Marxism and nationalism: A never-ending debate (Part II)

By Uditha Devapriya

Immediately after independence, the Sri Lankan Left faced an ideological dilemma for which it had not really been prepared. The government, headed by a comprador bourgeoisie, perhaps the most conservative and right-wing in Asia at the time, stepped in to deprive the estate Tamils of their citizenship. This slowly deprived the Left of its base in the plantations across the Uva and the South, right into the country’s south-western quadrant, limiting it to the cities, the working class. Elsewhere, in peasant strongholds, it made some strides. But the government’s careful, calculated cultivation of nationalist sentiment pre-empted the Left from mobilising them for a radical, truly emancipatory political project.

The government’s actions impacted these groups profoundly, adversely. The conventional reading of what happened next is this: lacking popular support among estate Tamils and the Sinhala middle-classes, the Left eventually pegged itself to the latter, compromising on its earlier, laudably progressive stance on languages and paving the way for a rapprochement with the SLFP. The latter, in the conventional reading, is often dismissed as a chauvinist and majoritarian party, in effect the political base of the Sinhala nationalist right. Anyone who chose the path of cohabitation with them, so the interpretation goes, shared or at least were complicit in the ideology of the nationalist right. Ergo, the Old Left is faulted if not chastised for bedding with the beast, with the harbinger of Sinhala chauvinism.

There is some truth to these allegations, and not all of them can be denied. But the dilemma the Left faced at the time could not have been more acute or complex. On the one hand, it lost the one community on whose behalf it had organised strikes and campaigns against the British and the UNP government. Such actions proved more than anything than the Left’s project did not just transcend ethnic distinctions, but also centred firmly on class issues. On the other hand, the UNP government proved itself capable, for a while at least, of rousing traditionalist elements, Sinhala and to a lesser extent Tamil, against the Left, on the basis of the latter’s supposed hostility to the past and to history.

Here the comprador bourgeoisie found a ready ally in conservative sections of the clergy. By that I mean not just the Christian clergy, including the Catholic and the Protestant. Their opposition to the Left was evident enough: they requested people not to vote for Marxist candidates, given Marxism’s “hostility” to religious values. The Buddhist clergy also sided with this view, and opposed or criticised monks who took to political activism. The latter, at least until after 1956, almost invariably swayed to the Left.

The point I am trying to get to here is simple. By 1956, the Left’s prospects had declined so badly that individual parties, including the LSSP, were already conceding the difficulty of forming a Left government. The 1956 election proved to be epochal here for two reasons. Firstly, it showed that the UNP’s hold over traditionalist elements was not absolute: these elements, disgruntled by the UNP’s policies, could defect to other parties, particularly those promising an alternative to the status quo which was less radical than the Marxist Left. In response the Left had to think of and come up with creative strategies, with which it could defeat the government while distancing itself from the Opposition. Eventually it settled on a policy of oppositional unity: thus, in some electorates it contested against other Opposition candidates, while in others it withdrew in favour of those candidates.

Secondly, the election showed how otherwise progressive ideals, once marginalised, could be reconfigured in pursuit of less than progressive ends. That is not to deny the immense vitality and popularity of the calls for Sinhala Only. Such calls underlay genuine grievances against the political establishment. Yet, instead of incorporating these grievances into an all-encompassing emancipatory project, the Sinhala middle-classes contented themselves on gaining the upper hand for themselves and for their identity. The tragedy here, for which we are still paying the price, is that such campaigns undermined the spirit with which the Left had earlier called for instituting the vernacular at official levels. The latter call was, in every respect, progressive, and it deserved being pursued till the very end. But the hysteria which usually accompanies elections in Sri Lanka eventually drowned it.

What I am critiquing here, essentially, are the political ideals of Sinhala nationalism. This, however, is a contradiction in terms: to have political ideals you must be part of a political project, and contemporary Sinhala nationalism, despite its rhetoric, has never had a properly coordinated political project against imperialism and neoliberalism. In that sense, I suppose, Sinhala nationalism is not hegemonic in the same way Hindutva is hegemonic in India, even if it shares much with the ideology of the RSS. The main problem with or limitation in Sinhala nationalism is that in its pursuit of national liberation, it defines the nation as the preserve of one collective, and overlooks or ignores the heterogenous character of not only the nation, but also that collective.

­The truth is that Sinhala is not monolithic, and nor is Tamil. All claims to the contrary, no matter how enticing they may be, are facile and false.

