence
struggle, couldn’t the LSSP muster broad support? Siriwardena’s answer
was that the LSSP was a Trotskyite party and Trotskyism, at its base,
repudiated nationalism.
To that my answer, presumptuous as it may seem, is that the people simply couldn’t have cared whether Leon Trotsky rubbished nationalism or not. Secular though their outlook may have been, the stalwarts of the Left were no “mul sidagath aragal karayo” (uprooted revolutionaries): they were connected with the people and this at a time when even independent candidates (including Kumari Jayawardena’s father, A. P. de Zoysa) could hope to enter the Legislature. They were popular, they did muster support (the Bracegirdle affair is evidence for this), and they could and did get elected to represent the people.
The answer, I feel therefore, is more complex than what Siriwardena came up with. My belief is that the political elite of the day could and did contest with no opposition, while the candidates from the Left had to contend with the many instances of malpractice, abuse, and the advantage of the upper hand the elite were endowed with. The latter point was clearly discernible in the State Council election of 1936. While quite a number of leftists, Philip Gunawardena included, entered with comfortable victories, in constituencies home to the political establishment (such as Veyangoda and Kelaniya) the candidate was elected unopposed. This is of course not the only reason why the Left couldn’t fare well, and why, in later years, it had to be happy kowtowing to a breakaway faction of the UNP. But it is a reason nevertheless.
Given this, what did 1956, 1964, and 1970 breed? The Old
Left, even by then a pale replica of what it had once been (after all, no
movement can be expected to sustain its base after years of detention and
internal rifts), facilitated the “maturing of the long submerged Sinhalese
intelligentsia.” This intelligentsia, which Siriwardena saw as a "belated and
embryonic bourgeoisie", consisted of the kade mudalali and the game iskole mahaththaya. Ideologically
they reflected the rightwing outlook of the very same forces the nationalists championed: the pancha maha balavegaya.
The irony here, incidentally, is that no more than three
decades later, the same Old Left that championed swabasha and “Sinhala
Only” would be distorted by the NGO mafia to pander to minoritarianism and
federal-speak. It was left to the New Left, the radical movement from the South
(as opposed to the pipe-smoking, armchair socialism that had adorned the
independence struggle against the Establishment), to rake up problems and force
the government to see them.
This of course led to two uprisings resulting in atrocities that account for the massive deficit
of professionals, artistes, and thinkers we are facing today, subject to the
caveat that sections of the Old Left, by omission or commission, aided and
abetted the ideology of the same government they were supposed to be against.
Given this context, it’s no cause for wonderment that the radicals from the
South could do what even the army couldn’t: bring the entire country to a standstill
for three years.
“Whither the Left now?” is a question on everyone’s lips,
though not everyone can or will answer it. It is the basis for a tragedy and a
farce, a reflection on opportunities missed and never reclaimed. The Old Left
today, all in all, have consistently shown that they are behind the political
bourgeoisie, that they are unable to stand up on their own, that they lack the
courage of their own convictions.
How bad is this? On the one hand, we have a section of
the LSSP supporting the former president on account of what is felt to be his
opposition to the West. On the other hand, we have another section (ironically
baptised as the “Majority Group”) proclaiming that their aim is to solidify the
gains made on January 8 last year. The latter, by the way, is careful to weed
out the fact that they are part of a government led by their historical foe,
the UNP: in every press release and feel-good statement they make, they hence
proclaim support for the president, not the government. Which side is better, which
side is more despicable? Again, not a question everyone can answer.
Where do we go from here? Do we look back at vanished
glories, or do we glorify the turncoats who’ve absconded ideals for expedience?
It’s a pity Sri Lanka couldn’t throw up a Deutscher to answer this.
Written for: Ceylon Today, December 20 2016
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