At 80, CPSL launches economic alternative, but United Front is unclear

Dr. Dayan Jayatilleka

The Communist Party of Sri Lanka can be proud of itself. A relatively small party, it’s 80th anniversary event was a big splash or as we might observe retrospectively, a big bang. It produced a lively, well-attended event, with significant foreign Communist representation. The CPSL showed itself to be unlike its older sibling on the left, the LSSP.

Samasamajism remains politically alive only in the elderly personality of Vasudeva Nanayakkara, who leads the Democratic Left Front. It has been unable to reproduce itself, but the Communist Party with its new, middle-aged leadership of Dr. Weerasinghe a medical specialist, shows that the CP has made the generational shift. For an old, modestly-sized party, the CPSL’s Maharagama event demonstrated dynamism, enthusiasm, and in a word, life.

DR. WICKS: FOUNDING FATHER

Clearly and rightfully the party had given Dr SA Wickramasinghe, rather than the more determinedly revisionist Pieter Keuneman, the pride of place. ‘Doctor’ is accurately named the founding father– and therefore the more ‘organic’ ‘Southern’ Communist tradition is the wellspring of inspiration. In long retrospect, the figure of Dr SA Wickramasinghe emerges as the greatest of the founding fathers of the Lankan Left.

The secret of the CPSL’s spiritedness was disclosed by Dew Gunasekara’s opening remark that theirs was “not just a political party but a political Movement”. That Movement, as demonstrated by the grainy, black and white footage in the documentary clips that were superbly used at the 80th anniversary, was an international movement the history of which included the Red Army’s defeat of Nazi fascism and the Vietnamese communists expulsion of the mighty US military.

Delegates from the Communist Party of China, India’s two main Communist parties the CPI-M and CPI, the Communist Party of Nepal-UML and the Communist Party of Bangladesh attended the 80th anniversary event of the CPSL, testimony to the actuality of that international movement.

The excellent speech by the CPI-M delegate mentioned comrade N. Sanmugathasan, commended the Aragalaya (which was hopefully not lost on Wimal Weerawansa seated in the audience) and urged the devolution of power as solution to the Tamil National Question.

It is the pride in that history which forms a part of world history and remains concretized in the mighty achievements of China and Vietnam, that has given the CPSL its elan vital and kept it alive while the LSSP has withered even beyond mummification.

IDIRIMAGA-2

The CPSL had a text it was rightly proud of, that had stood the test of time. That text was “Idirimaga” — The Way Forward—whose prime author and articulator was Dr SA Wickramasinghe. As DEW disclosed in his speech, its co-author was GVS de Silva, economist and Communist (before he joined Philip Gunawardena after 1956) with a razor-sharp mind. ‘GVS’ was the most brilliant Marxist mind of his generation.

The ideas in ‘Idirimaga’ influenced both the UNP’s accelerated Mahaweli project and Rohana Wijeweera’s five lectures.

Nowhere in its history did Samasamajism (with its ‘golden brains’) produce anything as memorable and durable as ‘Idirimaga’. Among other things, it was, as Dew said, the first Sri Lankan text to set out a strategy of sustainable development.

On its 80th birthday, the CPSL returned to ‘Idirimaga’ and produced its sequel: “Idirimagen Idiriyata” (‘Forward from The Way Forward’), a 250-page alternative economic platform and program for the Sri Lankan crisis, produced by a team of 25, which contains 11 PhD-holders, five of whom are full professors. The team’s intellectual hard-drive is the Asia Progress Forum, a non-party think-tank of political economists. Their product makes much more sense than the ex-left ‘New Conservatism’ in economics that buys into the ‘There Is No Alternative’ but Ranil’ propaganda. It also makes more sense than Dr Harsha de Silva’s Economic Blueprint.

At the 80th anniversary event, the alternative economic platform – let’s hope posterity can call it ‘Idirimaga 2’—was accompanied by a political formula. The party’s Gen-Sec Dr Weerasinghe and its fiery parliamentary orator Weerasumana Weerasingha stressed the need for a broad united front. They were taking their cue from party chairman Dew Gunasekara who made the link between (1) the broad national united front (of a four-class bloc) slogan presented by Dr SA Wickramasinghe at the CP’s fourth Congress in Matara in 1950, and (2) the economic program for national regeneration contained in the ‘Idirimaga’ (The Way Forward) in 1955.

UNCLEAR UNITED FRONT

However, that’s where the real problems come in. Where is the united front, what are its constituent components, what is its main objective?

