That Mystical Myth of the Laziness of the Sinhala Worker
Posted on March 23rd, 2026
e-Con e-News
Posted byee ink.Posted inUncategorizedTags:history, poetry, politics
blog: https://eesrilanka.wordpress.com
‘Before you study the economics, study the economists!’
e-Con e-News 15-21 March 2026
The USA is waging war on the world, and demanding their allies, pitbulls, poodles and puppets, fall in line. US Secretary of State Marco Rubio recently declared at the 62nd Munich Security Conference, billed as the world’s leading forum for international security, that the glory of ‘Western Civilisation’ depended upon a recolonization of the world.
Meanwhile, the Sri Lankan government has rejected the accusation that Sri Lanka is an US colony already. With regard to the sinking & drowning of the sailors of an Iranian ship, who had been guests of the Indian government, the Sri Lankan government insists that they were confronted by requests from both sides in the US war on Iran, to enter the country’s waters and airspace. The Sri Lankan government therefore decided to be ‘neutral’. The Iranian government however insists that the Iranian ship had already been invited, but refused entry at the last moment, leaving it open to attack by the USA. This has led to enduring suspicions that there was indeed collusion with the USA, and Sri Lanka is a US colony in everything but name.
Our intellectuals & policy makers are fearful & paralyzed (see ee Focus, Rethinking Underdevelopment). Yet as a great leader once declared: ‘Heaven & earth are in great turmoil; the situation is excellent!’ But excellent for what? To finally get rid of the import-export plantation economy that has ruined Sri Lanka for far too long!
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The laziness & backwardness of the Sinhala worker & Sinhala peasant is a common grumble, mumble & jumble in the media. Both blatantly & subtly, these myths operate behind such tropes as majoritarianism & superstition. And it has a very intriguing history (see ee Focus, SBD de Silva).
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The IMF is in town yet again, bearing ‘tranches’, while their main shareholder, the USA is waging war on West Asia & indirectly on Sri Lanka itself, as West Asia has been made to have an outsize influence on our economy. As we have pointed out before, the US propensity to wage endless wars should be part of the calculus in determining the liability? to pay debts. The moment they wage war, all bets and debts should be off! However, the demand of their many mouthpieces here, the Chambers of Commerce, as well as their economists, is the demand that we keep to the IMF’s prescriptions.
Alongside the IMF’s visit, the lawyers’ Bar Association (BASL) is holding the National Labour Law Symposium 2026, bringing together ‘legal, regulatory & industry leaders’ (see ee Who’s Who?) One of the IMF’s many demands to control the economy is to prevent the organization of labor in the interests of workers & the nation. The first organization to be registered as a union in 1935 was the Employers’ Federation of Ceylon (EFC). BASL was set up in 1974. The IMF demand is for flexibility – the right to hire & fire as they please, with labor laws enabling such ‘freedom’. Democracy may exist except at work. And the media coverage in Sri Lanka of the world of labor is typified by such headlines as this:
‘Unions unplug unsuspecting homes, shops’
– Sunday Times, ee Workers
Really? The government has been forced by the IMF to deny electricity to 100,000s of homes. What kind of mentality would formulate such a callous throw-away headline. This Wijewardene-oligarchy-owned rag is speaking of an organization representing the same workers who just gave light to the whole country in dangerous conditions after the devastating cyclone.
Some labor unions can end up being taken over bycompanies or mafia, no doubt, but this is usually done at the behest of a criminal capitalist state & likeminded employers. So where does this slave master & mentality attitude come from?
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Many myths about the Sinhala workers and of the working class generally are spread by the media. And why not? Freedom of the press is for those who own it. The Tamil worker in Tamilnadu has been called lazy, but then they cross the Palk Straits and are suddenly declared industrious when compared to the Sinhala worker?
These myths are traced to the Sinhala worker (who despite creating great monuments such as Ruwanwelisaya in the past) supposedly loathed working on the pristine plantations – perhaps because it was borne out of and transported from the slave culture of the Americas. Such myths of laziness are gaily repeated by academics and economists, many of whom are Sinhala themselves. These fictions have been methodically obliterated (to use a currently too familiar but misused term) by SBD de Silva in his classic The Political Economy of Underdevelopment.
