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e-Con e-News 5-11 October 2025

The white masque of benevolence crackles asunder

As plasterers flustered patch oozing fractures…

The past week saw the 3 old invaders of Sri Lanka – England, Portugal & Holland, without even a pale flush of shame, pushing the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) to adopt a resolution titled ‘Promoting Reconciliation, Accountability & Human Rights in Sri Lanka’ (A/HRC/60/L1/Rev1) – ‘without a vote’. These pirates have never paid reparations, nor have we demanded such, and what they actually wish us to reconcile with, is their right to terrorize the world. The UN ‘resolution’ (with the US state hovering in the shadows) resolves nothing, while extending the ‘mandate’ of the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) over Sri Lanka for 2 more years. This charade will continue until the UN General Assembly disassembles them, or we develop the leadership to truly break free from such economic & political bondage…

     The 3 white pirates were joined by other colonial brigands, has-beens & wannabes – Canada, Germany, Spain, Italy, Austria, Norway, Switzerland, New Zealand, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Albania, Croatia, Estonia, Iceland, Ireland, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Malta, Romania, Slovakia, & Slovenia (with US-occupied Korea & Japan, & 2 other token satrapies ‘of color’ from the Americas & Africa – Costa Rica & Malawi, in tow). A day later, the UN Committee on Enforced Disappearances (UNCED) expressed ‘concerns’ over Sri Lanka’s ‘lack of progress’ in addressing such matters. Yet what they are enforcing is the disappearance of any claim to the civility of their societies. Many of these UN agencies have been hijacked by ‘minority’ interests led by the truest minority – Europeans. The only countries to outright oppose them & support Sri Lanka were China, Russia, Ethiopia, & Cuba. Neither the names of those who opposed the resolution, nor the names of the overwhelmingly European imperialists, who push for such measures againt Sri Lanka , were given saturated reportage in the merchant media in Sri Lanka.

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‘Having directly destabilised Sri Lanka,

through a campaign of death & destruction,

India, unashamedly, still pushes Sri Lanka to implement

the 13^th Amendment that had been enacted in Nov 1987.’

– Shamindra Ferdinando (ee Sovereignty, Stark Hypocrisy)

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‘China is not welcome in the North & East because

they do not have the interest of the Tamil people in

their agenda’… recalling Beijing’s opposition

at the UN Human Rights Council to resolutions

supporting Tamil rights. ‘That is why we say the

Chinese are trouble in this country.’ – Tamil National

Alliance (TNA) Parliamentarian Shanakiyan Rasamanickam

(see ee Sovereignty, Shanakiyan urges Govt)

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‘People say: you don’t like China. No, I love them.

But their leaders are much smarter than our leaders.

And we can’t sustain ourselves like that.

It’s like playing the New England Patriots &

Tom Brady against your high school football team.’

– Donald Trump (2015)

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A total of 22 – almost totally European – countries voted for the UNHRC resolution against Sri Lanka. This magic number recalls the multilateral force of 22 nations assembled under UN command (actually US command), to wage a genocidal war, 1950-53, that has kept Korea divided ever since, even as Korea, China & the USSR, at great sacrifice, prevented them from fully taking over all of that nation.

     This week marked the 80^th anniversary of free Korea’s liberation day, and the birth of its ruling Workers’ Party, another celebration essentially whited-out by our ‘free’ merchant media. The UN ‘resolution’ against Korea was passed by the UN Security Council because the USSR was then boycotting the UNSC, for its refusal to let the victorious People’s Republic of China take up the permanent UNSC seat held hostage by the defeated Republic of China (aka Taiwan). Ceylon was also blocked from joining the UN due to imperialism’s manoeuvres to undermine that international organization (as is evident in the repeated US vetoes to prevent UN General Assembly censure of their genocide of the Palestinian people). The UNHRC resolution against Sri Lanka has nothing to do with ‘Tamil rights’, anymore than the 1950 UNSC resolution sought to ‘liberate’ Korea rather than replace Japanese colonial rule with US colonial rule (with 50,000 US military troops ensuring the submission of imperialist Japanese & collaborationist Korean compradors).

