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

e-Con e-News 07-13 June 2026

While the USA’s & India’s warships (& related NGOs) keep barging into & out of the country’s ports, bearing second-hand gifts and dishing out third-rate sermons about human rights, devolution, the rule of law, free & open oceans, etc., Prime Minister Harini Amarasuriya was gracing the opening of the new Nippon Office Building, commissioned by the Sasakawa Memorial Trust, on Ward Place, Colombo 7. The trust is in memory of Ryōichi Sasakawa, a convicted Japanese Class A war criminal.

     The day before the Sasakawa event, Amarasuriya informed Parliament that 267,138 children had dropped out of the school system between 2018-24 – many because the school system could not accommodate their needs, or their parents could not afford to keep them there. What perhaps-inadvertent yet subconscious messaging by the PM does this sequencing of events mean to convey? A country that cannot nurture or employ its people, let alone with dignity, must get rid of them somehow. Migration is not a possibility for everyone. Ryōichi Sasakawa’s answer to unemployment was to wage war, becoming part of an imperialist project that killed millions of Asians – genocidal acts Japan still refuses to apologize for, to Asians at least (see ee 23May 2026). Despite Sasakawa’s support for Japan’s attack on the USA’s Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, the USA still pardoned him and recruited him into their post-1949 Anti-China lobby.

     The siting of the ‘Nippon Office Building’ on Ward Place is also redolent of history. Ward Place also sites the ‘Eye Hospital’, that has helped give sight to many an awkward eye. Ward Place also sites ‘Braemar’, the last residence of President JR Jayawardene. The now-deceased Jayawardene is credited with misusing the Buddha’s words to rehabilitate Japan (as well as forgive England’s reparations to Sri Lanka) at that 1951 San Francisco Conference, that excluded the USSR and the People’s Republic of China (PRC).

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     On that same June day last week that PM Amarasuriya met the war criminal Ryōichi’s son – Nippon Foundation Chairman Yohei Sasakawa – the Daily Mirror published an interview with the Ambassador of Japan to SL Akio Isomata, ‘warning’ Sri Lanka, ‘that opportunities for investment & export-led growth cannot be delayed indefinitely.’ Sri Lanka has to ‘capitalize on a Japanese-backed export-oriented industrialisation initiative designed to integrate Sri Lankan manufacturers into regional supply chains linked to India, Japan & wider Asian markets’ (see ee Business, Walk the Talk: Japan urges…). Indeed, their plan is to install ‘an economic caste system: Sri Lanka has to only produce ‘inputs’, India will capture ‘assembly margins’, and Japan shall capture ‘technology rents & FDI returns’ (see ee 23 May 2026).

     Two days prior to the Sasakawa launch, Sri Lanka’s cabinet announced a new Japanese program called the ‘Employment Program for Skill Development’ to send workers to unnamed ‘key sectors, as [Japan] faces a shortage of local labor force due to declining population, and an increasing ageing population’ (see ee Workers).

     Amarasuriya heads the ruling NPP government in parliament, which is unable (or does not wish) to control the merchants and moneylenders that have driven the country’s economy into a dead end. Instead, the government’s judicial tools are actively prosecuting leaders & officials of the previous government who had brought an Indian-sponsored terrorist war to an end, accusing them of numerous crimes, corruption & terrorism. Such acts appear bound to create an endless revolving door of revenge, as one government replaces another, in this expensive game of electoral roulette, where the unregistered Merchant Capitalist Party (MCP) always ends up the winner.

     Meanwhile, the merchant media keep deploying euphemisms about ‘conflict’ & ‘oil crisis’ & ‘supply-chain disruption’, too afraid to name the perpetrators: that it is the USA & its armed poodles (EU+Japan) that are wreaking chaos around the world, and profiting handsomely, too.

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‘From its creation to modern times, the USA

has been defined as a racial project’

Europe slaughtered 100 million indigenous Americans, and enslaved 4 million Africans, to brand that continent ‘The New World.’ Thus, begins ee’s 5^th instalment of the Tricontinental Institute (TI)’s ‘Hyper-Imperialism: A Dangerous Decadent New Stage’. This excerpt of their monumental essay, details ‘The Evolution of Imperialism – the New Stage of Imperialism,’ pointing out that the US ruling class structure can only be understood by recognizing its white supremacist patriarchal character. Defining ‘Hyper-Imperialism’ by this history of genocide & enslavement, they track the concept’s core to the transition from England to the USA as an ‘Anglo-American Project’ (see ee Focus). 

