{"id":135096,"date":"2023-06-18T17:04:19","date_gmt":"2023-06-19T00:04:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/?p=135096"},"modified":"2023-06-18T17:04:19","modified_gmt":"2023-06-19T00:04:19","slug":"drugs-dollars-prostitution-the-political-economy-of-economists","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/2023\/06\/18\/drugs-dollars-prostitution-the-political-economy-of-economists\/","title":{"rendered":"Drugs, Dollars & Prostitution: The Political Economy of\u00a0Economists"},"content":{"rendered":"

e-Con e-News<\/a><\/em><\/span><\/h2>\n\n\n
\"\"\/<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

\u2018Before you study the economics, study the economists!<\/em>\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n

e-Con e-News June 2023 Part 3<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

*<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The economist\u2019s role became to \u2018explore & explain\u2019,<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

not to \u2018uphold or condemn\u2019<\/em>\u2013 SBD de Silva,\u00a0The Political Economy of Underdevelopment<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

*<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2018We could export heroin<\/strong> and prostitutes\u2019<\/strong>, wisecracked SBD de Silva, \u2018to obtain foreign exchange. If it\u2019s a dearth of foreign exchange that is the problem.\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n

     Could such chambered commerce achieve much-touted \u2018development\u2019 goals?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

     SB was reacting to the media\u2019s perennial persistence, that it is Dollars we desperately need most of all: Blah-blah-blah<\/em> bleats the humdrum for FDI \u2013 foreign direct investment \u2013 to resolve Balance of Payments, Deficits, Debts. Blah-blah-blah<\/em>\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n

     \u2018Dollars for what?\u2019 SB would ask, \u2018To import more cars? For joyrides? Investment in what? In highways for joyrides? What about roads & highways to connect rural supplier & factory & distributor & research institute?\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n

     SB made the transition on 15 June 2018. It is now 5 years. He was well aware we were speeding to this dead end. Long before we got here. Now the oligarchy wishes to extend the dead end, and even carpet it \u2013 with more Wall Street \u2018infrastructure\u2019 loans via the IMF. The import-export colonial plantation system<\/strong>, long dead, still rules. We are dead end too. Yet SB\u2019s words still haunt and stir.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

     SB was not responding to the still-continuing aragala ululation that it is dollars that we lack, that we need more loans, preferably from the US Treasury\u2019s IMF. SB has long turned into the corporeal dust that mingles twixt the monoxides that blow through Kalubovila.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

     Curiously, the private \u2018fund managers\u2019 who clogged the flow of Dollars last year, now tell us that the remittances of workers have increased. And yet, all we hear are prophecies of doom. Ominously, the (UNP-SJB) dispensers of the IMF\u2019s explosive elixirs, keep repeating they are going to \u2018look after\u2019 the \u2018poor\u2019. And we know well what this means\u2026 So, there it is. \u2018The poor will always be with us.\u2019 Amen!<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

     Rather than groan and grind teeth, what exactly do we need do of what needs to be done? This ee<\/em><\/strong> therefore points to the Communist Party of Sri Lanka<\/strong>\u2019s Economic Strategy being rolled out on 03 July:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2018In 1957, the Provident Fund was given purely due<\/p>\n\n\n\n

to a 3-month struggle conducted by the Communist Party.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Today the EPF has become the biggest fund in the whole of South Asia.\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2013 see ee Focus<\/em><\/strong>, The Communist Party\u2019s Economic Strategy: DEW Gunasekara<\/p>\n\n\n\n

*<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2022 Not knowing the difference between the sex trade<\/strong> and modern industrial production<\/strong> is not just a perpetual pestilence afflicting the Sri Lankan media and intellectuals. SB, in the introduction to his classic, points to the \u2018eminent\u2019 English economist, Professor, \u2018Baron\u2019, Lionel Robbins, who in invoking \u2018\u2018the economics of hired love<\/strong>\u2019\u2026 blurred the social & moral differences<\/strong> between different types of productive activity<\/strong>, as for example, a brothel and a manufacturing enterprise\u2019 (see ee Focus<\/em><\/strong>).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

     Robbins indeed profited, at least indirectly, from retail prostitution. SB recalled that the \u2018Baron\u2019 published an English state survey on the matter, whose title, Sitting on a Fortune<\/em>, Robbins purchased after he interviewed the first \u2018subject\u2019 he ran into on a street corner. She told him, she had been working as a typist clerk for many years before she realized, \u2018I was sitting on a fortune\u2019.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

     Robbins\u2019 hindsight haunts us more, for he was chair of the Economics Department at the London School of<\/strong> Economics<\/strong> (where SB acquired his PhD, whose thesis he soon recanted as fundamentally flawed!). Robbins\u2019 Malthusian reduction of economics to \u2018scarcity\u2019 is reinforced in Sri Lanka\u2019s high school curricula<\/strong> \u2013 O-Level & A-Level. In 1931, Robbins hired Austrian economist Friedrich von Hayek<\/strong>. Hayek\u2019s utopian ideas of laissez fair<\/strong>e and free trade<\/strong> are now pimped in Sri Lanka by all the empire\u2019s thinktanks, economists and other hitmen. Apparently \u2018Britannia rule[d] the waves,\u2019 but permitted a \u2018free and open\u2019 Indian Ocean. 1796. 1815. 1818. 1848. 1878, 1915. 1948. 1971. 1980. 1983. 1987. All had no bloody \u2018state\u2019 behind its conspiracies and bloodlust\u2026. or so the media proclaims. The colonialist Hayek \u2013 no doubt aching for a recently dismantled Austro-Hungarian empire \u2013 clearly had no need to state the obvious about the bellicose state of Europe\u2019s states.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

