H. L. D. Mahindapala

By and large, ideologues come with inseparable attachments of narrow blinkers, tinted glasses and, worst of all, thundering egos — all which obfuscate and limit their vision to see only the half-baked theories they breed in their deracinated, disoriented and disinherited minds. This applies mostly to Marxists like my fellow-columnists, Prof. Kumar David (KD) and Dr. Vikramabahu Karunaratne (VK) and anti-Sri Lanka academics and theoreticians (mainly in NGOs) whose formulas, recipes and the mono-causal fictions they concocted to demonize the nation have gone down the drain that ran all the way to disgorge in the Nandikadal Lagoon.

Take the case of VK who has not been shy of referring to his residence in Panadura, if I remember correct, as the “Walauwe”. This Marxist “Walauwe hamuduruwo” hanging on to an archaic status symbol is as irrelevant to the 21st century as he is to Marxism. More importantly, it is his political somersault that is so revolting. Like some of the old pioneering Marxists he has, at the end of his futile political career, landed on the lap of Ranil Wickremesinghe — a dangerous place to be in to those who know Wickremesinghe’s preferences in his non-political pastimes. VK, however, says that he prefers the lap of Wickremesinghe because he is fascinated by the colour green. He goes into raptures about the green flags fluttering in Beruwela and Paiyagala because he thinks it “has become the symbol of freedom.” Obviously, his blinkers, tinted glasses and ego make him see things which Wickremesinghe’s closest comrades in the UNP do not see. They see him as an anti-democratic, power crazy, fascist who has throttled and suppressed all democratic norms within the UNP. But VK sees Wickremesinghe as a “liberator”. This is not surprising. Some of the anti-Sri Lankan NGO pundits, and committed devotees of the Jaffna’s “Surya Devan” also saw Wickremesinghe’s political partner, and VK’s political hero, Velupillai Prabhakaran, as a “liberator”.

The bottom-line, however, is that the “Walauwe hamuduruwo” from Panadura has found the most bizarre excuse for joining the “Walauwe hamuduruwo” from Cambridge Place. VK who claims to be a serious Marxists has designated Wickremesinghe as “a social democrat”. Don’t laugh. He is bloody serious! He rejects any suspicions of Wickremesinghe being a “conservative” (mark you, this is despite the latter being the Deputy President of the International Democratic Union (IDU) — a gang of arch capitalist reactionaries running the Christian-dominated IDU — ) and anoints him as a progressive “social democrat.” Of course, all this pacha kaivaru is to find an excuse for him to sit on the lap of Wickremesinghe. He, in fact, confesses that Wickremesinghe’s “social democratic” credentials are “good enough for us to collaborate” with the Deputy President of the IDU.

Marxists hopping into bed with capitalists has been a common behavioural tendency among the Trotskyites, Stalinists, Maoists, Guevarists etc. After misleading the masses, throughout the better part of their lives, crying that the capitalist class, represented by the UNP and the SLFP, is the enemies of the working class they had no qualms in abandoning the working class and grabbing a share of the creature comforts in the capitalist state as cabinet ministers, diplomats (Robert Gunawardena), chairmen of corporations etc. Perhaps, it is possible to put up some excuses for joining the centre-left SLFP but to join the out-and-out right-wingers in the UNP, allied to the West, is inexcusable. VK jumping into the lap of Wickremesinghe, the Deputy President of the IDU, could be written off as the last in the long line of Marxists who had no reservations in betraying the working class in exchange for acquiring bourgeois recognition, respectability and comforts.

As for Marx he must be cracking whatever bones that are left in his Highgate tomb in London laughing at the character certificate given by the lumpen Marxist from Panadura who has shifted his loyalty from: Prabhakaran to Wickremesinghe. Marx, of course, has produced global evils. But in VK I feel that Marx has produced his most pathetic joker. What credibility is there in the Marxist “Walauwe hamuduruwo”, whose ultimate political goal is to sit on the lap of Wickremesinghe! Geez! These political nincompoops makes you want to throw up in their faces.

Anyway, let’s leave this Marxist moron to rot in his own inane fantasies and move on to the other slightly sophisticated Marxist, Prof. Kumar David, (KD) who also is incapable of distinguishing between Marxism and his petit-bourgeois Tamil tribalism. Of course, it must be granted that in some of his analyses he is a cut or two above the Marxist “Walauve hamuduruwo”. But that’s all. Even at the end of the first decade of the 21st century KD’s head is still wrapped in the anachronistic mantras of 19th century Marxism which was a good critique of primitive capitalism of the Dickensian era. Marx was expecting it to decay, crumble and end up in blaze like Miss. Haversham’s wedding table — a Freudian frustration frozen in time. But dynamic capitalism has moved light years away from the garrets of the grimy world of Dickens into the liberal spaces of America where the proletariat — an entity that was supposed to descend into hell holes of irredeemable poverty — come to their work places in cars.