The last few chapters of de Silva’s classic that ee have reproduced examine, for instance, the widespread and intricate uses of money by Sinhala men & women. Sinhala people’s lack of understanding of money has been given as a reason for them not enjoying work on plantations. In this ee Focus, SBD de Silva carefully examined ‘the so-called aversion to wage labour among people of precapitalist economies’. He provided extensive examples of Sinhala workers, and the types of work, including the high wages they demanded. Caste was also no barrier to work. They worked if the work was profitable and they were not treated as slaves and cheated of their wages. English employers and their agents on the plantations were wont to indulge in such perfidious ‘American’ practices. Yet de Silva also offered examples of English officials and employers who did not participate in such games.
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The slave mentality promoted by that plantation system of chattel slavery born in the Americas, predominates to this day. It has long been hidden from the world, but now is being brought into the open, and no one offers a better example than the current US Secretary of State – slightly dark and linked to major Miami, Florida drug traffickers. He descends from the kangany (overseers) who best exemplify the system of chattel slavery that has fostered the so-called ‘human resources’ business. The Colombian President Gustavo Preto has named Dubai, Miami & Madrid as the top 3 centres of drug trafficking in the world. Rubio as US Senator represented Florida for 14 years.
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US Secretary of State Marco Rubio is threatening officials of neighbouring Caribbean (West Indian) countries who failed to comply with Washington’s plans to strangle Cuba. A measure of its hysteria, the USA says it will revoke the visas of ‘non-compliant government officials & their immediate families’. 3 leaders have already refused to go along with the US demands. We imagine this threat has been applied and could soon apply to many of Sri Lanka’s ruling classes who stash their children & their wealth in the imperialist centres. In Sri Lanka, former President Gotabhaya Rajapakse was supposedly prevented from visiting his children, and court cases were pursued against relatives.
If adherence to the USA’s imperialist objectives is one of the criteria for travel to the USA, we recall India’s External Affairs Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar’s children, such as his son Druva Jaishankar who lives in Washington DC. He is Executive Director of the Observer Research Foundation America (ORF America), a public policy thinktank, which regularly pumps anti-China propaganda into the media in Sri Lanka.
Jaishankar Jr helped establish ORF in 2020, partly funded by the Dhirubhai Ambani family, who own the Indian conglomerate Reliance Industries. Jaishankar Jr also joined a US War Department-linked thinktank Marathon Initiative (MI) to advise US President Donald Trump on his plans for war on China while pushing Europe to fight Russia.
MI is a brainchild of Trump’s earlier Assistant Secretary of State for European & Eurasian Affairs, A Wess Mitchell. Mitchell has teamed up with former CIA director William Colby’s grandson Elbridge Colby, now the third-ranking official at the Pentagon, as Trump’s Undersecretary of War for Policy. We recall Colby as wishing to fabricate a ‘counter-hegemonic coalition’ in Asia, against China. Both Mitchell and Colby spend their time ‘sequencing’ world wars – which countries should the US attack first, second, and third, or all at once: Iran, Russia, China (see ee 26 April 2025). In addition to Jaishankar, MI also recruited Admiral Dennis Blair, a former Pacific fleet commander & Director of National Intelligence (2009-10); Thomas de Maizière, German Defense Minister in the Merkel Administration, and 2 first-term Trump appointees.
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‘We depend on imports for over 90%
of our inputs, mostly petroleum-based…
All our raw materials & synthetic rubber
prices have gone up by 50%.’
(see Who’s Who, Imported-Exporters)
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‘The West Asia crisis does not invalidate fossil fuels overnight,
but it exposes the fragility of regimes whose reproduction still
depends heavily on geographically concentrated, geopolitically
vulnerable & thermodynamically mature energy sources.’
– Warwick Powell (ee Economists, West Asia’s Energy Shock)
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It will soon be one year since the US government declared another ‘Liberation Day’ (what happened to July 04?), which asserted their right to impose tariffs on trade ‘partners’, when and how they please. A year later and the USA is waging a genocidal war on Palestine, Iran and Lebanon, and blocking access to the abundant energy sources resources of West Asia. All our fake businessmen (import merchants & moneylenders, really, dressed up in the transvestist drag of high-sounding ‘entrepreneurs’ in coats & ties) are crying fake tears dosed with the real. They all act as if they didn’t know that a made-in-USA armageddon has long been in the making and now is on its way. From tea and garment exporters, tourism operators, to small manufacturers, cultivators, all complaining about their dependence on imports, on West Asian fuels & fertilizers, seem to be acting too shocked.
