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‘Before you study the economics, study the economists!’

On 7 Years after the Passing of SBD de Silva

e-Con e-News 08-14 June 2025

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‘They think Singapore has developed because of zero state-interference.

They don’t understand that 90% of the land in Singapore is owned

by the government still. They don’t understand that 25-30% of GDP

in its economy comes from state-owned enterprises;

most of the growth in the ’80-70s was from SoEs.

It transitioned into a high-tech manufacturing economy &

brought in a service sector. So now Lankans & everybody around

the world looks at Singapore and says ‘Oh it’s a service economy.’

No! It grew & developed into a 1^st-world country & then took on more

& more services. But it was always an entrepot economy that developed

into an industrialized economy. So if you give them this example they say

‘Oh, Singapore is unique.’ Then you have to give them a different example:

Taiwan, South Korea. No! We have an excuse for everything…’

– Kusum Wijetilleke (see ee Economists)

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An accidental, inadvertent tribute to SBD de Silva was broadcast in the mass media this week, by the latest of Mr Maharajah’s (or it’s actually Unilever’s) MTV news programs. Rather auspicious & suspicious, we surmised. For here comes SBD de Silva’s 7^th death anniversary on June 15.

     Of course, the mass media still never mentions his name. Could SBD be brought back to life, if only because the times demand such a voice, if only in the ghostly dialectical spit of afterlife? The mercantile media would certainly dare not make the mistake again – they can’t force-multiply SB’s message about the need for modern (machine-making) industrialization, through daily, hourly saturation – but at least we got to hear of it once or twice (see below). This ee Focus reproduces and updates Krisantha Sri Bhaggiyadatta’s 2018 tribute to his ‘guru’. ee has for almost 7 years been a continuing tribute to SBD de Silva, but it’s unclear if ee has strayed beyond SB’s focus, into areas he noted (eg, the domination of the economy by ‘minority agents’ of multinational corporations or MNCs) but perhaps feared to tread. This ee Focus therefore reproduces SBD’s fascinating analysis of Burma, another colonized Buddhist country, but that chose to break early from the English ‘Commonwealth’, with crucial lessons for Sri Lanka.

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So, why does the English media absolutely despise Myanmar (Burma) so? What is the role Indians have played in controlling Myanmar during the English colonial rule? Is it because it is one of the last Theravada Buddhist states in the world? In this ee, SBD de Silva provides startling insight into Burma as another possible ‘stark exception’ (like the Congo & Indo-China) in his thesis on the differences between the economies of non-settler colonial states such as ours in Sri Lanka. Here expatriate interests, ‘invisible but pervasive’, operating through multinational corporations, have easily subverted any attempt at economic independence. In Sri Lanka, within 3 months of a promise by a ‘socialist’ finance minister, to nationalize the economy in 1970, English bankers declared, We shall go on!” (see ee Focus).

     Whereas, in the ‘white dominions’ (USA, Canada, Australia etc) as well as ‘settler colonies’ (South Africa, Kenya, Algeria etc), modern industrialization was pursued despite vehement opposition from Europe’s capitals. In fact, does this explain why the English in London & the French in Paris, etc, have preferred so-called ‘native’ (petty merchant, usurer & landlord) rule, versus white settler (industrial) rule, which competed with them?

     SBD de Silva detailed how, post-‘independence’, Myanmar moved swiftly to dispossess foreign domination of its economy, where Indians had become ‘the visible symbol of the whole system of control & domination of Burma by foreigners’. However, ‘while reflecting a socialist ideology… to some extent merely nationalist in fervour’, it is unclear if Myanmar, besieged by imperialist subversion, has pursued modern industrialization (see ee Focus). Such nationalist writers as Kamalika Pieris have referred to the separatist demand for ‘Tamil Eelam’ as part of a longer-term ‘Indian settler colonial’ project in Sri Lanka. However, there have been no moves to modernize (industrialize) their ‘settlers’ in Sri Lanka, and Tamil plantation workers remain in bondage to a precapitalist (import-export plantation) economy.   

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While excoriating the rampant ‘corruption’ inside the country, SBD de Silva saw this problem as a product of the English colonial system and the continuing domination of the country by merchants & moneylenders. He always asked, ‘What if there was no corruption? Would the economy be alright then?’ With the wrangling over municipal office still going on long after local elections, ee Focus continues Gustavus Myers’ History of Tammany Hall, about that infamous New York ‘charity’ aka political machine, in a USA tumbling toward ‘civil war’. Myers showed how integral the role played by municipal corruption is, in maintaining the capitalist system. We see the early formations that went on to become the USA’s 2-party system, which is really one capitalist party.  This episode also describes the ‘private organization’ within the board of municipal representatives, formed to ‘receive & distribute bribes’, as in the procurement of ‘licenses’ to operate & profit from slum housing, policing, railroads, ferries, marketplaces, brothels & electricity.  

