By Dayan Jayatilleka –

Dr. Dayan Jayatilleka

Who says the economic crisis cannot be dented? The prerequisite is that the austerity approaches of both the militarist-ultranationalist GR regime and the ‘IMF plus debt consortium’ option of the neoliberals, are rejected. An out-of-the box, but hardly unique approach is needed.

The present economic epidemic can be dented by a ‘double-vaccination’ alternative policy:

(A) Cut the ‘bloat’ of the Defence budget. There is hypertrophy, if not metastasis, of defence spending. Bring defence expenditure to the level of sufficiency in peacetime. Reassess and right-size it.

(B) Increase appropriately the direct taxes (not transferrable to the consumer) on the biggest corporates and wealthiest citizens. If anyone thinks that’s my residual radicalism rising, they’ve not read US President Joe Biden and more especially, US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen.

Agricide & Peasanticide

Sri Lanka’s agrarian crisis was not caused by the Covid-19 pandemic. It was the result of deliberate presidential policy which could have been abandoned at any point, but has not.

Unlike India, Sri Lanka after Independence never had a rebellious peasant movement, though it has a long history of peasant associations. The sole exception was when a peasants struggle was led (in Anuradhapura, I think) by the All-Lanka Peasants Congress (‘Samastha Lanka Govi Sammelanaya’) led by Ariyawansa Gunasekara of the Communist Party.

That struggle ended in a very Ceylonese way. The highly literate, brilliantly articulate (and witty) young cadre sent fresh from the university by the Communist Party to ideologically guide the struggle, Tissa Wijeratne, and the daughter of the rapacious large landowner the peasants were rebelling against, fell in love and married– and that was that.

All that’s ended, gone with the wind, thanks to President Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s incredible agrarian policy of a shock ban, nationwide, on chemical fertilizer, weedicide and pesticide.

His stand on this, flies in the face of scientific evidence as well as of political good sense.

The smartest and toughest-minded of rulers, Lenin, reversed his agrarian policy twice. The first-time round was when, just before the Revolution, the Bolshevik party abandoned its peasant program of collectivization and literally stole the far more moderate peasant program, sensitive to the needs of the individual peasants, of its political rival the Socialist-Revolutionaries (the ‘SRs’).

Dr. Gamani Corea

The second time is better known. When the tight economic policy of War Communism which included forced requisitioning of grain by the Red Army to feed the citizens of the cities, exploded in the Kronstadt rebellion (which was suppressed by Trotsky), Lenin swiftly adopted the New Economic Policy (NEP) which liberalized the economy and enabled peasant prosperity.

Vietnam’s Ho Chi Minh, a strong and sagacious leader also reversed the harsh agrarian policy of his comrade Truong Chinh, and won back the peasantry. Then of course there is Deng Xiaoping, who kicked-off China’s economic miracle by liberalizing the rural economy and facilitating prosperity in the countryside.

The lesson is that the toughest leaders who were also the smartest, never went against the peasantry and when they found they had done so, unhesitatingly reversed course and beat a retreat.

The fact that Sri Lanka’s rulers think they now better, and don’t have to do likewise, tells us, the peasants and the world, a great deal about them. What makes them think they are immune to the political and socioeconomic fate that even Lenin wished to avoid, sure beats me.

The answer may lie in a specialized field of medical knowledge in which I have neither training nor experience and therefore will not venture into.

Gamani Corea-Godfrey Gunatilleke-Lal Jayawardena

It is not only the discourse of the regime’s policy elite in all domains that are embarrassingly outdated in translation into any universal language. The anti-regime neoliberals, writing in English, are no less embarrassing by international standards.

Dr Godfrey Gunatilleke

The latest issue of The New Yorker (October 8^th 2021) carries in the Annals of Inquiry column, essay entitled ‘Is it time for a New Economics Curriculum?’ and introduces “‘The Economy’ a new textbook, is designed for a post-neoliberal age”.

Sri Lanka’s neoliberals, most conspicuously but not only the economists, just do not know that it is a “post-neoliberal age”. Their writings and pronouncements show that they still live in a time-warp of a unipolar post-Cold War world of free-market neoliberal globalism. For them the Great Recession of 2008 never happened and even if it did, it may no difference to their theoretical and policy constructs.

CG Weeramantry

During the Great Recession of 2008, I was the elected Chairman of the ILO in Geneva, and had the privilege of working with ILO Director-General Juan Somavia, in launching the Decent Work agenda globally, starting with an event in Portugal hosted by the Socialist Prime Minister. As Chilean ambassador/Permanent Representative to the UN in New York, Somavia had organized the 1995 UN Social Summit in Copenhagen which already intellectually upended the neoliberal-globalist ideological construct that most Sri Lankan economists continue to adhere to and advocate.

In 2008 we worked closely with UN General Assembly President Miguel D’Escoto, former foreign minister of Sandinista Nicaragua, who came over to Geneva. He had appointed a Commission to report on globalization and the crisis, chaired by Nobel prize winner Joe Stiglitz, former chief economist of the World Bank.

Geneva was a town in which Dr Gamini Corea, former Secretary-General of UNCTAD and later, head of the South Center was remembered with great respect. Whether it was in my work as ILO Chairman, or a Vice-President of a UN Human Rights Council or Ambassador to the Conference on Disarmament, a cluster of Sri Lankan names kept cropping up: Gamani Corea, Godfrey Gunatilleke, CG Weeramantry and Lal Jayawardena.

Lal Jayawardena

Miguel D’Escoto, a former Catholic priest of the Maryknoll order (during and after the 1979 revolution even as Foreign Minister, he was “Padre Miguel”), held Fr. Tissa Balasuriya in high esteem. Prof Emeritus of International Law at Princeton, Richard Falk asked me for Godfrey Gunatilleke’s email address to renew his old acquaintance.

Which is why I am amused at those rightwing economists who mention Gamani Corea without mentioning Godfrey Gunatilleke, which is rather like mentioning Karl Marx and associating his name with someone other than his co-thinker Frederick Engels.

Certainly, in Geneva and Paris (UNESCO), the Sri Lankan economist mentioned with the most respect together with Gamani Corea and Godfrey Gunatilleke, is the late Dr Lal Jayewardena, student of Eric Hobsbawm and Director of the World Institute of Development Economic Research (WIDER) in Finland.

It is also ridiculously illogical for those who detest and revile the Raul Prebisch-Gamini Corea tradition and sanctify Dr. Corea’s antipode in Sri Lanka’s economic policy-making, BR Shenoy, to take it upon themselves to classify one of their free-market/free-trade co-thinkers and academic heroes in the same category as Gamani Corea, while ignoring both Godfrey Gunatilleke and Lal Jayawardena.

Devaluing Premadasa

Contrary to Colombo’s rightwing economists, President Premadasa’s most noteworthy developmental contribution was NOT a deepening or ‘second wave’ of liberalization. Non-sequential fusion of rapid growth with social upliftment and equity was.

Janasaviya, the housing program, redistribution of state lands free to the landless, free schools uniforms, free mid-day meals for schoolchildren, strict conditionalities on labor conditions (air-conditioning, free meals including buns at teatime, etc.) imposed on the 300 garment factories program in exchange for state bank loans, and the 15,000 projects program, provide empirical evidence.