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Demanding to decide who their representatives should be, a ‘final solution’ to wipe out the Palestinian nation of West Asia is about to be imposed by imperialism, led by the US with their killer pitbulls – England & the European Union – alongside their colonies in anything but name. What we are witnessing is another phase in the old ‘Indian Wars’ of the white settler colonies. This scenario is what is supposed to greet us on Monday morning (on the NATO clock).

     Meanwhile, the UN Security Council on September 30 passed a resolution (with Russia, China & Pakistan abstaining) to establish a ‘Gang Repression Force (GSF) in Haiti – gangs which Washington & their western allies have armed & nurtured through their interventions & occupations, kidnappings & coups. Haiti, one of the first countries in the world to fully evict white settlers, has to be made to suffer for the audacity of what they made real beyond just ‘hope’. It was the defeat of the European armies in Haiti, that saw them fully turn to promoting ‘indentured slavery’ & non-settler colonialism in Asia…

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‘The vast technological & cultural gap between the settlers

& the indigenous population caused the economic aims of settlement

to be compounded with humanistic claims such as underlay

the ‘dual mandate’ in Africa – a civilizing mission, a moral force,

pax Britannica, & trusteeship. In regions where the repression

of the indigenous people was greatest, such ideas

gave stability & a sense of permanence to English rule.’

• This ee concludes Chapter 2 of SBD de Silva’s 1982 classic The Political Economy of Underdevelopment, on the‘Factors Conditioning European Settlement’. This continues his explorations of the differences between the white settler-colonial states & the non-settler colonies such as Sri Lanka. He examined how the status of labor, ‘derives from the treatment accorded by society to those who work’. He linked racialized segregation to a ‘whole institutional mechanism, involving legislative sanctions and psychological devices’: ‘White men would not work at all in the presence of those whom they dominated’. He examined the facades of white supremacism needed to assert dominance, and the role played by segregation in creating delusions of grandeur. In Sri Lanka, ‘to spend like a white man’ was a popular aphorism which conformed to the image of the Europeans as God’s most expensive creatures.’ (see ee Focus)

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• This ee Focus also continues Gustavus Myers’ History of Tammany Hall, that New York ‘charity’ that was a front for the political machinations of the USA’s foremost metropolis & municipality. This Myers’ excerpt goes beyond the obvious political gangsters & the ‘phantom leaders’. He briefly exposes such ‘men of wealth’ as the ‘President of Columbia University… a corporation attorney, serving the great vested interests.’  The media during that turn to the 20^th century, focused on ‘the flagrant immorality under which young girls of the tenderest age were often decoyed into lives of shame.’ Such matters were also exposed by the novels of Theodore Dreiser (banned in the US for exposing such matters, but within a larger context of the financial capitalism that Russia’s Lenin was about to unearth).

     Myers’ focus highlighting ‘corruption’ can make readers forget that this period (1875-1900) was the dawn of modern imperialism, of cartels & monopolies that undermined capitalism’s claim to unending competition & ‘creative disruption’. Myers hints at the ‘chief financial powers’ long controlling Tammany Hall, and in turn, New York City. ‘Securing franchises, privileges & rights of enormous value,’ here we gain a glimpse into ‘the most dangerous, the most vindictive & the most powerful influences at work in this community’. They have ‘accumulated their millions of dollars’, yet behind these leaders, ‘and secretly operating through them, were magnates of great financial power with their tens or hundreds of millions of dollars acquired largely by means of financial & industrial power conferred by legislation, permissory or statute, of various kinds. The electorate well knew that comparatively small grafters were numerous, but now it had the promise that the large spoliators, hitherto immune, would be exposed & prosecuted, if possible’….they weren’t! (see ee Focus)

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• President Anura Kumara Dissanayaka’s recent speech at the UN General Assembly, by shying away from ‘the material roots of global injustice… puts paid to any illusions of Marxism playing a part in his ideology’, asserts the Asia Progress Forum (see ee Focus). The APF plumbs the ‘strategic depths’ of Dissanyaka’s proposals to the world, and finds them superficial. But has Dissanayaka said anything less than what previous leaders have told the UN assembly? (see ee Sovereignty, SWRD) Rather than harp about corruption, the APF insists that communists must always remind working people that the crucial & main problem is labour’s exploitation. Last week ee reported on the US government’s harking to the JVP’s once-were-Marxist claims. So who or what is all this ‘Marxism’ business, all about? We too would like to know.