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• With debate being raged by the media about whether AI automatically throws people out of work, Indian economist Prabhat Patnaik argues that capitalist economists are recycling old arguments to justify unemployment. For instance, some claim that the introduction of machinery does not give rise to unemployment, as workers have long argued. However, as Marx pointed out at the beginning of Chapter 15 on a very interesting examination of machinery in Capital Volume 1, such unemployment is a tactic of capitalist practice. Patnaik also makes interesting links between the rampant joblessness created by the new machinery of the 19^th century, and how England used settler colonialism in the Americas & Pacific to ameliorate the effects of unemployment. Patnaik also traces efforts by Indian planners such as PC Mahalanobis, and China’s efforts to ‘walk on 2 legs’ to ensure that industrialization does not result in mass unemployment (see ee Focus).

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So, SBD’s ideas about industrialization surfaced on MTV News1^st’s ‘Face-to-Face’ program fronted by that slack & trying-hard-to-be-easygoing Niresh Eliatamby, interviewing a coifed Kusum Wijetiileke. This episode was at a relatively higher level than most talkshows in Sri Lanka, and we recommend people watch and encourage such endeavors – but with a critical eye and nose. SB certainly was acid and derisive about the ability of – or need for – the merchant media in Sri Lanka to turn this vital, fully suppressed conversation into a priority for the nation. Unfortunately, as even Confucius says, we must first name things correctly. And tabloidal MTV, and the rest of the merchant media gang, cannot afford such incisive superstars.

     As the show unfolded it became clearer that the program should have been named ‘Mask-to-Mask’ or ‘Euphemism-to-Euphemism’ – another photocopy of those one-on-one pseudo interrogations (minus the waterboarding!) on massively broadcast tv, modeled on BBCs gnawing Hard Talk, though this was more sotto-sotto talk, exhumed to some degree by Wijetilleke’s passionate demurrals at Eliatamby’s oral egurgitations.

     Eliatamby calls Sri Lankans (read: Sinhala) ‘lazy‘, which Wijetilleke diplomatically rejects by placing such calumny in a more historical perspective. SBD certainly did more cogently, locating such colonial fabrications in their American plantation birthplaces. Eliatamby begins by referring to the existing world, of wars & riots, invoking rather lamely that ‘unfortunate situation in Gaza’. Unfortunate? Then again, funded as the media are by the import lobby, they cannot bite the hand of their multinational sponsors by naming all these wars as ‘English wars’ or US wars or NATOs wars or Trump’s riots.

     Eliathamby quickly goes on about the business at hand, the business of which is business, petty trade: Tariffs. Wijetilleke is clear that the USA’s moves are predicated on undermining China’s rise. He does try to explain that all the East Asian miracles, from Japan to Singapore, were fueled by state policy & national enterprises. Wijetilleke does try to effect well that performance called articulate, but he too also cannot be precise. In contrast to sitting President Donald Trump, he calls US President Ronald Reagan ‘diplomatic‘ in his method of imposing the 1982 Plaza Accords, which sought to rein in and hobble Japan’s economy. Reagan’s ‘diplomacy’ was however US-as-usual, accompanied by physical attacks on Japanese vehicles and East Asian people in the Americas more generally. Yet Wijetilleke is by far more relevant and ‘based’ than most of the faces & suits that greet us on these imported screens. He calls for a rigorous & ‘advanced’ National Industrial Policy. But the problem remains, though much more informed about the subject, he lacks the intricacies of an SBD, for such is the juvenile nature of business concourse in Sri Lanka. These petty importers & their media cannot call a spade a spade or a machine tool a machine tool. No ‘face’ is allowed to address the fact that imperialism and their local merchants has not and won’t allow rival industrial economies to grow, certainly not in non-settler colonies dominated by the expatriate quicky-take on an ancient national polity, they prefer to call an island. As SBD always reminded, it’s not because they are selfish, but because it is one of the laws of capitalism, to concentrate & monopolize. SB was, and is, not the only advocate of industrialization, but he’s certainly the only one whose arguments scoured the earth to detail the advances and roadblocks to modern machine-making industrialization, that verboten subject in a non-settler colony such as ours. (see ee Economists, Trump Tariffs – the Clock is Ticking, Kusum Wijetilleke on Face-to-Face)

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• The Sri Lankan President is in Germany, greeted we are told, by a military salute, just as an English naval ‘strike force’ enters Colombo in his absence! Seig Heil! Germany, just last week, returned 19 decapitated African skulls to New Orleans. A US hospital in that ‘city of jazz’ had sent the crania there in 1872, for the study of African phrenology aka the white supremacist study of physiognomy. Perhaps the Germans wish to appear moral before Sri Lanka’s current President? That is, before they launch into yet another sermon about GSP+ etc – on why their markets are so precious & pure that they wish us to change our laws to suit their current fancies & fashions.

