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| Sunday, 1 May 2005 |
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The many masks of May Day Sunday Essay by Ajith Samaranayake Yet another May Day takes to the streets today, brave banners held proudly aloft, the bands at full blast and a thousand throats lustily shouting the slogans of the day. Sri Lanka perhaps is exceptional in celebrating the International Workers' Day in a style and manner which has remained unchanged over the last several decades which have witnessed the withering away of Communism and the consequent diminution of workers' power.
But in Sri Lanka there has been little change in the way May Day is marked and one still gets a feel of the elan of the 1940-70s when the Left was at the zenith of its power as one sees the crowds pouring out into the streets and taking the city by storm at least for a day. There have, of course, been dramatic changes in the quality and character of May Day over the decades. The workers who demonstrated in the 1940s and 1950s may have genuinely believed that the Left as it was then constituted would be able to establish a socialist government putting to rout the forces of capitalism and imperialism. The militancy and morale of the organised working class, undiluted by petit bourgeois opportunism and romanticism, was of a high order then. A socialist heaven on earth seemed possible. But today after many wasteful decades of compromise bordering on betrayal of once bright hopes May Day has become yet another political jamboree where the people walk under their separate banners in the Long March to bring this or that parliamentary party to power. The working class was both the saviour and snare of the traditional Left, the LSSP and the CP. It was among the working class of Colombo that the Left began its politics challenging the hegemony wielded by the then reigning Czar of the labour movement, A.E. Goonesinghe. These workers were mainly concentrated in the Colombo Port, the Railway and the British-owned companies in Colombo involved in export trade. The LSSP was at the same time moving into the plantations and challenging the hegemony of the Ceylon Indian Congress led by Natesa Aiyyar (later to become the Ceylon Workers' Congress led by S. Thondaman). In treating the working class as the motor of the future Ceylonese revolution the Left was, of course, following orthodox Marxist wisdom but the contradiction was that the Left's predominant parliamentary strength lay not in the towns but the countryside. While the LSSP was powerful in the Kelani Valley, the Sabaragamuwa Province and the Kalutara district the CP's strongholds lay along the southern coastline. So while the Old Left paid formal ideological homage to the working class they were compelled to look to the more backward peasantry for parliamentary deliverance. The peasantry was by far the most numerous class in Sri Lanka but politically they were the least radical or politically conscious. Mired in subsistence agriculture on small plots of land, exploited by landlords and money-lenders and prey to all the superstitions and fears of a stagnant rural society they provided the biggest vote bank for the two main parliamentary parties, the UNP and the SLFP. In fact, it is no secret that the founding fathers of the Soulbury Constitution had drafted it in such a manner that there would be a distinctly rural weightage to the voting system. Having opted for the parliamentary road rather than the revolutionary path the Old Left was caught in a cleft stick. There was no way in which they could capture power in a predominantly peasant country through a parliamentary system heavily weighted in favour of the backward rural vote. What is more the Left had done nothing to organise the peasantry politically. In the March 1960 General Election which followed the assassination of Prime Minister Bandaranaike both the Mahajana Eksath Peramuna of Philip Gunawardena (then at least a nominally left party) and the LSSP both had high hopes of victory. It was in part its failure which prompted the LSSP to form a coalition with the SLFP in a bid to penetrate the villages but in retrospect this appears a doomed strategy. The LSSP had after all had a dialogue with these villages since the 1930s when Philip and N. M. Perera had been elected to the State Council from rural constituencies but the left had made no attempt to organise the villagers politically or instill a radical consciousness into them. While the left had been concentrating on the working class but without obtaining any hold on the towns (except for Pieter Keuneman in Colombo Central) the SLFP with its populist politics had filled the vacuum in the villages and won over the more radical rural sections unwilling to back the UNP. In fact the village has been the greatest conundrum of left politics in Sri Lanka. Although Sri Lanka is predominantly an agricultural country with the bulk of the people living in the countryside the left has never addressed itself