May Day and the real anthima satana
It’s May Day once again and as usual there is an excuse for political
parties who know the right labour words but have the wrong (right)
labour policies to have a party, a show of force and maybe even make
workers feel that they have been counted in. This, sadly, is as true of
the supposedly radical/left parties as those that are hardly
worker-friendly.
Sometime in 1988, just after the United Socialist Alliance (USA) came
off a distant second best in the first set of Provincial Council
elections (the SLFP decided to boycott), the Lanka Guardian (or was it
the Christian Worker?) carried an article titled ‘After the election
debacle which way for the Left?’ A pro-JVP writer came with a cutting
reply to the query: ‘Right!’ It’s been more than two decades since this
happened and it looks like the ‘Left’ has taken the advice.
The ‘leftists’ have long since abandoned the class project. They’ve
embraced women, the environment, sustainable development, climate
change, human rights and that very ‘milkable’ cow called conflict
resolution, especially its ethnic-breed. All less-class than the working
class.
Don’t take my word for it but try finding a single party that has any
cogent analysis of global capitalism, its various articulations, its
logic, its fault-lines and what it does to people, communities, nations
and the environment. The Socialist Equality Party would come close, but
they would stutter when it comes to the issues pertaining to modernity
and the paradigms of development therein, the things that have been
taken in the ‘going-without-saying’ way of living and letting live.
The problem is one of not being able to grasp that the objectors to
the status quo were for decades distracted by a poor, incomplete, lazy
and reductionist understanding of the term ‘Left’ and one which was
extremely unappreciative of nuance and temporality. Treating labour and
labour politics as some kind of Marxist preserve and happy to limit
engagement to sloganeering and the limited universe of action that
sloganeering prompts, the organized left by default ended up willingly
or unwillingly, knowingly or unknowingly hitching their hopes to the
Soviet Ship. When it sank, so did the Left.
Where is the Left now? The Communist Party is with a Government that
certain Leftist commentators like to call ‘populist’ or ‘a creature of
Sinhala Buddhist nationalism’. The same goes for the LSSP. If there were
no ‘National Lists’ and if Mahinda Rajapaksa was not the generous kind,
the LSSP would not have any presence in this Parliament.
The fall of the Berlin Wall turned thousands of leftists into
political refugees. Unlike other refugees they found a
‘promised/promising land’: I/NGOs. Their ‘activistic’ urges and their
need to keep their leftist badge meant that they had a comparative
advantage. I/NGOs have been described as the New Zamindars. The leftist
PDPs (Politically Displaced People) suddenly realized they could keep
their leftist pretensions and still make bucks. They had a ball, playing
according to the tune of their new masters, i.e. individuals and
organizations whose agenda could hardly be called ‘leftist’.
What went wrong? I think the left got their knickers twisted in the
terminology. They never paused to ask why they were allowed to engage in
saber-rattling about capitalism but were toilet-trained not to piss on
‘modernity’, ‘modernism’, ‘progress’ or ‘science’. None of these terms
are ideology-free or innocent. They all flow from a certain
philosophical paradigm that privileges certain kinds of historical
trajectories. This is why Marx saluted the colonial enterprise and saw
it as ‘progressive’.
Marxism tied us to the myth of progress and we got hooked on to the
allure of modernism. We’ve ravaged the earth and consumed to the point
of extinction, and are still caught in the capitalist-socialism debate
and are hardly ready to consider the fact that there can be non-Marxist
forms of socialism and that the left-right dichotomy is patently false.
Today is May Day. Is the worker living in a paradise a la
‘dictatorship of the proletariat’? No. Things are not rosy, but things
certainly are better than they were half a century ago. Yes, Marxists
have played a role. Non-Marxist trade unionists too have done their bit.
And, strangely enough, so have the so-called ‘right wing’. It was in the
interest of capitalism’s survival that the working class in the USA got
the ‘New Deal’ after all.
There still is exploitation, extraction of surplus value absence
and/or denial of rights, laws and a manifest reluctance to apply them,
and regulations that are ignored. President Mahinda Rajapaksa when he
was Labour Minister commissioned a Workers’ Charter. That was scuttled
by the then President and her capitalist friends. Chandrika Kumaratunga
pooh-poohed labour struggles and demands saying that she was against
‘freedom of the wild ass’, even as she was bending over backwards to
grant wild-ass-freedom to her corporate friends.
There’s logic in struggling, because the terms of exploitation can
and should be re-negotiated. But the workers of the world can relax;
they’ve got nothing to lose than the chains that the Marxists and
so-called Leftists put on your minds. They have no place for ‘class’ any
more. And certainly not the working class.
The anthima satana (the last battle) that the Left spoke about then
is discarding Marxist baggage along with neo-liberal capitalism and all
the rubbish arguments pertaining to progress. That’s something to think
about this May Day.
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