If the main objective is to build an anti-neoliberal bloc around a viable economic alternative program, a credible progressive answer to the crisis, then there has to be a roundtable which brings together three progressive-reformist alternatives already on the table, namely those of the CPSL, the Freedom People’s Congress (FPC) and the NPP-JVP. When will that discussion commence and who will convene it?

If on the other hand, the main idea is a united democratic front, then there should be a conclave of the broadest sort, involving all Opposition parties or more correctly all parties who are willing to fight for the holding of elections next year, starting with the local government elections and provincial council elections right now.

If the united front is to be of the Left, or have Left unity as its core, then it is a pointless exercise without the JVP-NPP and the FSP.

If it is to be an anti-Ranil united front, then all Opposition parties in and out of parliament should be invited. The same goes if the goal is to be an anti-autocracy, anti-austerity bloc.

Those who advocate a united front, which is indeed the need of the hour, must be realists above all. Even if all the shards of the 2019-2020 SLPP-led coalition form a united front, it will be similar to the United Left Front (ULF) of 1977 which also drew in PDP, led by the SLFP progressive dissidents TB Subasinghe, Nanda Ellawela, Tennyson Edirisuriya, and AM Jinadasa.

The United Left Front was wiped out at the 1977 general election because the voters were unconvinced that they had paid adequately for the sin of not leaving the United Front coalition government of Sirimavo Bandaranaike when there was great economic privation from 1973. The same thing could happen to any combination of the 2019-2020 coalition.

If the CPSL’s new ‘Idirimaga’ is to have any chance of implementation it must influence mainstream policy, which means it must be inserted into a coalition that has a chance of governing. Plainly put, any united front worth the effort must be capable of being elected, ideally to office and if not, at least to the Opposition as a fraction that can have an impact.

Any serious attempt at building a united front must firmly grasp two principles enunciated by the greatest political theorist of the Marxist tradition, the Italian Communist leader Antonio Gramsci:

“The proletariat can become the leading and dominant class to the extent that it succeeds in creating a system of alliances which allows it to mobilize the majority of the population…” (Gramsci, Some Aspects of the Southern Question’, SPW II)

“It is necessary to draw attention violently to the present as it is, if one wants to transform it”. (Gramsci, Prison Notebooks)

What is the answer that confronts us when one puts these two propositions together and applies it to Sri Lanka today? What in the current situation is the system of alliances that can bring together a majority of the population? Above all, the matter has to be considered concretely.

There are only two ‘centers’ which in alliance with each other or with the center-left, can unite the majority. They are, in no particular order, the centrist-populist SJB or the left-populist JVP-NPP.

One can rule out any united front which contains these two rivals, though it is problematic how anyone can secure an election next year from the autocrat Wickremesinghe without a broad bloc, perhaps an action bloc rather than a political-programmatic one, that contains both the SJB and the JVP.

Let us set that consideration aside for the rest of this year. This leaves the obvious conclusion that the parties of the left and center-left cannot merely unite with each other because their post-election presence in parliament is likely to be marginal. They have to enter a united front either with the SJB or the JVP-NPP.

I have no intention of tilting the outcome of the discussion in one way or another, except to warn that the ultra-nationalists in Uttara Lanka will desperately play the chauvinist-xenophobic card for electoral purposes and discredit the Left.

However, I do wish to point out that there are precedents in the history of the CPSL for an alliance with either the centrist SJB or the left-populist NPP-JVP:

The Ceylon Communist Party entered the Ceylon National Congress and played an influential role in 1943-1947, especially 1943-44. This model would clearly support a united front with the SJB.

The Ceylon Communist Party was a constituent member of the United Left Front of 1963-64. This model would clearly support a united front with the JVP-NPP and/or the FSP.

In 1947, at the (negatively) historic discussion at Sri Nissanka’s residence ‘Yamuna’, the Left had a chance of uniting with the progressive centrists such as SWRD Bandaranaike, but sectarianism as symbolized by Dr Colvin R de Silva’s remark that such unity would be a “three-headed donkey” wrecked that chance. Fifteen years later the LSSP would also break the United Left Front (and swing on “Sirima’s saree pota” as more radical leftists denounced it).

Those parties gathered at the 80th anniversary of the CPSL constituted the progressive or center-left camp. The progressives must partner either the Center (SJB) or the Left (JVP). There is no viable third option. After decades, the Old Left has the intellectual capital to invest in any partnership: the CPSL-Asia Progress Forum’s alternative economic program, ‘Idirimagen Idiriyata’.