Throughout the colonial period, the Left proved itself capable of tapping into the immense anti-imperialist potential of nationalist groups, while distancing itself from the comprador right’s alliances with such groups. The dynamics changed after independence, and by 1956 the Left had no choice but to question its former positions and, if possible, revise them. It did this with the hope – plausible as it appeared to be at the time – that the SLFP, and the Bandaranaikes, could be relied on to provide a ballast for a socialist advance in the country. But the Bandaranaikes were, for all intents and purposes, Bonapartists, who could sway to the Left or the Right depending on the situation. S. W. R. D. Bandaranaike did not live long enough to tilt completely to the right: it remains to be seen what he would have done had he survived his assassination. Yet, as his support for Philip Gunawardena’s Paddy Lands Bill showed, he was willing to support the Left in whatever way he could.

But Sinhala nationalism is deeply and utterly chameleonic: it is capable of turning against its allies. In 1975, spurred on by fears that the Left would unionise workers in plantations, the Sirimavo Bandaranaike government moved to expel the LSSP and the Communist Party from its ranks. The Left’s efforts at land reform, important as they were, fell short of what they had originally aimed at, largely because the SLFP’s right-wing sabotaged them. The Left, in all this, had to both adjust to and fight against such forces, and in doing so it paid a heavy price: not just expulsion from international Left collectives, but also rejection by the very milieus it had staked so much for. The great lesson of 1977 in that sense was that Sinhala nationalism, regardless of anti-imperialist potential, will never be a substitute for anti-imperialist politics so long as its purveyors fail to look beyond its cultural dimensions. The nationalist allegation against the Left today – that it is soft on minority issues, that it is not nationalist enough – is but a continuation of these conjunctions and contradictions.

Given all this, how should the Left reorganise itself? I recommend two strategies. First, it should try to weed away what Dayan Jayatilleka, at the Philip Gunawardena Oration in 2015, described as the rootless cosmopolitanism of many of our Left ideologues. There is nothing objectionable in being cosmopolitan: many of the original stalwarts of the Sri Lankan Left, after all, had been part of the aptly named “Cosmopolitan Crew.” But there is a difference, a distinction, between the cosmopolitanism espoused by these figures and the rejection, not of nationalism but of nationhood itself, by Left ideologues today. To quote Jayatilleka’s essay in Gramsci Today, “The Great Gramsci: Imagining an Alt-Left Project”,

“Our left contemporaries learned from much of what [Gramsci] wrote on hegemony and culture but missed one of his most important themes, that of the nation, nation building and state building. He understood that the left had abandoned those tasks and argued that picking up where Machiavelli left off was a task of the left, by which he meant wrestling with the tasks of nation and state building. Indisputably an internationalist, he notably criticized ‘cosmopolitanism’ as a doctrine that hampered the task of nation building.”

Simply put, national liberation is as much about liberation as it is about nationhood. The one cannot be weaned, still less cut off, from the other. Any group that attempts this does so at the risk of marginalising itself and pushing itself down an abyss.

Second, the Left should embark on embracing the ideals of nationhood without affirming, or associating with, the tenets and principles of the nationalist right. What constitutes the nationalist right is obviously a matter for conjecture, if not debate. The finer details need not concern us here. What is important is that the Left build bridges with communities which have been targeted by the nationalist right, and then attempt to convert them. This is not as difficult as it may seem. The strategy is to get these communities to realise that any national liberation project must focus on the nation, and the fundamental cleavage in any nation is not between ethno-religious groups, but between the masses and the elite. To quote a Sri Lankan poet, “the only minority is the bourgeoisie.” That should be the refrain of the Left as well, especially in its engagements with the Sinhala middle-classes.

It remains to be seen whether the Left can or will achieve a rapprochement with these groups. The Left tried once, and for a while it succeeded. Yet for reasons outlined above, it failed to transform that into the basis for a socialist advance in Sri Lanka. To castigate it for such failures would be to cry over spilt milk. But they certainly represent failures of the sort the Left should avoid today. To put it simply here, then, if the Left is to build a front against the economic right, it should be wary of allying itself with the nationalist right, but it should also recognise the anti-imperialist potential of nationalist movements without viewing and dismissing all as right-wing and reactionary. The latter, for me, is as bad an error as the Left’s act of capitulating to such forces. It does no harm at all to account for the specificity of these movements, or to recognise their distinctiveness. That hardly constitutes a regressive act for the Left; it in fact constitutes the only sensible alternative the Left has.

NB: This essay has benefited extensively from conversations with Dr Dayan Jayatilleka, Vinod Moonesinghe, and Shiran Illanperuma, as well as Pasindu Nimsara Thennakoon, who remains fascinated by the possibilities of the Sri Lankan Left.

The writer is an international relations analyst, researcher, and columnist who can be reached at udakdev1@gmail.com.