to the question of ideologically and politically mobilising the peasantry on a radical platform. There has been no intensive study of the class relationships and hierarchical ties within peasant society, the relationship of the peasant to the landowners, the village gentry and the Buddhist clergy often chosen from the ranks of the aristocracy in the Kandyan areas. There is good reason to believe that in a semi-feudal milieu such as Sri Lanka caught between subsistence agriculture and incipient industrialisation there would be broader vistas to be explored, which cannot always be encompassed and explained away by the orthodox Marxist class categories. But except for a few studies by the late Newton Goonesinghe this latter area has not been illuminated by any Marxist discourse. It was this blind spot of the Old Left, which was so tellingly exploited by the JVP. If the SLFP during an earlier time had moved in to fill the vacuum left by the Left in the villages the JVP during a different time did the same to explosive effect. If the SLFP had identified the rural petit bourgeois of monk, Sinhala teacher and ayurvedic physician as a distinct class from the propertied gentry, the JVP identified the youth generated by this rural middle-class as a distinct category and specifically addressed itself to them. It was not so much unemployment which fuelled the 1971 April Revolt as the sense of exclusion from the political process felt by this generation of youth. There may not have been anything very Marxist-Leninist in Wijeweera's five lectures but they did strike a responsive chord among a new generation while the Old Left fell between the two stools of impotent trade union strength in the towns and meagre parliamentary strength in the villages. All these factors came to the boil in the Insurgency of April 1971. British colonialism had disrupted subsistence agriculture in the villages and imposed on its debris a plantation economy, which provided the surplus necessary for capitalist development. But this profited only a miniscule elite living off the surplus of the plantations in the towns. True Sri Lanka has had one of the more advanced Welfare States in the world but since economic development in real terms could not keep pace with the burgeoning Welfare State this itself became a top-heavy burden for post-Independence Governments. The village was left to its own devices while its brightest sons lured by Free Education and the bright neon-lights of the city were left stranded as the springs of welfarism began running dry in the harsh economic climate of the 1970's. The Insurgency of 1971 was therefore above all else the climactic explosion of the fermenting crisis of the village to which sadly Sri Lankan society has still to find an answer. Today 34 years after April 1971, however, the JVP finds itself part of the Government but again by a cruel historical trick circumstances have conspired to ensure a hostile global environment for any successful socialist project. Although occupying the Ministries of Agriculture, Fisheries and Rural Industry the JVP is not able to implement any socialist strategy at the rural level in the absence of any project for an overall socialist transformation of society as a whole in a climate of triumphant neo-capitalism unfurling the banner of Globalisation. They are also in danger of becoming corrupted by the soiled ways of parliamentary politics. The question then is how the idealistic young are to be offered a fruitful leadership in this climate so hostile to and disdainful of idealism. So the JVP will take to the streets on its own this May Day and by another ironic trick their slogans will have little to do with workers' solidarity or radical economic transformation. For the principal preoccupation of the JVP these days is the National Question and more immediately the problem of a joint mechanism for the rehabilitation of the North and the East Between the Government and the LTTE. The cruellest trick then for the faithful of this over half century of May Days from Goonesinha to Somawansa Amarasinghe has been the substitution of nationalism for socialist revolution on the banners and the bunting of Workers' Day. Is this a manifestation of virulent nationalism in an economy in decay, a vindication of the dark prognoses of western academic sociologists and capitalist ideologues that the future will steadily unfold a scenario of warring nationalisms? How are we to put May Day back on its rails by addressing the problems of the economy as they affect the working classes of both town and countryside rather than the ephemeral problems of parliamentary politics which appear petty in contrast to the larger problems of economy, society and nation-building? There are obviously no ready-made answers but one thing is obvious.
Today's May Days are a far cry from those of that halcyon time when the red
banner denoted at least a possibility of radical change if not all-out
revolution. |
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