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• ‘Communist’ & ‘Marxist’ & ‘Socialist’, have been long turned into viperous epithets by the mass capitalist media, thrown about with gay abandon, most recently by the US government’s state department. But that is their media’s job. Yet some people wear such labels as badges, as if the ideas would just rub off such clothing into their bodies. But is Sri Lanka even ‘capitalist’, really? For example, wouldn’t real ‘capitalists’ wish workers to come to work, fresh and energetic, asked SBD de Silva, instead of having them daily fight incessant fatiguing battles to get on, in and out of buses and trains?

     And were (or are) some NPP leaders (still) Marxist, as stated by the US government? Is it just a bugaboo to frighten the ruling merchants and moneylenders into united reaction? Is the US government and its ‘Department of State’ actually qualified to assess such matters? Why, not!? After all, with typical yankee bombast, the US, with its history of mass murder, mass dismissals from employment, looting, incarceration of alleged ‘Socialists’ & Marxists & ‘Communists’ is the least able to discern such complexities. After all, it is the job of the paid servants of the capitalists, the hired intellectual gunmen, to distort such terms, to divert movements, knowing very well, how important the concepts that underlie such labels are…

     Finally, let us look at the scientific basis of such terms. One of the most common terms flung about is ‘Leftist’, which hails back to the French Revolution, with Left & Right referring to the seating in the French National Assembly – with those on the Left, generally representing ‘The People’, and those on the Right supporting the monarchy (so-called aristocrats, nobility etc). This designation becomes more complicated when we learn that ‘The People’ in France, included the ‘bourgeoisie’ – that ‘Middle Estate’ (commonly mistranslated as ‘Middle Class’) between the aristocrats & the ‘common people’ – and that those supporting the monarchy, included the ‘small peasants,’ etc.

     SBD de Silva has emphasized that ‘capitalism’ and Karl Marx’s analysis of it, had a very specific geographic compass: ‘The idea of capitalism as a transformative agency on a world scale has recently become almost an article of faith among Marxists. They have not sufficiently examined the forces underlying the development of capitalism outside the specific historical experience which Marx took account of. Marx explained that his analysis of primitive accumulation, whereby society became divided between wage workers and capitalists, ‘does not pretend to do more than trace the path by which, in Western Europe, the capitalist order emerged.’

     Marxism itself is a ‘system of views and teachings’ which drew on the 19^th century’s most advanced ideological currents from Europe: ‘classical German philosophy, classical English political economy and French socialism’, as described by VI Lenin. Lenin, J Stalin, Mao Zedong, Kim Il Sung, Fidel Castro, Ho Chi Minh, Patrice Lumumba, Amilcar Cabral, etc, sought to practically apply those teachings in the 20^th century to uplift their nations. These are leaders who, when not kidnapped and executed, are generally caricatured & maligned every hour & every day by a merchant- & moneylender-dominated media.

     The US government’s analysis of the ruling NPP (which avoids naming its major constituent, the JVP) chooses not to call them ‘Marxist-Leninist’, which the JVP have always claimed to be. Having survived 2 determined attempts at liquidation & annihilation, the actual nature of the present party is a matter of great debate & contention. It may thus be pertinent to ask how long it will be, before Sri Lanka gets a President who comes from a party that claims to be nationalist & progressive, and is actually a former ‘executive’ from the USA’s Goldman Sachs or BlackRock. After all, the so-called ‘Leftist’ Syriza in Greece, with an economist claiming to be ‘Marxist’, as if like a magician producing a white rabbit from a black box, ended up led by such a financialized trickster…

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Marx is very specific – modern capitalism emerges in the 1860s, in Western Europe & the genocidal white settler Americas, with the domination of an industrialized capitalism, by machines that make machines. De Silva’s classic work, seeking to unearth the roots of Sri Lanka’s discontent, is dedicated to showing how economists have falsely claimed that the colonial import-export system imposed by England, particularly, the plantation system imported from the enslaved Americas, is modern or capitalist. It is neither. SBD shows that the plantation system has no positive impulses to impart to the rest of the economy, which is dominated by a subsistence agriculture, that colonialism has further diminished. Contrary to the hosannas of economists praising colonial rule, the English left us – recalled SBD – with the most impoverished peasantry in Asia! Has any party, even a capitalist party in Sri Lanka,  discussed the role that the making of machines that make machines play in a modern society? Has any party even demanded such matters be taught in the education system?

