e-Con e-News

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

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e-Con e-News 02 – 08 November 2025

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‘In a humorous tone, the President recalled pre-election claims that the National People’s Power (NPP) would seize private property if elected to office.’ – see ee Economists, President jests…

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‘Aga Jayasinghe understood the NPP’s decision to continue with the IMF program, & felt it wise for the NPP to not rock the boat too much. Not because he endorsed the IMF program but because he must have felt that the balance of power was strongly tilted in favour of the bondholders & local merchant capitalists, who could make the economy scream by withholding foreign currency, hoarding commodities, downgrading credit ratings, & so on.’– Shiran Illanperuma (ee Focus, Returning to the Source with Aga)

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The manifest motivations behind the mass killing in Canada’s capital Ottawa of almost an entire Sinhala family, and the autumnal conviction this week of the alleged killer, will be relegated to those artificial mists & fogs that regularly emanate from the North Atlantic, and seek to deeply befuddle the world. Leaves fall, and tears fall harder, but even more torrential are their blatant lies. We are told this is Ottawa’s worst mass murder – which is just not true. That the media in Sri Lanka repeat this dangerous nonsense is even worse. Ottawa is named after the Odawa people, whose lands were stolen & their people decimated. Pontiac – a name now remembered only as a popular car brand, which was discontinued – was one of the Odawa leaders, so feared, the English & the French invaders used biological warfare (smallpox) against the Odawa. Any such correction will not be broadcast by an abject and supine media in Sri Lanka, who also claim to take seriously the accusations of genocide by the Canadian government & its politicians, blaming these canards solely on the lobbying by Tamil migrants of Sri Lankan origin, resident there, along with those idiots (idiotic is the opposite of politic by the way) who clearly choose not to admit that the very land they stand on is genocide personified, They simply have no standing to accuse others of any crimes. And worse, this state is bruited about as a success story in multicultural living!

     Then, all we are told is that the Ottawa killer watched TikTok videos before his rampage, and was obsessed by videogames, living in a recently emergent suburb where he paid rent to his more ‘established’ victims. He feared having his visa revoked, for not going to the college he was supposedly there to attend, also fearing his family in Sri Lanka would stop funding his existence by the Arctic. Nobody has sought to interview the convicted killer’s family in Sri Lanka. Yet everybody knows that the foreign student game is what is keeping universities in those countries financially afloat (See ee Workers, Australian education partnerships hailed as blueprint for Sri Lanka’s future economy). And that the foreign student game is a type of illegal immigration, which they supposedly abhor. What the media will also not state is that those countries, who refuse to employ their own workers at decent wages to do certain jobs, are only using our workers to weaken the labor power of their own workers, and will happily sacrifice migrants once they get what they wish.

     Meanwhile, by their failure to challenge & overcome their capitalist masters, the white working classes of Anglo-North America, Europe & their colonial satrapies (from Australia to Japan) are being dragged by their noses into another mega mass slaughter, another widespread war against us and the rest of the world. The United States of Amnesia is trying to pull us all down with them into their sweet chloroform of forgetting. Such matters become all the more poignant when we consider that many Sri Lankans are choosing to leave the country and seek supposed greener pastures in those very countries. The majority of Arab & Muslim governments’ betrayal of the historic struggle of the Palestinian nation, and their active involvement in the genocidal wars being waged on North & East Africa, tells us that the need to know who our friends & enemies are in this world, is an even more pressing matter. Our workers are being sent off, without any understanding of what awaits them. All they feel is that they too have no future in their own motherland. But, are they ready to don a uniform & die for another country?

     We do not know our own country, and its place in the world and its economy, let alone know the role our neighbouring countries play. We even believe the US & English & European media even more than the citizens of those countries believe in them. We even believe as we once did about the USSR, that the world is to be explained by so-called ‘superpower rivalry’, when it is the US & Europeans who have invaded China, rather than the other way about. The larger white war on China can explain much of historical events in the world over the last 80 years (see ee Random Notes). A denial that involves an erasure & whitewashing of the history of colonialism in Asia & Africa and the Americas.

It is in such of state of mindlessness, that we near the 90^th anniversary of the founding of the Lanka Sama Samaja Party (LSSP). Shiran Illanperuma steps into the luminous shadows of the socialist movement in Sri Lanka, recalling its early actors, noticing that much of its history curiously remains unwritten. He therefore glances at the story of the Communist movement in Sri Lanka through the reminiscences of Aga Jayasena, a national organizer of the Communist Party of Sri Lanka.

     Jayasena recently departed to meet Marx & Lenin & Stalin & Mao, as scientific socialists like to quip, about the aftermath to their all-too-brief dynamic sojourn on this tuft of planet earth. Jayasena recalls the CPSL’s founding leaders, and their role in the building of mass movements, the trade unions & cooperatives, out of which the power of the Party arose, and the social forces that propels their programs forward. He relates its weaknesses to the underdevelopment of modern industry in Sri Lanka, and the role an industrial proletariat can lay in providing the solid steel of clear progress. This week saw the announcement of the eradication of extreme poverty in Kerala, a state in India where the Communist movement has been strong. India’s first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru marched in their army to topple the world’s first elected Communist government, in Kerala in 1959, a year which saw the assassination of SWRD Bandaranaike in Sri Lanka.