     TI traces the modern origins of the term, imperialism, to the work of Hilferding & Lenin, and its basis in the domination of the economy by monopolies (which were anyway always the basis of ‘free trade’), and the switch from steam to electric power, which led to superprofits. TI describes the reorganization of the financial system after World War 2, with the formation of the World Bank & IMF, to enforce the convertibility of all currencies into the USDollar, and of the dollar into gold. NATO, formed in 1949 to dominate Europe and overthrow socialist countries, using ‘soft power’ at first (nominal independence, & economic subordination). In 1971 the US unilaterally suspended the US$’s convertibility into gold. Since the 1980s they have been moving to the overt genocide again, that they enact before our eyes alongside ‘neoliberalism’, whose features such as privatization, debt bondage, & the rigid enforcement of ‘intellectual property rights’, TI describes, culminating in the ‘rise of digital monopoly capital, exemplified by Google seeking to dominate the whole world (except for China, Russia, Iran, DPR Korea, Cuba, & a few others). They also examine the rise of imperialist ‘cultural, political & foreign policy hegemony’ made possible by the monopoly status of US technologies, including Google, Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, X…’

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‘Why don’t the educated have a public consciousness, a national & a social consciousness?’, mused SBD de Silva. ‘We lack a social & political history of the character of the local bourgeoisie, of the absence of nationalism & of the role of the bourgeois’ – there is no such account. English colonial governor Henry McCallum (1907-13) ‘hacked the unprogressive nature of the local bourgeoisie, saying they were not concerned about the rural masses, and only concerned about their private interests’.

     England’s Donoughmore Commission (1927-31) reforms were implemented and a State Council was elected under universal suffrage in 1931. This ‘bourgeoisie’ in Sri Lanka had opposed the recommended grant of the franchise:

‘There is no compare to the rise of the Indonesian elite

who were nationalist, or to Kenya, or the Indian bourgeoisie.

Our local bourgeoisie had opposed the franchise, played

politics based on caste, & were collaborationist, despite

Kumari Jayawardena’s claim of their role in the independence

movement. It was not in the character of these bourgeoisie,

they were not one bit radical. The Left, the LSSP, was quite

overconfident about the anti-imperialism of the masses, and

its leadership. Outside the ranks of the Left, the bourgeoisie

were rentiers & traders, refusing to make concessions to the

masses. & they were caste-ridden. The politician Ponnambalam

Ramanathan opposed universal franchise as he felt that the caste

system was an integral part of the Hindu way of life. He informed

London, that he would change his political allegiance, if he

& his family were photographed with their queen.

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Of course, it is curious why the English were so eager to ‘grant’ the franchise here, long before doing so in their other colonies. Certainly, the mass of workers & peasants remained unorganized after England’s savage repressions of the 19^th and early 20^th century (1818, 1848, 1915). We are also unclear about whether this fraction of ‘rentiers and traders’ could be called a ‘bourgeoisie’, like the ‘middle class’ that emerged in western Europe between their peasantry and landed gentry, to establish modern (machine-making) industrial capitalism. The ruling merchants and moneylender in Sri Lanka, sought quick profits, and feared industrialization would shape an organized working class.

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The nature of Sri Lanka’s ruling class (ie, if they really do ‘rule’, and not merely ‘perform’) and the new fraction of ‘schooled’ wannabes that have emerged since 1948 (& 1956, in particular), is examined in the recently translated excerpt (see ee Focus) of Sena Thoradeniya’s keynote at the 2013 launch of Gunadasa Amarasekera’s novel Roopantharanaya. Thoradeniya, novelist & controversial author of Galle Face Protest; Systems Change or Anarchy? exposes the narrow criticisms of his positive reviews of Amarasekera’s literary takes on ‘the evolution of Sri Lanka’s middle class’. Thoradeniya’s analysis is exceptional for he examines literature & literary criticism through an unabashed Marxist-Leninist sweep of history & society. He criticizes false claims to a ‘political art’ and exposes the hubris of wannabes in a hurry to abandon their cultural ethos through the eponymous ‘hero’ of Gunadasa’s novel, who rises via infantile adventurism & NGO patronage to become a professor & diplomatic envoy.