‘A frightful hobgoblin stalks throughout Europe.

We are haunted by a ghost, the ghost of Communism’

– 1850 English translation by Helen Macfarlane

of 1848 Manifesto of the Communist Party

In The Red Republican, Chartist publication

So who or what on this good yet troubled earth are socialists?  The Communist Manifesto aka Manifesto of the Communist Party, crafted by Karl Marx & Frederick Engels (M&E) in 1848, goes into succinct detail on the very different types of socialism: Under the rubric of ‘Reactionary Socialism’, M&E lists ‘Feudal Socialism’ (largely ‘literary socialists, made up of words alone, which includes ‘clerical socialists’ aka ‘Christian socialists’). These feudal socialists fear that modern capitalism is creating not just a proletariat but a revolutionary proletariat.

     Here again, this word, ‘Feudal’ is thrown about in Sri Lanka as an epithet, against so-called ‘aristocrats’, etc., when as SBD de Silva noted these are Marx’s categorizations of the active phases that led in Western Europe & England, in particular, to modern capitalism. Feudalism in Western Europe contained within it the seeds of modern capitalism & proto-industrialization. No such features are evident in what is characterized as ’feudalism’ in Sri Lanka.

     Then comes ‘Petty-bourgeois Socialism,’ which M&E link to the ‘medieval burgesses’ (with their guilds & strict rules for ‘masters’ & ‘artisans’) and the ‘small peasant proprietors’, whose criticisms of modern production’s contradictions – displacement by machinery, concentration of capital & land in a few hands, overproduction, underconsumption – are articulated most acutely and presciently by the truly great Swiss economist Sismondi I Sismondi. But Sismondi was wrong! This Petty-Bourgeois Socialism is particularly evident in those who seek to maintain by any means their ‘small production’, fearing their imminent hurling down into the ranks of the working class & proletariat in particular.

     Sismondi’s criticisms have resonated most forcefully among Sri Lankans and their political organizations, not just because he was criticizing modern capitalism’s first major crisis, which occurred midst some of Sri Lanka’s greatest upheavals – 1815, 1818. Utopian & Romantic Socialism are indeed political byproducts of this Petty-Bourgeois Socialism, especially Anarchism & Nihilism. VI Lenin brilliantly eviscerates the anarchists & nihilists of his day – the Narodniks – Friends of the People (aka Janatha Mithuro!) whose ideas he traces back to the notions of Sismondi, in a work called A Characterisation of Economic Romanticism (Sismondi & Our Native Sismondists). This was not just a theoretical matter for Lenin, it was personal: his beloved elder brother – a member of the Narodniks – was executed for attempting to assassinate the Czar. Anarchism & Nihilism – have been evident in the recent Aragalaya – which was promoted by the capitalism’s hired gun men & political police. And Lenin was critical of his own brother…

     The next category of ‘socialism’ that M&E finger, is ‘German or ‘True’ Socialism’, which German intellectuals ‘borrowed’ from the French, minus the practical resolutions of France’s own attempt at ‘revolution’. A World to Win: Essays on the Communist Manifesto, eg, by India’s Aijaz Ahmad, Irfan Habib & Prabhat Patnaik, edited by Prakash Karat (LeftWord Classics, 1999), points out that the Manifesto is ‘the distillation of a multifaceted philosophical understanding that had arisen out of a series of confrontations with the thinkers most influential in the Germany of his times: GWH Hegel, LA Feuerbach, PJ Proudhon, M Stirner, Bruno Bauer, SI Sismondi, the ‘True Socialists’ and the all the rest whom the authors of the Manifesto broadly describe as ‘would-be universal reformers’. They point out that Marx was a ‘very young’ 30 years old, when the Manifesto was published. It is ‘a text of an intellectual and political transition’, from his explorations into a Critique of Hegel’s Doctrine of the State and A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: an Introduction, The Jewish Question, Economic & Philosophical Manuscripts, Theses on Feuerbach, and The German Ideology – only a few of which had been published.