According to Marxist dialectics capitalism was not going to lift the poverty-stricken workers into the middle class. It was to go other way into grinding poverty while the capitalists were to shrink into a dwindling enclave with nothing to do except lose their wealth, power and grip on the state and crumble under the weight of the raised hammer and sickle. But the creation of mega-million middle classes in India and China has stood the theories of Marx on their head. The resilient dynamics of capitalism, with all its infirmities, have survived the multiple roller-coaster rides from the thirties whereas the socialist haven of USSR that was supposed to bury capitalism is now lying dead and unsung in the rubble of the Berlin Wall. All political systems — fascism, Castroism, Chinese communism — have embraced capitalism within their different political frameworks. So far capitalism has shown a remarkable capacity to repair it damages and bounce back with some vigour. On the contrary, “scientific socialism” which was supposed outlast capitalism went down the drain with no signs of doing a Lazarus.

This is the difference between capitalism and Marx’s communism. One has flexibility and viability and the other was too rigid and cramped, structurally and ideologically, for it to compete with the innovative technological, social and market forces that were driving capitalism to new heights. In the end capitalism outlived Marxism and Marx’s baby (incidentally, he did produce an illegitimate baby by exploiting the working class servant woman in his house) died ingloriously.

Of course, comrade KD is scratching his head wondering why capitalism has not conformed to Marx’s dogma. Each time capitalism seemed to be on the verge of collapsing — e.g, the Malaysian melt down, the subprime lending crash in USA, the European debt crisis, global financial crisis, etc., — comrade David jumps up and down delighted that the end has come for capitalism. This reminds me of the classic story in the Panchatantra where a fox was trailing behind an ox believing that the heavy, loose testicles, which were doing similar roller-coaster swings like capitalism, were about to fall. After hanging around the ox for years the fox finally gave up saying: “It is loose but tight!” Capitalism is just like that: loose but tight.

The strength of capitalism, unlike communism, is in its flexibility with a rejuvenating and recurring capacity to come up each time it goes down. When communism collapsed in Berlin there was no one to rescue it. But capitalism has the creative potential to interact constructively with the residual partners who must necessarily rush to rescue each other in times of crises. Creativity and flexibility have saved capitalism time and again. Consider China, for instance, the newest face of capitalism. It is one of the greatest contradictions in history where capitalism survives and thrives inside the political framework of communism. Marx never foresaw this though it must be conceded that of all the known stages of history he paid the highest tribute to capitalism in his Manifesto. So far capitalism has survived like the broad Catholic Church — the first multinational where there are institutional and individual faults leaving the whole system in a wobbly but reasonably stable condition.

Marxism, on the other hand, was doomed to fail. It carried its own seeds of destruction. In fact, it collapsed under the weight of its own contradictions. The central premise on which Marxism was established claimed that it had found the key to the mystery of history. His famous formula of the thesis and anti-thesis ending in synthesis, though appealing, was too linear and also outside the empirical reality. According to Marx, history would end in socialism after the contradictions of capitalism (thesis) clash with the anti-thesis (the revolutionary working class) resulting in the new socialist order that would be the eternal paradise for mankind without any further contradictions disrupting its existence.

What he failed to recognize was that the thesis-anti-thesis dynamics resulting in a synthesis is an eternal and universal law that grinds its way in the universe — just not in man-made history — without any possibility of Marx’s theory of dialectical materialism stopping the laws of opposites performing its cosmic motion in time and space. It was never going to stop Marx’s synthesis of socialism. When Trotsky wrote Revolution Betrayed, analysing the rise of the new bureaucratic class — a theme picked by Milovan Djilas who fell out with Stalin — he wrote unwittingly the anti-thesis that was going to bury Marx’s thesis. Now this is a subject that can be extended into a voluminous book. But like KD I too must accept the generosity of the Editor, Rajapal Abeynaike, who due to the circumstances he has to face, cannot afford to be munificent.

