The need for more Left voices

By Uditha Devapriya

I agree with Dayan Jayatilleka (“’Sinhala Buddhist nationalism vs. liberal civil society’ debate on the left”) that the Sri Lankan leftwing intelligentsia is making a very thin contribution to debates over the crisis in the country. This is in stark contrast not merely to the 1980s, which he takes up as his point of reference and comparison, but also as recent as 10 years ago. The immediate postwar period unleashed a flurry of commentaries and analysis from the Left. We no longer see those kinds of interventions now. Except for a handful of commentators, in fact, there’s hardly any written contribution from the Left, though the few who are writing – Devaka Gunawardena and Ahilan Kadirgamar in particular – are prolific not just in how often they are writing but also what they are writing about.

Compared with the great debates that animated the Left in Russia, China, Latin and Central America, and France in May 1968, Sri Lanka has turned into an intellectual desert. This is utterly worrying and concerning, because in the absence of such debates and interventions there can be no real strategic focus for the Left. There is a new generation of bilingual and bicultural radical writers, including Ramindu Perera and Dhanuka Bandara, who are far, far removed from Colombo’s insular, cosmopolitan circles. They are more aware of the situation on the ground and are deeply aware of what’s unfolding around them. They do write to the press, local and sometimes international, but not as frequently as one would expect them to. In the 1980s there was only one Qadri Ismail, but all these writers have the potential of being his successor today. So why the deafening silence?

One can posit several reasons, though they are all really excuses, which simply will not do. One can contend that the Old Left and the earlier avatars of the New Left did not focus on producing intellectual successors. This in turn is linked to another issue, an omission on the part of the Old Left: the fact that, as Regi Siriwardena notes in Working Underground, they did not leave behind “a single Marxist work of enduring value.

” To this it can legitimately be argued that the Old Left were “immersed in day-to-day political activity”, but as Siriwardena again notes, that is hardly a good excuse. Three LSSPers did produce original work: Colvin R. de Silva (Ceylon Under the British Occupation), Leslie Goonewardena (a summary of Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution), and N. M. Perera (“The Case for Free Education”). Two of them – Colvin and N. M. – in fact wrote or redrafted from prison.

But these were few and far in-between. In that sense, not until the Lanka Guardian came into being in the late 1970s did the intellectual voices of the Left emerge properly. Until then the Left limited itself mostly to party publications, in itself not a bad thing, except that this limited the Left to petty polemics. By the time Lanka Guardian wrapped up several other Left journals had come into being, but none contained the kind of diversity of opinion the Guardian enjoyed. From then on there has been, for the lack of a better way of putting it, an intellectual descent: a phenomenon not limited to the realm of political commentary, but very much part and parcel of it. Today, therefore, one hardly comes across a political piece of enduring value. This failure is, in many ways, a legacy of the Old Left.

This too, in itself, is not a valid excuse. The fact of the matter is that there are several outlets for the voices on the Left or progressive centre today, from newspapers to journals to blogs, from the most exclusive to the most accessible platforms. That is elementary knowledge. Moreover, the crisis has turned Sri Lanka into a hotbed of political analysis. And yet, it’s the liberal intelligentsia, from Colombo’s NGO-sphere, that dominates the headlines, here and abroad. Left commentators like Ahilan and Devaka have made indelible contributions, and they have been far more prolific than most. But I can’t see other commentators as prolific as they. Political analysis should never be the preserve of a specific ideological group. The Sri Lankan Left’s biggest weakness has, in that sense, been its inability to reconcile its immense activist appeal with its incredibly diverse intellectual potential.

This is particularly worrying given the phase Sri Lanka is entering. The buzzword or rather buzz-tag today is TINA: there is no alternative. There is a consensus within the Opposition, and of course the government, that austerity is the way forward. Influential think-tanks and Western economists based in those think-tanks are peddling these narratives.

There has been a pushback from Left academic-activists, but as I mentioned in my piece on the Marga Institute seminar weeks ago, that pushback has been met with hostility, ironically by the same people who rally against government corruption. The latter in all likelihood will not call out on private sector corruption, which is to be blamed for the crisis as well. Against such a backdrop, it is incumbent on Left voices, particularly from the current generation, to stand in solidarity with those opposing the country’s austerity overdrive.

The New Left has a very important task to fulfil here. After a long time, it is refreshing to see JVP-NPP MPs talk about issues like production, industrialisation, and the need to resolve our deficits in favour of domestic economic activity. When the establishment consensus is that the island’s economy will grow only if more and more imports swamp the domestic market, one urgently requires a counter narrative, because more and more imports will simply not be sustainable in the longer term.

That counter narrative should come from the Left, especially the New Left, which alone has the potential to rally young voters around such issues. In that regard, why can’t the JVP-NPP do what the CPSL is doing, and invite economists like Howard Nicholas to their forums? Such activities can and will provide an intellectual ballast to their work: an imperative that has become more urgent than ever, given that we are entering the most decisive phase in Sri Lanka’s modern political-economic history.

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