     Yet, they keep refusing to pay reparations to Africa’s Namibia, where they practiced their nascent Nazism – in what became the 20^th century’s first genocide (Hitler’s Minister of War Hermann Goering’s father was Imperial Commissioner in Namibia 1885-90). And their current leader Friedrich Merz, an unreconstructed Nazi, keeps sending their latest weapons to kill Russian civilians and soldiers. President Dissanayake will have to present his most concerned ves muhuna to all those Hun sermons. The Nazis always acknowledged ‘white settlers’ as their mentors & older brothers.

     Morality & truth are for slaves, said their infamous German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (whose sister failed to colonize Venezuela) – and Europe, with its genocidal (US, Canada, Australia) & settler-colonial satellites (South Africa, Israel, etc) around the world, has to keep reminding us that this is indeed so – by their ‘postmodern art’ exhibition of naked televised horror in West Asia, midst sermonizing about rule of law! The media, in Sri Lanka in particular, also get paid off by the various German NGOs (German Agency for International Cooperation ­– GIZ) & foundations (Friedrich Ebert Stiftung – FES, Konrad Adenauer Stiftung – KAS, Heinrich Böll Stiftung – HBS, etc. The media remain unadulterated agents of MNCs and, more precisely, of the biggest US NGO called NATO! It becomes clear when this media refuse to state clearly that the wars on us, on Palestine & Russia, are nothing but white wars – ‘postcolonial’ academic production notwithstanding – meant to maintain good old imperialism.

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They are not content to be a cork in the gushing waters

of their time but would ride the crest of the wave &

attempt to direct its course, giving it greater thrust by

whipping up the social forces which constitute

the underlying current… – SBD de Silva,

The Political Economy of Underdevelopment, 1982

15June 2025 witnesses the 7^th anniversary of the transition of our very own great economist SBD de Silva. He would have shuddered at being called an ‘economist’. And yet he saw it vital to listen carefully and learn how to challenge the everyday mutterances of those economists, also known as capitalism’s ‘hired prize fighters’.  Nevertheless, he observed, ‘If you wish to really know about the economy, take a walk along the pavement, see what is being sold, where & how it is made.’

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In place of disinterested inquirers, there were hired prize fighters;

in place of genuine scientific research, the bad conscience

& the evil intent of the apologetic.’ – Karl Marx, Capital

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SBD de Silva strongly felt one has to situate oneself, within the country, to studiously train a point-of-view, dedicating everything one has and can, towards the transformation of the economy. Sri Lanka has no written economic history, he’d lament. Why? Millions of words are printed on tons of imported paper exhibiting our private neuroses & endless shortcomings, our primordial fractiousness, to the world. But our own composite, complex & challenging, yet profound history over, in, on & under this beautiful terrain remains an unexamined enigma. Sri Lanka has, for instance, a preponderance of cultivators, of paddy in particular, farming in different agricultural systems, involving different relationships between people, with different outcomes. Hambantota, Moneragala, Ampara, Batticaloa, Jaffna, Rajarata. Highlands, Dry Zone, Wet Zone. Yet, most are impoverished, with their wealth sucked up by Colombo loansharks & importers, who ‘live on the village, but not in the village’. These merchants & usurers are preventing rural industrialization, which could provide employment during the seasonal gaps in rice cultivation.

     A country refers to millions of living workers who reproduce the country & the world every day. SBD thought, those who call the country an ‘island’, exude a colonial redolence, a perspective pushed by the colonial expatriate & mercenary, the absentee investor, who spent/spends brief sojourns in the country, seeing it though porthole & fort bastion, plantation portico & hotel window, making their fortunes & fleeing: with no long-term commitment to the country & its people…

     SBD de Silva’s 1982 classic The Political Economy of Underdevelopment (PEU) remains a brilliant, awe-inspiring (tho he would despise such adjectives), textual monument to dedicated scholarship, worthy of emulation by scholars everywhere. His introductory chapter examines the state of science & of scientists, the empiricists & the generalizers, the fearless & the frauds, the ‘economists & economizers’ – as once headlined an essay by his also dedicated contemporary GVS de Silva, who challenged economists who claimed to represent only the view from the kitchen.