     The Manifesto then goes on to describe ‘Conservative or Bourgeois Socialism’: ‘To this section belong economists, philanthropists, humanitarians, improvers of the condition of the working class, organizers of charity, members of societies for the prevention of cruelty to animals, temperance fanatics, hole-&-corner reformers of every imaginable kind. This form of socialism has, moreover, been worked out into complete systems. We may cite Proudhon’s Philosophy of Poverty as an example of this form.’ M&E point out that these ‘socialists’ want a bourgeoisie without a proletariat’.

     Next is ‘Critical-Utopian Socialism & Communism’. Here is socialism on a yet-underdeveloped proletariat, a working class that cannot provide modern leadership, because ‘the economic conditions for its emancipation’ are yet to be produced. Yet it promotes ‘universal ascetism’ & ‘social levelling in its crudest form’. Here is the socialism of Brebeuf, Saint Simon, Fourier, Owen, etc, who even sought & failed to set up settler colonies of an utopian kind in a colonial Europe & settler Americas, etc. –‘New Jerusalems!’

     The Manifesto then goes on to describe the ‘Position of the Communists to the Various Existing Opposition Parties.’ Here, a ‘scientific socialism’ thoroughly examines every movement for its advanced character, upholding the role that a modern industrial economy & proletariat must play. The various introductions to different updates & translations of the Manifesto have gone on to point out how this text was pushed into the background by the violent reactions to the growth of the working class & its political representatives, when their parties were ‘excommunicated’ & ‘banned’. Catholicism in the 1880s & Fascism after the 1920s claimed to be ‘socialists’ too, hunting down if not excommunicating ‘Communists’.

     As Kanishka Goonewardena has pointed out, both Marx & Engels would go through their own development, criticizing culture and religion, until culminating, in their seeking the deepest roots of political & economic disarray, in Capital (1867). In fact, as ee recorded (11 July 2020, Cool Marx on SL) in the last years of his life, Marx was avidly reading about Sri Lanka’s own ancient economic & political system as exhibited in our puranagam (ancient villages), through the records of colonial administrators.

     It is important to know first that ee’s explorations on this subject are those of amateurs (etymology: ‘lovers’). The Manifesto was first written for the Communist League, a small party of German workers, explaining the need for the working class to become organized into a party. Over 544 known editions would be published in 35 European languages, even prior to the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. It is considered to be the single most published tract – Dhammapada, Bible & Koran included – to have substantially changed the world. In India, it was first translated into Bengali, Urdu, Marathi, Tamil – where Communist movements were first organized, in Calcutta, Lahore, Bombay, Madras – and later into Malayalam, Gujarati, Oriya, Hindi, Punjabi…. Also, Marx’s Capital was only recently published into Sinhala (2018), by the Communist Party of Sri Lanka (CPSL)’s Jayatilleke de Silva. Many if not most of the original works of Marx were first written in German, and then translated into other European languages, eg, Polish, Danish, Swedish, English, French; and from those languages, particularly from Russian, into Chinese, and other Asian languages. It was only later that they were published from the original German… Marx’s writings, and M&E’s Manifesto, have now been translated into more than 1,000 versions in over 200 languages.

     As SBD de Silva would lament, for some curious reason or another, there is no Economic History of Sri Lanka. All we have is a rich terrain, first researched by SBD, who had to figuratively travel the world, to bring out clues to the radical roots of our disarray… Perhaps a new Manifesto would describe how the many Marxisms & Communisms, several created by imperialism’s political police (USAID, etc.), have come to be…

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• The media constantly cries for entrepreneurs, investment & exports, etc, without examining if these demands are for productive investment, etc. After all, gang leaders, drug dealers & pimps are also ‘entrepreneurs’, even if few would call them ‘productive’.

     Lal Jayawardena, who became economic advisor to Prime Minister (later President) JR Jayawardene in 1977, declared that ‘welfare’ is ‘the villain of the piece’. Many economists have since promoted this idea, such as that Royalist rugger player, and Tokyo Cement director, Indrajit Coomaraswamy. Coomaraswamy blames ‘populism’ and a ‘culture of entitlement’ etc, which SBD labelled as silly since there was no decision by people to continue import-export plantation colonialism. Instead, welfare was scapegoated, blamed for the stagnation of the economy. SBD de Silva called it absurd, an inversion: Lal Jayawadena et al implied that there was a capital scarcity, because of the absorption of funds by the food subsidy, education, healthcare, etc. Yet it was the Englishwho promoted ‘welfare’ measures in Ceylon during their World War 2, to buy support during the Japanese invasion….