     The shallowness of Sri Lanka’s intellectual production is unbared by our degreed scholars (who revel in decorating themselves with such appellations as ‘Doctor’ minus the prescriptions & prognoses) who energetically manoeuvre to bask in borrowed feathers by adopting relatively unknown European role models. The more-obscure sophists adopt the fascist Heideggers & opportunistic Arendts & opaque Lacans; the more-shallow adopt the superficial Zizeks, while the old run-of-the-mill quote such anti-communist luminaries as Orwell. Economic analysts stick to limited framings of Adam Smith (minus his appeal to morality) & Maynard Keynes (minus his welfare to military budgets), and the more-untried utopias of Friedrich Hayek. Then there are those who love to repeatedly quote Lee Kwan Yew (minus acknowledging industrial city-state Singapore’s highly statist economic underpinnings) especially to hit out at the depredations of our purportedly Sinhala-Buddhist policies. Still more are those who declare Marxism dead, and when confronted with the reality of an insistently Marxist-Leninist People’s Republic of China, seek to divide that country into pre- & post-Mao Zedong, turn 1978 against 1949, the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution vs the Reform & Opening-up.

     Shiran Illanperuma (see ee Focus) concludes ‘only now do we have the data & empirical tools to begin to answer’ such riddles as to whether China’s Reform & Opening-up process in 1978:

‘Was a capitulation to imperialist capital & neocolonial globalization,

or part of a long-game to develop China’s productive forces so as to create

the material conditions for economic sovereignty & common prosperity.’

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Illanperuma offers China’s story as a ‘model for Sri Lanka’ to adapt. With intricate statistics, he shows that ‘China has both integrated into the global cycle of accumulation and ‘delinked’’. Egyptian Marxist Samir Amin proposed the concept of ‘delinking’, stressing that ‘delinking was not autarky; it was the subordination of external relations to the imperatives of internal accumulation.’ Indeed, our media economists must repeatedly parrot the need for ‘exports’ failing or unable to explain that everything and at all times must be based on the long-term goals of the nation.

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One of the more popular myths about plantations claim that they use the most advanced production techniques, even as the bulk of their workers still use methods (plucking, tapping, etc) 100s of years old. They even claim modern technological & management practices are demanded by their foreign ownership. Examine the repeated whingeing by the EU about food safety, the World Bank about food processing, and the USA about forced labor (see ee Sovereignty, Do-or-Die EU GSP+ bid spurs major reforms, etc). None of their pronouncements point out that the most basic human rights are the ‘right to develop’ & the ‘right to enjoy happy lives’, as China recently declared.

     This ee Focus begins Chapter 11 of SBD de Silva’s 1982 classic The Political Economy of Underdevelopment, a chapter  that focuses on ‘Plantations & Technological Stagnation’. de Silva compared various plantation crops across Asia, Africa & the Americas. His argument is complex, subtle & intricate. Many of the so-called changes in the growing & processing of plantation products have sought to ‘raise yields & output per acre, and to improve marketability & prices, rather than to reduce the unit cost of output’. Real productivity upgrades output per worker through use of higher technology & skills. Wages are forcibly kept low, using archaic labor relations, to produce planation crops, whereas these plantations have not been able to dislodge peasant cultivators, ‘who have continued to supply the world market in their own fashion’. SBD also discussed paddy cultivation, and the exceptions to his thesis, evident in sugar plantations in the Caribbean, where a proletariat arose from the ranks of independent small farmers, and tin mining in Malaysia, though such endevours too end up as having limited possibilities for extensive development.

     SBD’s most interesting discussion in this excerpt is how investment in science, physics & chemistry continually transforms the productive process, as opposed to investment in mechanical ingenuity. This led to a multiplication of ‘development possibilities’, and the diffusion of scientific knowledge & rationality throughout workforces & communities. He provides fascinating descriptions of the widespread effects of the brewing industry on food production, glass & bottling, as well as on agriculture. He also considers the cumulative changes in technology & science brought about by Japan’s small rice farms. SBD cogently argues why none of these changes are possible in plantations, due primarily to the colonial nature of its production, high overheads & low wages, which promote technological stagnation.

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Contents:

War Criminals Rise from their Graves to Confront Sri Lanka’s Future