     It is therefore apt that Illanperuma (see ee Focus, Returning to the Source with Aga) examines the role that Malayali workers – brought by the English to work in the workshops, ports and railways of Ceylon – the role these workers played in the formation of the socialist movement in Sri Lanka. He also speaks to the need to nurture more equitable links with India’s movements:

‘Not just to bask in the glories of the past,

but to regain a sense of self, a confidence

in our ideas & original aspirations,

& a grounding to forge a way ahead.’

Illanperuma describes the effects of the splits in the Left into sects, and the missed opportunities for coalescences into larger forces, and both the positives & setbacks in forming national coalitions. He also brings up the matter of what exactly is the national question, let alone, of the moment we are in and the strategies for breaking out of this colonial plantation stranglehold.

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Also, in this week’s ee Focus, Ahilan Kadirgamar examines the possibilities midst what he claims to be ‘worst economic crisis ravaging our country since the 1930s’. He looks at the particular capacities for rebuilding rural cooperatives, particularly in the context of the loss of an entire generation. Whether he is only referring to the people of the north is unclear, but the country both north & south, east & west have experienced annihilations of its most dedicated & creative cadre, at regular intervals.

     A supporter of the current ruling parliamentarians, Kadirgamar tell us not to expect too much from this week’s budget for 2026, ‘until the IMF program with its austerity measures ends’. He then points to the abject neglect of the rural economy, and points toward the possibilities provided by the planned ‘1,000 producer co-operatives to revive & strengthen’ agricultural & food systems. He too goes back to the source: particularly Karl Marx’s prognostications on the state of the working class & its struggles – in the aftermath of great repression – for a decent wage & conditions of work. Kadirgamar examines the role cooperatives can play in providing ‘decent work, incomes & food to our working people’.

     All of this is heard midst the caterwauling & chorus of the ruling merchants & their media – ‘Keep the IMF bailout on track’, all to drown the gnashing & gnawing of the rusted iron claws that seek to perpetuate the colonial import-export plantation fraud run by those who monopolize the national resources of the country.

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Wijeya Group Financial Times’ Monday economist WA Wijewardena eagerly quotes ‘the Dutch economist JH Boeke’ about ‘colonial economies in East Asia [where] there was the coexistence of a modern economy & a backward traditional economy stunting economic transformation’. He believes that this applies to the ‘modern’ digital economy, in a country where offices don’t even answer land phones. It is rather sad, that this purportedly erudite economist has not read SBD de Silva whose classic work refutes exactly such dualities. The so-called modern economy – personified by the import-export plantation economy – was not modern, and the so-called backward peasant economy was no more backward than the so-called modern. We therefore continue SBD’s The Political Economy of Underdevelopment, where this excerpt from Chapter 3 describes the ‘monopolistic structure [that] dominates foreign trade in the colonies’, controlling both imports & exports.’ He shows how the early agency houses, shippers and exporters pre-empted the best locations due to their financial resources, and financed the indigenous retail traders who had no access to the banks. He thereby tracked the nature of the rise of a backward ruling class in Sri Lanka.

     While European firms dominated business that was safe, the trading risks were taken by the indigenous and other Asian traders. SBD de Silva also shows how the European businesses declined in the 1930s due to the segregated nature of their existence. He linked ‘the narrow range of interests of European capital in nonsettler colonies’ to ‘the extraterritoriality of the investors’.

     Tea growing in Sri Lanka eventually became a corporate enterprise dominated by absentee capital, but it was started ‘by individual planters who were quasi-settlers’. SBD detailed how the nonsettler colonies only obtained small production capital, mostly infrastructure investments. He linkedthe ‘constricted channels of investment of foreign capital (trade & plantations, and not industrial ventures)’ to ‘the impediments imposed by extra-territoriality on the mobility of capital on a world scale. At that time there were no ‘rapid telecommunication and transportation facilities, no internet and jet planes, to enable close management and control of investments. Multinational corporations (MNCs) – ‘the final expression of the internationalization of capital’ were not yet born. ‘The circuits of capital, within each colonial empire, were themselves affected by the division between the settler & the nonsettler colonies. The movement of capital being mainly to the settler territories…’ (see ee Focus)

In the last excerpt from Gustavus Myers’ History of Tammany Hall, we noted how ‘reform’ and cries of corruption were a ploy to divert from the real structures of the capitalist economy: the private expropriation by the monopolies of large corporations of the public surplus. In this ee see how dummy corporations are set up, with brokers taking commissions for ‘paper roads’ never built, with companies then made bankrupt, and records destroyed – the main corporate entities involved are the large transportation businesses – buses & streetcars & trains. The main beneficiaries in this corruption business appear to be the judiciary & the media – the former supplied with clientele and the latter supplied with headlines. Meanwhile this week’s big New York election headlines, claimed yet another reformer…has arisen…

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Contents:

Canada’s Capital of Mass Murder & Amnesia