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This week’s ee Focus, re-titles the Sunday Observer essay ‘Rethinking Sri Lankan Development After the Neoliberal Order’ by Shiran Illanperuma as ‘Rethinking Underdevelopment in Sri Lanka midst the Latest Capitalist Disorder’. He describes how a ‘neoliberal’ order was built to benefit US capitalists, by pushing loans to bribe countries into ‘opening up’ their economies to control by Wall Street. He traces the tearing up of this order beyond the trade war on China to the 1985 Plaza Accord, which brought French, West German and Japanese industry under greater US control. The USA under capitalism seeks not to repeat history except as farce:
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‘India should understand that we [the US] are not going
to make the same mistakes with India that we made with
China 20 years ago in terms of saying, ‘You will be able
to develop all these markets, & then the next thing we
know, you are beating us in a lot of commercial things.’
– US Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau
at India’s 2026 Raisina Dialogue
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Illanperuma also traces the undermining of import substitution policy (a dirty word in the capitalist media) and the World Bank’s promotion of the ‘East Asian model’, which would also meet its Nanthikadal in 1997. He also shows how comparing Sri Lanka with Singapore is based on an ignorance of that city-state’s economy, which is fully linked to the US military industrial machine. The major country to escape US dictat has been China, controlling its home market, and there too, local economic hitmen, trying to attack Mao Zedong et al, ignoring the modern industrial foundation established 1949-79.
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As for Sri Lanka, we remain paralysed by an import-export plantation system, denied food & energy security, a paralysis that can only be overcome by a people’s movement that prioritizes economic sovereignty, and will not be diverted by populist diversions such as petty corruption while ignoring the larger depredations of multinational corporations (MNCs) that have larger budgets than most countries (see ee Random Notes, How Multinationals Avoid Taxes).
We always look forward to Ilanperuma’s analyses which succinctly frame the latest challenges faced by the working class & peasantry of Sri Lanka, as well as around the world. Re-titling his essay is because we believe Sri Lanka has been more underdeveloping (as pointed out by SBD de Silva) than ‘developing’ (which appears to be a state in perpetual stasis). We have long pointed to the word ‘development’ as a polite synonym for ‘colonial’ as coined by the MNC Unilever. We also do not accept the word ‘neoliberal’.
As ee noted 2 years ago: ‘Neoliberalism was a term coined by European economists (funded by the Exxon-oil-tax-hideout, the Rockefeller Foundation) who later formed the secretive Mont Pelerin Society (MPS), which has also met in Sri Lanka. These economists warned of an imminent ‘suicide of the West’ – this is a trope reamplified recently by US official Marc Rubio in his white-power speech in Munich). They were deeply concerned about controlling the ‘hordes’ of non-white countries who could take over the United Nations. They wanted to block the rise of a so-called ‘postcolonial world’, especially to maintain white power (protecting settler white South Africa & Zionist Israel being essential) anchored in the North Atlantic aka White Atlantic (buttressed by its military wing, North Atlantic Treaty Organization/ NATO), which now bleeds through US & EU warships into our ocean called Indian’ (see ee, 16 March 2024).
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‘Successful societies are those that master negentropic interventions:
they renew their energy systems, improve the efficiency with which
energy is turned into useful work, & build institutions that keep
the whole metabolic process coherent.’ – Warwick Powell (ee Economists,
Why I Wrote Thermoeconomics in a Time of Monsters)
Negentropic is a word our numerous English professors probably have never heard. Neither had we, until coming to understand that it is the opposite of ‘entropy’ (ie, the opposite of the descent into disorder, the opposite of ‘a thermodynamic quantity representing the unavailability of a system’s thermal energy for conversion into mechanical work, often interpreted as the degree of disorder or randomness in the system’).
We guess that negentropy, however, maybe a fancy yet intriguing term for what SBD de Silva always referred to as the ability of modern industrialization to make ‘one thing lead to another…’, one product lead to another product, what Karl Marx called ‘capital accumulation’, where we get an unending progression of skills & goods to serve humankind.
This ability is not evident in our underdeveloping economy, based on labor-intensive plantations (still plucking tea by hand) and garments (no pin or needle or fabric made), tourism (most machinery imported), etc. All the talk about AI, etc, concentrates on its ability to dis-employ and harm workers. This is of course claimed as natural, but that is the role of the capitalist mass media. The word ‘negentropy’ of course speaks to the ability of a different society to produce & use the latest goods & services, including AI, etc., to people’s benefit.
