It Requires More Than Narrative

 

Some people say that all we have to do is realize that ordinary people vastly outnumber the elites and their institutions of control.  "We are many. They are few."  Some people say that to do this all we have to do is change the narrative(s) that govern our conscious thinking: "We in the West live under democracies.  Capitalism is the best, most efficient system for the allocation of scarce resources among society.  Work hard and play by the rules and you will be rewarded to the extent that your talents deserve it." becomes "We live as the subjects of rapacious, self-interested, short-sighted, oligarchs.  Capitalism is theft.  Which means that we are being robbed.  Democratic socialism is the best form of economics."

But I say that it requires more than that.  There was a people's revolt in Sri Lanka a few years ago.  Fed up with economic stagnation and decline and brazen elite corruption, the people of that country rose up almost as one and swarmed the institutions of power and the residences of the elites, who themselves fled the country.  But, then, having expended their rage, the people simply went home.  The economy then improved (probably for unrelated reasons) and in the aftermath, a form of authoritarian neoliberalism reasserted itself.

Nevertheless after the economic crisis and the political upheaval that followed in 2022, it seems that the SLPP has lost its political dominance in the South. The strong sentiment among people that Rajapaksas are responsible for the economic woes – which also was a key theme raised during the 2022 protests – seems to have unraveled the foundations of the once powerful political project, resulting in the loss of its hegemony. The SLPP now has been divided into several rival factions. Most of the senior SLPP MPs having a SLFP background seemed to have abandoned Rajapaksas. In the context of an economic crisis, when people are delving more into bread and butter concerns, militant Sinhala nationalism seems to have lost its former appeal, at least for the moment.

Authoritarian neoliberalism

The decline of the Rajapaksa project as a consequence of the economic crisis and the aragalaya protests has created a power vacuum on the political scene. Although the SLPP lost its popular support during the aragalaya times, the party managed to remain in the government relying on its numerical majority in parliament. The new pact the SLPP entered with Ranil Wickremesinghe therefore indicates another important political development since the 2022 uprising.

President Wickremesinghe negotiated with the IMF for an extended fund facility and began discussions with bilateral and commercial creditors seeking a debt restructuring deal. Consequent to the IMF agreement, the Wickremesinghe presidency has been implementing a series of austerity measures comprising a sharp increase of taxes, withdrawal of electricity and fuel subsidies and privatization of state owned enterprises. The essence of the economic reforms that are carried out has been shifting the burden of the economic crisis onto the urban and rural working poor, lower middle class and other intermediate sections. Since 2022, the poorer people have been going through a humanitarian crisis reflected in the massive increase of poverty, indebtedness, food insecurity and outward migration rates.

This restructuring of the economy according to neo-liberal lines is accompanied by an authoritarian turn in politics. President Wickremesinghe started his term by violently dispersing the protestors occupying the entrance near the Presidential Secretariat on July 22, 2022. This was followed by a wave of repression targeting more active elements of the aragalaya protest movement. After July 2022, in all the instances that organizations such as student unions or trade unions have attempted to take to the streets, demonstrations have been dispersed citing that permission for the protests was not obtained. Even now no street protests are allowed in the Colombo city premises. This is an unprecedented situation in a country that has a long standing democratic tradition of public demonstrations, street marches and collective protests.

As reflected in the decision to postpone the local council elections in March 2023, and ongoing attempts to postpone the presidential elections, the Wickremesinghe presidency has shown its unwillingness to be tested before the public in popular elections. These developments reflect the signs of what contemporary scholars have referred to as authoritarian neo-liberalism.

 

This is an interesting essay that I read at CommonDreams this morning:

 

Private property and free markets are essential to prosperity. But when private property becomes concentrated in the hands of a very few people, markets become less free and prosperity becomes less widely shared, super-sized for some and doled out in teaspoonfuls for others.

Public property and social provision are essential counterweights to these baleful effects of private monopolies and ruinous competition.

I am a socialist thus for the same reason I am a democrat. Capitalism is a market economy run by and in the interests of capitalists; socialism is a market economy run by and in the interests of the whole society—wage earners and consumers as well as owners, managers, and investors.

An economy that best serves the interests of everyone is, as I understand the term, “socialist” by definition. It combines both private property and public enterprise to protect and maximize the profits of capital and the wages of labor, with each sharing equitably in the prosperity of all.

Some say that this sort of mixed economy is impossible, that the best we can do is to govern the private economy from the outside by imposing “rules of the road” that companies and other economic actors must obey.

But people don’t obey the rules of the road because they have to. They obey them because they choose to.

Hasn’t every driver driven over the speed limit, run a red light, or veered into the on-coming lane of traffic, when it suited them to do so? It isn’t the law that keeps us from doing so all the time. It is our self-interest.

Similarly, if we are going successfully to release the energies and simultaneously to restrain the excesses of private enterprise, we must have a countervailing system of public enterprises that can compete with the private by providing the goods and services required for a decent standard of living at prices everyone can afford.

Our public enterprises— think the post office, public schools, the transportation network, the national parks, the armed forces, etc., even the farm bill—thus represent a really existing, actually desirable socialism we already have. They provide affordable goods and services we need or want, not in the place of private provision, but as a complement and counterweight to it.

The best way to achieve the kind of democratic socialism we might want, or can at least accept, is not to make all private property public, but to expand the number and functioning of the affordable public options.

We don’t need to burn down the American People’s Home! We need to open it up, air it out, renovate the broken bits, extend it here and there, and make it the welcoming and comfortable place for everyone that the best of its founders wanted it to be.

I find myself further to the Left than the writer and some of the commentators.

I believe that there are tens of millions of details needed for the re-ordering of our society.  And that the thing to do is to strike at the heart of where power lies within our societies, and that we first change that, and then, once holding this "power" people on the spot can decide how things will change at their leisure.  Through democratic trial and error.