So before space runs out, let me deal briefly with KD’s inability to interpret, apply and the understand the north-south dynamics that interacted with each other. It is rather difficult to forgive a Marxist who fails to read or interpret the known history according to the fundamentals of Marxism. After all they are supposed to be equipped with the key to the mysteries of history to interpret it scientifically. So why did KD fail to apply his Marxist theory to interpret the north-south conflict? He boasts that he had produced a left-wing manifesto presumably on Marxist principles. But even a cursory glance at it reveals that there is absolutely nothing new in it all. This so-called revolutionary thinker has merely regurgitated the conditions laid down in the Vadukoddai Resolution demanding just not devolution of power but “self-determination” ONLY to the Tamils.

Like Prabhakaran and his fascist predecessors , the Vellahlas, KD talks of “liberation from oppression by the Sinhala-Buddhist state.” I am going to ask him the questions I pose to Tamils who parrot-like repeats the slogan of “discrimination by the Sinhala-Buddhist state”. How has his individual growth and his career been stunted/obstructed by the oppression of the Sinhala-Buddhist state? Has he suffered anything comparable to the discrimination and the violence inflicted on the Tamils of Jaffna by the oppressive regimes of the Vellahlas and Prabhakaran? If the Sinhalese too suffered oppression and discrimination from the state, which makes oppression and discrimination universal without selectively targeting any one particular community, on what grounds does he think that only the Tamils of Jaffna were discriminated? If in the Marxian sense the state is the oppressor of all communities — a theme explored in Marx’s essay On the Jewish Question — how can he argue that only the Tamils were oppressed? Since he picks “the Sinhala-Buddhist state” as the oppressor of the Tamils can he, as a post-1956 product, explain how the Sinhala Only Act hindered his progress? How does he compare the officially authorized violence and the oppression of the Jaffna Saivite Vellahlas and the officially endorsed political violence and oppression of Prabhakaran with that of the so-called oppression of the “Sinhala-Buddhist state”? Why does he say that “state terrorism was a great deal worse is entirely true” when V. Anandasangaree and S. C. Chandrahasan have stated categorically that Prabhakaran’s regime has killed more Tamils than all the other put together?

As a committed Trotskyite why is he asking that the Public Security Act should be repealed now when his political gurus, who swore to tear up the PSA when they were in the opposition (from the time Kandasamy was killed in the strike led by them in 1947) used it to oppress the workers and even dismiss I.J. Wickrema, the Government Clerical Service Union’s secretary, a loyal Samasamajist, for criticising Dr. N. M. Perera’s budget? Where was this secularist when his theoretical idol, Dr. Colvin R. de Silva, went with offerings of flowers to the Temple of Tooth and sat cross-legged with the other theoretician Doric De Souza? What kind of opium was he taking when these theoreticians enshrined Buddhism (like the British) as “the foremost” religion — mark you, not the ONLY official religion — in the constitution? Does he think that the British Westminster model is less democratic because it recognises only a Protestant to be the head of the state?

His commitment to Tamil tribalism is clear: he proposes “devolution” to the Muslims and “self-determination” to the Tamils ONLY. Consider also the following hilarious lines: ” …. the supreme failing of the LTTE was ideological. It subordinated the political to the military and there lay the inevitability of its obliteration. But what else can one expect from a petty-bourgeois outfit ignorant of Marxism?” This implies that he is superior to the petit-bourgeois lot in the LTTE because he knows Marxism. He fancies that by using the Marxist jargon he rises above his fellow-tribalists in the Vellahla-Prabhakaranist gangs. He accuses Prabhakaran of subordinating the political to the military obviously ignoring the known fact that it was the Vellahla leadership that “subordinated the political to the military” when it endorsed the military solution in the Vadukoddai Resolution, abandoning the non-violent democratic politics. Shouldn’t one at least be honest in reviewing the known history — let alone the barbarism of Jaffna history that began with Sangkili?

He puts on airs and graces as an original Marxist thinker with an intellectual capacity to draw up a new manifesto for the left when, in fact, his writings expose him only as mediocre Marxist midget utterly incapable of engaging in any serious Marxist analysis of the politics of his tribe, or the nation. He talks of removing the privileged position given to Buddhism? Why? How has it affected the other religions? Which religion has lost it rights to pursue their spiritual and religious activities as a result of Buddhism becoming ” the foremost religion ” ?

He is demanding the abolition of the present constitution. But wasn’t this constitution drafted by his revered gurus deriving sovereignty from the people? Was he on crack or arrack when his Marxist gurus were drafting the constitution?

I do not want to lengthen this any longer knowing that the Editor is waiting with his knife to chop me at the knees. But I will continue if he answers my questions.