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| Sunday, 9 May 2004 |
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JVP: refiguring the Left Sunday Essay by Ajith Samaranayake May day this year was an occasion for especial rejoicing by the Left and left-leaning forces in Sri Lanka. This was not merely because political parties identified as belonging to the Left or the Centre-Left had formed a Government but also because the Left itself had ceased to become a dirty word in politics. After the almost imperial accession of President Reagan and Prime Minister Thatcher the West rejoiced in what appeared to be the ultimate triumph of neo-conservatism and neo-liberalism. Mr. Francis Fukuyama informed anybody who cared to listen to him that we had reached the End of History. The Berlin Wall had come tumbling down and Communism had been abandoned. Not merely Left but also Keynesian economic theories of a socially distributive type were being challenged. But now after two years of a neo-liberal and neo-conservative regime theory is suddenly back in vogue. Analysts who are by no means unsympathetic to the UNP are talking of class and tracing the defeat of the Grand Old Party to its reliance on neo-liberal economic policies and structural adjustment programmes. Wonders will never cease. Now it is even fashionable to bash the IMF and the World Bank again. So one of the incremental gains of April 2 would appear to be that offering theoretical explanations for socio-economic phenomena will no longer be treated as the pastime of some eccentric eggheads or 'potheguras.' Those who rejoiced in their pragmatism have been brought down to earth and those media commissars and moghuls who tried to drug the younger generation with a surfeit of punk culture have met their nemesis. Even the Editor of the 'Sunday Leader' was citing the UNP's rejection of the traditional aspirations of the people as contributing to its defeat. However, if recent events have pushed the ideological Left back to the centre stage of national politics it has also reshaped and refigured it in a significant way. This is not merely because of the drastic decline of the Old Left and the rejection of the Nava Samasamaja Party which sought to take its place. By its emergence as the chief party of the Left the JVP has undermined and challenged the categories and orthodoxies of Left thinking because it was after all not so long ago that the purists of the Left were refusing to consider the JVP as a Left party at all. Historically the parties of the Old Left, the LSSP and the CP, have been largely led by declasse intellectuals, most of them educated abroad and immersed in Marxism-Leninism or Trotskyism. The schism between Trotsky and Stalin which can be summarised in the two polar positions of Permanent revolution (Trotsky) and Socialism in one country (Stalin) was to split the Left movement down the middle but both parties were united in the thinking that the socialist revolution could only be led by the working class. In Sri Lanka, however, the working class was small and what was more the nature of the working class was distorted by the fact that the bulk of this class belonging to the plantation proletariat was organised and led on communal lines. The urban working class centred on the Port of Colombo and the service industries was not only small but also of a semi-feudal nature since they were tied in one way or another to the villages of their origin. The bulk of the masses therefore was drawn from the peasantry but like all peasant communities they were tied to the land and the backward values and mores which go with it. It was against this peculiar development of the Sri Lankan polity that the JVP emerged constituting as it does a wave of educated youth to emerge from the peasantry. It is these origins which give the JVP its ambiguous character and what is more generated ambiguous feelings towards them among politicians particularly of a Left persuasion. Although drawn from peasant stock the JVP being the product of free education and modern culture are not given to the old pietistic ways. They are also impatient with the gradualist or reformist approaches to social transformation found on the left wing of the SLFP and among the Old Left. On the other hand since they are a generation which has been deprived of a grounding in English and hence a rounded classical education they lack the theoretical rigour which was found among the older intellectuals of the traditional Left. But this died not prevent them from challenging not once but twice the political Establishment and the State machinery through armed revolt. If all this combined to make the older liberal or Left intelligentsia adopt a condescending attitude towards if the JVP's present leadership (the older leadership with the exception of Somawansa Amarasinghe having been decimated) seems to have admirably taken up the challenge. They are all educated young people and do not appear to be overtly troubled by the fact that they are not proficient in the 'kaduwa'. In fact they seem to have converted this to their advantage by rejecting bookish doctrinaire approaches in favour of practice and their very rootedeness in a nativistic radical political culture quite different to the Eurocentrism of the older Left intelligentsia has equipped them to look at national problems with fresh eyes. The JVP's achievement then has been to substitute the educated youth for the working class as the main engine of the Sri Lankan social transformation. They were helped in this by the Old Left's own withdrawal from revolutionary politics and the assaults on the working class and trade union movement mounted by UNP Governments after 1977. During the late 1950s Gunadasa Amarasekera in a now famous essay in 'Sanskruthi' had argued that it would be the educated rural youth who would give leadership to society and hence his sense of triumph at the JVP's ascendancy at last months's election although strictly speaking Dr. Amarasekera's forecast was about an earlier generation of the bilingual youth. But bilingual or not the JVP has now emerged as a youth leadership of a radical nature sprung from the villages and overturning the orthodox categories of Marxism which had ascribed the leadership role to the urban working class. If the classical Marxist order was the urban working class giving leadership to the peasantry the JVP with its control of the Agriculture, Fisheries, Rural Finance and Cultural Ministries has been provided with the opportunity of reversing that order and giving leadership in both the economic and cultural and spiritual spheres through a new re-organisation of relations in the countryside. How will production relations be reorganised within the agrarian economy? How does one revolutionise the fisheries sector? How does one pump in new capital to the rural economy so that agro-based industries and light and cottage industries are encouraged and developed? How does one rejuvenate traditional culture and make it the partner of a modern artistic and cultural resurgence? In the absence of any major exercise such as Land Reform and re-distributing the land among the peasantry the JVP will have to explore means of developing new strategies such as communal ownership, smaller working units and intermediate technology based on local labour and resources. If funding from the international lending agencies is to be rejected capital will have to be generated from within the economy itself. Already the party is on record as planning to resuscitate the network of neglected and abandoned rural tanks and this will involve finding the funding and mobilising the resources available within the domestic economy itself. Strangely enough the party may be better placed to go ahead with such essentially 'Small is Beautiful' type of plans in the climate of criticism which has sprung up of neo-liberal economic nostrums and structural adjustment programmes which have been so deleterious of agriculture in recent years. In this, its third, incarnation the JVP has played a delightful trick on its critics. Fully conscious that it will be dressed up as the Marxist bogey in the UPFA the JVP has eschewed the rhetoric of radicalism. It talks instead of holding the Government to its election promises. Its Cabinet Ministers visit the Asgiriya and Malwatte temples and confer gravely with the Mahanayakes. They talk in measured, statesmanlike tones to the television microphones. Its critics might dismiss this as another of its clever postures but then it is galling for them to concede that it is possible that the JVP has grown up. |
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