     Underdevelopment, through its control of the \u2018commanding heights\u2019 of the economy, of technology and markets, had acquired an \u2018automaticity\u2019<\/strong> (SB\u2019s lovely word) in our world, that does not always require direct military occupation (unless you\u2019re an upstartish Korea, Japan, Taiwan & Germany!), though there would be, and are, sporadic annihilations\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n

     This ee<\/em><\/strong> reproduces some of the recent, though scant, recall about the legacy of SBD de Silva by other Sri Lankan scholars. This weekly ee<\/em><\/strong> itself was first prompted in 2018 due to our dedication to SB\u2019s insights, which locate and examine Sri Lanka midst the colonial deindustrialization of much of the world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

     Sri Lanka\u2019s role as a drug entrepot (linked very much to the US wars on Afghanistan & Southeast Asia), and seller of unprotected workers abroad, has been accelerated since 1977. Yet deindustrialization certainly didn\u2019t just begin in 1977. A proper political, economic and military plan and strategy for modern industrialization, like in the USSR or China, would never be willingly allowed. This ee<\/em><\/strong> records some of SB\u2019s contributions to disassembling this state of Sri Lanka\u2019s underdevelopment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

*<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Before the [Dominion Status] Bill was introduced in the Imperial Parliament,<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

it was necessary that Ceylon should sign <\/em>certain agreements<\/em><\/strong> with London.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2013 see ee Focus<\/em><\/strong>, Independence, the First Cabinet<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Most accounts of the \u2018independence\u2019 London afforded (or \u2018granted\u2019) us, fail to reveal in clear language what these \u2018certain agreements\u2019 actually amounted to. The \u2018certain agreements\u2019 that ensured the continuation of the underdevelopment of a non-settler colonial state. Can the supernumerary English classes and departments (facilitated by the US World Bank & Brutish Council) tell us what the English of \u2018Dominion Status\u2019 and \u2018Fully Responsible Government\u2019 has really meant; tell us in condescending mathematics, beyond Oxford\u2019s limited dictionaries?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

     In his classic (or should we mimic, \u2018Epic, dude!<\/em>\u2019), SB recalls how England\u2019s agency houses were allowed to flush capital from Sri Lanka even after 1948, even as they continued to exercise economic control over us.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

*<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2022 SBD de Silva had rejected the rushed attempt by Oxford University to publish his PhD thesis. In the Introduction to his book, eventually published (by Cambridge), he explains why he rejected his own PhD thesis (see ee Focus<\/em><\/strong>). ee<\/em><\/strong> mentions Oxford and Cambridge not to call down Anglo accolades on SB\u2019s head. He was always quick to point out that Oxford and Cambridge had little to do with England\u2019s industrial revolution. SB instead pointed to the mechanics\u2019 institutes, etc.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As is said about SB: he saw it was better to know than to be known<\/em>. And he wrote in order to express his thoughts best. For himself first. And then to ask another, if they too saw what he saw. And what he had seen was an import-export plantation economy, monopolized by merchants and moneylenders, that was underdeveloping the country. And this is what ee<\/em><\/strong> now sees too.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

*<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2022 In the end, SB saw that without an organized movement<\/strong>, no plan would be allowed or enforced that aims to invest and accumulate capital through modern industrial production. Firstly, most of our intellectuals, Left, Right and Neutered, have no idea what machine capitalism<\/em> means. See how the pitiful media praises every other trader, who makes nothing, as an \u2018entrepreneur\u2019. Our scholars have even less idea about what machine socialism <\/em>means. Our imported rock&rollers \u2018rage against the machine\u2019 \u2013 Luddite-like \u2013 even as they use the latest technology to broadcast their nihilistic & anarchistic nostrums.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

     No \u2018independent researcher\u2019 (Independent of what, we are tempted to ask? Independent like a Wall-Street addicted Central Bank?) has archived the experience and indispensability of socialist industrial strategies, both the splendid advances and bitter lessons. Nor will they be funded to do so. The preclusion of the role of Marx & Engels, let alone of the 20th<\/sup> century\u2019s Lenin, Stalin & Mao in industrial development, have turned a hole in the head into a modern fashion statement in the Anglomanic hemispheres.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

     (When unable to avoid Marx, they turn him into an atheistic romantic anarchist, not as the incisive observer of machine capitalism, the promethean who sought to harness industrialization to serve human need).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

     Having bade \u2018goodbye to the working class\u2019, we are sold the latest of pre-used liberal panaceas, which may ultimately form the epitaph for a middle-class aragalaya:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Everything is allowed<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nothing is possible<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n
Drugs, Dollars & Prostitution: The Political Economy of Economists<\/a><\/blockquote>