     In fact, after independence, the economy sometimes brimmed with foreign exchange – there were the accumulated sterling balances, which England owed after their world war; there was the ‘Korean war boom’ – and what happened with those surpluses?  How did we become the newest ‘sick man of Asia’? Because of government spending? How did the government get rupees for wars, north & south, and for the Mahaveli boondoggle? There were no savings, cried Lal J. But what was that Korean boom’s surpluses invested in? Well, after the supposed ‘opening’ of the economy in 1977, Sri Lanka was sent on consumption sprees, to enrich a merchant & moneylender class as never before. There was a rush of imports, so much so that that Chandra Malliyadde, secretary to the Minister of Planning & Implementation, under JR, cried out: ‘Are these imports really necessary?’ But there were no savings – instead there was ‘free exchange allowed’, said SBD de Silva, – which has no logic!

     Indeed, it is true, DS Senanayake’s welfare schemes were electoral bribery. FR Jayasuriya, too, wrote that consumption would have to be curtailed to allow investment, but that it was a political matter whether consumption constraints would be imposed on the rich or the impoverished!

     Meanwhile, the most excellent examples we have are Xi Jinping & the Communist Party of China (CPC), who are generally against welfarism, but prioritize work & investment instead. The IMF & World Bank, however, want China to consume more & invest less. Meanwhile, a debate in China on the printing of money, exposes how central banks, several claiming to be ‘independent’, have come to be controlled by multinational agencies, eg, foreign fund managers, EU Central Bank…  (see ee Random Notes; ee Economists, Xu Gao vs Ray Dalio)

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• ee has always noted that the English media, in particular in Sri Lanka, is written for the imperialists first of all. We are meant to be bystanders, looking over the shoulders of the US, English & other European & colonized envoys. Journalists & Editors, in moments of confession or inebriation, provide numerous instances of how the US, English, European, even Israeli, envoys have demanded & obtained the removal of media workers who do not toe their line.

     This week saw the media given over to saturating coverage of the USA’s demands for the country, as parroted by the World Bank & IMF’s latest prognoses. See (ee Economists) how the ‘World Bank’s Sri Lanka Development Update, titled ‘Better Spending for All’, and the IMF’s prognoses got widespread reportage under different headlines:

• World Bank Says: US Tariff Threatens 12% Drop in RMG (readymade garment) Exports

• ‘WB engages with Financial Oversight Committee’

• Delay in energy sector reforms: WB warns SL, calls for pruning of public service

• Sri Lanka’s Economy Grows, But Poverty Persists: World Bank Calls for Reform

• SL should watch private sector credit growth: WB Economist

• World Bank urges businesses to lead Sri Lanka’s comeback

• SL should reform land, labour, liberalize trade for higher growth: WB

• ‘SL’s economic recovery incomplete’: World Bank

• WB says Sri Lanka’s economic recovery incomplete; poverty levels still high

• SL has No Room for Significant Spending Hike: WB

• WB warns SL’s recovery fragile, urges urgent reforms to sustain growth

• WB sets out reform agenda to lift SL’s investment & exports’…

• Government receives praise from the IMF

• SL’s public finances highly vulnerable to shocks: IMF

• IMF to SL: 2026 Budget must align with program parameters

• IMF says reducing debt stock alone insufficient

• 2026 Budget Must Reflect Fiscal Discipline, Says IMF

• IMF needs SL’s budget parameters to be in line with EFF for next disbursement

• SL’s Import Surge Welcomed by IMF, But Long-term Impact under Review

• Govt clarifies $7.2bn figure is an IMF projection, not an EFF mandatory target

etc, etc, etc….

Are these paid advertisements or infomercials? And does the Internal Revenue Department collect taxes on them? Who pays? The media? The World Bank and the IMF? The US Embassy. Or it is us who always pay?

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Contents:

A New International Manifesto & Economic History for Sri Lanka