      For SBD, science developed through ‘a process of interchange’ & challenge: ‘Do you see what I see?’ A person’s work had to be ‘adjusted to already existing work and also pave the way for others’. There was no culture of the university canteen or café brimming with people criticizing & defending the latest scientific theories. Publication has become an isolated act of narcissism to see one’s name attached to ‘ideas in print’; rather, ‘it was supposed to be an expression of one’s social involvement’. He believed humans had a natural urge to relate to society: ‘The social scientist cannot endure loneliness; for him communion is life.’

     Scientific research into society is being bought & sold on the stock market. Ask the World Bank! Publication is a requisite for university teachers to pad a CV, qualify for professorship, assure tenure, give a gloss to their university’s real-estate brand. NGOs arose to help fill that need for diversion, printing out publications en masse, which SB likened to ‘calenderr gahanava vagay’ – calendars being a sure-fire bestseller at new year!

     Corporate publishers bribe professors to demand their books on their syllabi, flooding their overpriced unreadable tomes via the restricted budgets of state (university, public) libraries. The publications end up in basements, in boxes, staring down & daring white ants to indulge their ultra-critical appetites. The universities are supposed to cradle new ideas, but by the 1980s they had become a wasteland for SB. Students only wished a scroll of paper, which declared their possible qualification for a job & tenure, and he thought such seekers could get such papyrus from any academic salesmen with lots of letters behind their names.

     That awful word, imbrication, which has filled so many unreadable postmodern PhD theses of the 21^st century, yet perhaps seems the best fit for SBD de Silva’s style of writing: Layered like bricks or tiles, one edge over the other, his carefully honed arguments are layered, tightly fitting to fashion a monument to modern scholarship, a blueprint for a foundation, fortifications, above ground & below, with a roof to build a solid country!

     SBD could spend days on constructing a sentence – one sentence! Choosing, rejecting, savoring & balancing each word. Lean manufacture? Streamlined? Each word was carefully selected so he could then arrange its sound & sense in the correct syntactic order to bring out, sustain, maximize & propel his larger argument. He did the opposite of trying to fill space to impress. He would compare long academic quotations to musical dance sequences thrown in to fill up time or keep an audience awake during a formulaic Hollywood or Bollywood movie – added to pad the requisite number of pages, to qualify as an essay or a thesis. He wondered how intellectual productivity would be commodified, how it could be deemed productive?

     To begin a chapter, SB would declare what he had tried to do so far, and what he was going to try & accomplish next. It was the same with each paragraph, the lead sentence then being explicated in the rest of lines, and woven into his next premise & paragraph. And at the end, he would conclude whether he had accomplished his objective, or failed. He was not afraid to list its shortcomings or the exceptions to his theses. He quipped, that social scientists who live off eternal funding, always ended their tomes with the sentence: ‘More investigation needs to be done…’

     Perhaps such severe prerequisites ensured he would not publish much at all. His only book is what we have bequeathed in words, along with a few articles, secret tape recordings (for he hated to be recorded, saying, ‘But what if I change my mind?’ He also despised the media’s studied superficiality: ‘Let me interview them, what do they know of the economy? Be careful of their cameras!’). So, all we have left to rely on are random notes quickly & unreliably taken & tapped down by an un-stenographic hand on a computer. And he did not give listeners much of a chance. He was old, had only so much time to live… It was like: If you want to know, don’t waste my time. Here it is. One had to listen & listen again. Ask questions, in trepidation, hoping it was the right one. Especially those of us who were not grown to be academics, let alone economists, have had to rely on common sense, which is not that common. Yet, he was always hungry for evidence of & insight into the state of the society, and wished to hear from cultivators, from workers – though he did not believe everything he heard or read. It had to be tested, comparing analysis to the police’s reconstructions of suspects faces through combing memories of facial composition .

     SBD de Silva’s incisive classic PEU scours almost the entire planet, in order to ferret out the deep roots & parasitic florescence of Sri Lanka’s distress. He unearths the different policies imposed on non-settler colonies such as Sri Lanka, compared to those in the imperialist & genocidal & settler-colonial states. We have always said, if we ever got to title a biography of this gentleman who was no gentleman, it would be from one of his favorite utterances, ‘One Thing Leads to Another’. And indeed, this is the very definition of an advancing country – the cascading production of one commodity leading to several new commodities. What the fraudsters who run the plantation, garment, tourism, etc – all non–industries – simply refuse to do, to invest more in capital accumulation, more in our people…

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Contents:

Myanmar vs Sri Lanka: Tamil Eelam as an Indian Settler-Colonial Project?