Features
The Left, Kumar Gunaratnam and executive presidency
by Dr. Dayan Jayatilleka
Sri Lanka needs a strong Left, and it never needed it more than it does today. It is only the Left that can prevent even partially, the burden of the economic crisis and the solutions presented to solve it will not fall preponderantly on the people.
It is only the Left that can prevent even partially the effort by the regime to divert the crisis and public disaffection arising from it, in the direction of ethnoreligious, ethnolinguistic and ethno-regional minorities; in the direction of racism and religious chauvinism.
It is only the Left that can organize the working people into a permanent counterweight against neoliberal policies and austerity packages, whichever government they come from.
It is only the Left that can raise the consciousness of the military rank-and-file if the military is deployed against democracy and the rights of the working people.
FSP
By ‘the Left’, I mean primarily the JVP and the FSP. Though the former is clearly larger, it is the FSP that is closer to the ethos of leftism as understood the world over. Its three main spokespersons, Kumar Gunaratnam, Duminda Nagamuwa and Pubudu Jayagoda are the most authentic left ideologues and spokespersons.
On Faraz Shauketaly’s show recently, Kumar Gunaratnam rolled out a persuasive perspective of the public retrieval of the sovereignty vested in the political class and monopolized –and abused-by it. He disclosed that his party was committed to building a countervailing people’s power through the creation of elected Councils of the working people. This is an imperative struggle and an appealing vision.
That is why I was disappointed when Kumar Gunaratnam got a basic political question wrong. Both the JVP and the FSP oppose the presidential system. However, the FSP’s Kumar Gunaratnam criticizes the JVP for allegedly softening its commitment to its abolition (though one has not seen any documentary evidence to back the charge). That has now become a stated obstacle to left unity.
‘”On the other hand, the JVP has now started to espouse the virtues of the executive presidency. We have heard its top leaders stating that the executive presidency is not that bad. The JVP has been against the executive presidency since its introduction to this country. The present day JVP may change its stance, yet we have no reason to change our policy of detesting the executive presidency. These differences would not let us join with them,” Gunaratnam said.’ (FSP rules out any truck with JVP – The Island)
He seems to forget Rohana Wijeweera’s presidential candidacy in October 1982.
At the personal request of Wijeweera, introduced to my father Mervyn de Silva by Prins Gunasekara, the English-language TV speech by Wijeweera as Presidential candidate was drafted (and typewritten) by Mervyn. By 1988, Mervyn was named (as was Godfrey Gunatilleke) as a traitor in a statement issued by the JVP Politbureau, a label with deadly implications.
Progressive Presidentialism
There are no valid grounds for a leftist or indeed a progressive to stand for the abolition of the executive Presidency.
Lankan liberalism’s argumentation that a Presidential system makes for authoritarianism is demonstrably nonsensical. The latest international survey, while listing the decline of democracy, has several countries denoted “full democracies”. Uruguay is one of them. Uruguay has a presidential system. It had a presidential system when President Juan Bordaberry declared a state of siege and instituted a civilian-military junta in 1972. During that time, Mujica, one of the leaders of the Tupamaros, was imprisoned at the bottom of a disused well.
Uruguay had a presidential system when decades later, the Tupamaro candidate Tabare Vasquez became President and still later when he was succeeded, by popular election, by Mujica himself who had been vice-president! The Tupamaros never tried to abolish the presidential system because they were rational enough to know that the dictatorship they had suffered so terribly under, and the country’s option of a presidential system as such, had nothing to do with each other.
Every ruling Communist party governs in a Presidential system (China, Vietnam, Cuba etc.).
Virtually, ex-guerrilla movement with a Marxist-Leninist ideology has assumed the leadership of their countries, by winning a presidential election. This is widely manifest in Latin America, with the Nepali Maoists as an episodic exception elsewhere.
Every national liberation struggle which has won state power has a presidential system (e.g., South Africa).
Every anti-imperialist or state which counterbalances unipolar hegemony has a presidential system (e.g., Russia).
Every country which had a bourgeois democratic revolution in its history and political culture, has a presidential system (USA, France).
Why do almost all Marxist-Leninist, Communist, revolutionary, leftist, radical and progressive parties and forces, support the presidential system or do not oppose it and call for its abolition? Why do they perform much better and come to the leadership of their countries through elections in presidential systems or remain within or opt for presidential systems? The reasons are simple.
Firstly, the presidential system better reflects the views of the majority of the citizenry, who in most countries, are socioeconomically underprivileged. This gives a better chance for progressives to attain leadership someday.
Secondly, as in Chile under Salvador Allende or the Venezuela of Chavez, it is the legislatures that are more easily manipulated by vested interests of a reactionary nature. Even in the USA today, Joe Biden’s progressive attempts on social spending and voting rights are blocked in Congress (by two rightist Democrats) and by State legislatures controlled by Republicans.