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The US Peace Corps was expelled from Sri Lanka (then Ceylon, still under the English) after the attempted 1962 Anglo-US coup d’etat against the world’s 1st woman head of government, Sirimavo Bandaranike. These ‘Corps’ were re-admitted into Sri Lanka in 2024, two years after the aragala putsch in 2022. And since then, they have been giving Sri Lankan youth, ‘English lessons’ in certain strategic areas. Now after over 500 years of invasions, all areas in Sri Lanka are strategic, yet we also wonder about the kind of English they are teaching. Is it Washington Beltway or Manhattan AdLib, Wall Street Wail, or Chicago Boys Bluster, Seattle Boeing or Virginia Spook Speak or Baton Rouge Redneck? Whatever, we twang… knowing their curriculum does not have to underplay such English lessons as Palestine, Venezuela, Iran, Cuba, etc. These are meant to be the real English lessons, promoting such variations on the theme, ‘There is no Alternative’, and the older ‘Resistance is Futile’…
For this is one of our problems in learning about the world in English. Every new generation of English readers suffers a minor brain stroke when learning English, when they are forced to deploy certain words that are euphemisms for the white world & the honorary white world, like ‘West’, knowing full well that west to us is mostly southwest India, East Africa, and West Asia, which they insist on still calling like their English forebears – the Middle East. Who knows where that really is, unless Europe is the actual West Asia?
So, the major English language problem is their constant misnaming, and the ‘US Peace Corps’ is yet to really learn real English. US media talk of the ‘Korean War’, ‘Vietnam War’, etc etc, and now they call it the ‘Iran War’. When it is really the ‘US War on Iran’. When forced to admit their active role, they call it the ‘US-Israeli War…’ The truth is that it is not just Trump but an entire mostly invisible ruling class which is behind this war.
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‘The word is that Israel tricked Trump into war with Israel.
& they played a role. But that’s a subtle way of saying
Jews did it. However, this war is about oil & the heads
of the 5 biggest US oil corporations are not Jewish.
They’re WASPS. It’s true. Don’t believe the hype &
get tricked…’ – Communist Party of the USA
The CPUSA is referring to the publicized resignation of Joe Kent, the top US counter-terrorism official in Trump administration who blames Israel for the war on Iran. Many suspect that Kent as a Nazi & a top former CIA employee, who is trying to deflect blame from the US ruling class.
The Nazis saw the US settlers as their older brothers. Further, Miami Cubans don’t make US policy on Cuba. The Tamil diaspora does not make US/Canada/England/EU policy on Sri Lanka. Irish Americans don’t make US policy on Ireland or England, etc. Yet are not all of them very useful tools of the US ruling class?
And so we come to the WASPS – White Anglo-Saxon Protestants – a minority group that never ever get called ethnic… and are not that familiar to the conspiracy theorists of the cyber-universe. Yet all such analysis reduces the complexity of an imperialist ruling class, dominated by monopolies & cartels, to a matter of race, ethnicity, etc. And this is the problem. The last thing, the merchants & moneylenders, agents of multinational corporations who misrule us, wish to do, is name reality correctly. The USA’s current plans are to sequence and synchronize wars against Iran, Russia & China, who they see as the main obstacles to their attempt to reinforce white supremacy. The USA claims they have but a few years before China ‘overtakes’ their capitalist system. ‘Overtakes’ for them is not about advancing people’s livelihoods, but anxiety about military & economic dominance. The USA therefore seeks to pull Sri Lanka into their war on China just as it is pushing Japan, to ignite a war over Taiwan, by provoking China. Japanese PM Sanae Takaichi was hosted in the US White House this week, where the US President reminded her about Japan’s ability to surprise, as in Pearl Harbor, when Japan attacked the USA. Japan has been a colony of the USA for over 80 years, with 45,000 US troops parked there.
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The ghost of DJ Wimalasurendra now haunts the nation as never before… Wimalasurendra’s vision to develop hydropower to electrify the whole country over 100 years ago was thwarted & sabotaged by the usual suspects, who now rule over Singapore etc, as once again we are being held hostage by the suppliers of oil, led by the USA who is waging war. There are those who claim that we can be saved by green energy, yet the machineries that enables wind & solar etc, have long been controlled by the same oily MNCs, led by the US Rockefellers. Others claim that China has been able to get out of the grasp of these old pale patent holders. But without any discussion allowed on the role the making of machines plays in an economy, how can we even begin to discuss economic sovereignty?
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