PEOPLE STRIKE IT DOWN

Yesterday’s palpably – colossally – failed strike action goes to indicate what results when a worker strike purportedly is in fact an attempt to stir up the lumpen proletariat. While the core working class by and large desisted from joining the strike action as if it was the plague itself, it was in the lumpen sectors that the strike’s leadership tried to whip up into some kind of anti-regime hysteria.

‘Didn’t work’ is probably the understatement of the year, regarding that valiant try. That the JVP tried to whip up the lumpen sub-sector of its party cadre was obvious from the day K. D. Lal Kantha the strike’s godfather said ‘Yes we killed – ow, api maruwa, ow api kapuwa – deshapremi viyaparayta viruddhava dun otthu walata wiruddawa api kepuwa ketuwa, ow.’

(‘Yes, we cut, we murdered, we did this to those who ratted on the patriotic movement, … so what?’).

The core labour, agrarian-worker, health-worker and railway worker class was embarrassed, if not revolted. The rest about the ‘giant’ May 2013 strike is as they say, history -- forgettable history, except when a political scientist might want to cite a textbook case of a lumpen class agitation that failed to excite either the working classes or the masses.

The problem with the JVP and the rest of the political leadership that spearheaded the strike, was the fact that these people have lost all real organic connectivity with the working classes. This may sound either exaggerated or unfair, but as far as assessments go, it is accurate for the simple reason that the JVP leadership which was never able to read the mass mind, has almost totally lost its base to the ruling UPFA.

But that is not too bad, compared to the fact that the JVP is so out of sync with the collective national psyche - or to put it in plainer terms, the national mood. Many people in the working classes may still be struggling, speaking in purely economic terms, but when didn’t they during our long night of discontent past-independence, particularly during the long years of conflict?

The difference now however is that ordinary folk may strain to make ends meet, but yet they see the light at the end of the tunnel. They are not so stupid as to be impervious to the fact that after decades, or almost a three quarter of a century that is -- sans hyperbole -- they finally seem to have a chance in life.

They see a regime that has delivered on many fronts, the war being the big one.

The people are too fed up with empty rhetoric and years of yo-yo politicking to deny themselves this opportunity. That is the long and the short of it, to put it across in the plainest terms that even the JVP leadership might perchance understand.

This may sound rocket science to the Marxists after a fashion in the JVP, that practice a brand of Marxism that might make Karl Marx himself turn in his grave -- but it is common and garden variety wisdom for the working classes who they would like to represent. They see salvation, and then they see the JVP and the comic UNP between themselves and that hope that beckons, and then they want to run a mile from anything that looks or sounds like a work stoppage.

The JVP has in essence, given an object lesson on exactly how a worker strike ought not to be organized. First the party frightened the hell out of the people, so to say, by firing a warning shot about the JVP’s ability to kill! ‘Api meruwa, api kepuwa’ said Lal Kantha sounding a clarion call to strike!

What was he thinking? That the people see the world through crimson coloured glasses? Next, they made it clear that the strike was a political act, what with the jarring hype and the reasoning that it is about the masses and not the workers, citing the electricity tariff hike. The masses are not asses. The least that can be said in conclusion is that Lal Kantha learnt this this week, before anybody could quite say the word jackass out loud.