"The materialist world outlook not only opens a wide window on the whole universe, but it also strengthens the will. It is also the only thing that makes contemporary man a man"- Leon Trotsky [Attention to Theory].
Tamil Nationalism, a dead end to the Tamil working class in Sri Lanka
Three and half decades after the bloody anti-Tamil pogrom in Sri Lanka, in July 1983, and ensuring war in the North and East that caused colossal losses of lives and wealth to the working people, both in the North and South of the country, and close to a decade since the end of civil war in 2009, the Tamil bourgeoisie is yet more emphatically fixing the Tamil working class in the most damaging Tamil Nationalist defensive strategy against the Sinhalese working class.
Cankili Thoppu Archway
While the Tamil bourgeoisie has been all throughout endeavouring to strike a deal with the Sinhalese liberal bourgeoisie in the South, it was always confronted with even harsher offensive by Sinhalese bourgeois Nationalists. In an attempt to carve up an autonomous pro-imperialist capitalist state in the North and East, it was always necessary for the Tamil bourgeoise to rationalize and assert a Tamil Homeland in the North and East, which task was assigned to Tamil nationalist historians, in a cold war with Sinhala chauvinist historiography and archaeology. This debate remains unresolved, as it should, propounding competing historical narratives, while the Sinhalese nationalists denying to recognize the North and East as the lands where Tamil civilization prevailed for centuries.
Against each anti-Tamil offensive by the capitalist ruling class in the South, using parliamentary, military and police state measures, the bourgeoise Tamil nationalists place the blame on the Sinhalese working class and the poor, as if they were responsible for the discriminatory and oppressive treatment by the Sinhalese Majority government of the South. In the backdrop of the government of the South retaining the lands of the Tamils and fortifying its military presence in the North and East, even nine years after the end of war, some Tamil nationalist academics and politicians even revived blaming Sinhalese of being an internal colonizer, portraying the Sinhalese working masses as an oppressive colonizer of Tamil masses. The picture painted is false to the core.
This blame-game flows from the very interests of the Tamil elite, which is devoted to formulate narratives in order to dilute the class question of the entire national question. When class differences are sidelined and diluted, the nationalist issue is retained in the interests of the Tamil elite, at the expense of the Tamil working class.
The politics of Tamil nationalists is so bankrupt that it fails to unravel the truth of the real enemy of the Tamil working class and the poor, which is none other than the Tamil and Sinhalese ruling class, borth in the North and the South. In this background, the more the identity politics of Tamil Nationalism is strengthened, the more the Sinhalese Nationalism is strengthened in the South by the Sinhalese ruling elite, in order to further entrench the nationalist dividing lines that separate Tamil and Sinhalese working classes and the poor on communal lines.
This is a vicious cycle. It affects the whole working class in the island, as it disarm them of a political programme of a united independant fight against the capitalist ruling elite of both the communities, that serve the demands of neoliberal market economy.
Naloor Manthiri manai in Jaffna
Without a complete breakaway from this bankrupt politics of Tamil Nationalism, the Tamil working class and the poor will have no imancipation, no lasting solution to any of the day-to-day problems of their lives. History has taught the most important lesson that the only programme that saves the Tamil working class against the oppression by the Southern government is only a fight against these ruling classes in union with the Sinhalese working class of the South, in order to establish a Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka and Eelam on the internationalist perspective of a Socialist Federation of South Asia. This is a fight that was ever resisted and hated by the Tamil elite and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam(LTTE), who never ever appealed to the Sinhalese masses.
Nationalist politics serves the ruling elite, not the working class and the oppressed peoples. Images by SWJ.
Neoliberal Constitutionalism and the Danger of Authoritarianism in the Third World
By Sanjaya Wilson Jayasekera, LL.B, Attorney-at-Law.
Following is the speech delivered at the Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL) Conference held at National University of Singapore on July 21,2018. The panel was moderated by Vasuki Nesiah, Associate Professor, New York University, Gallatin School (USA).
Good Morning! Professor Vasuki, all my colleagues,
While thanking the National University of Singapore for organizing this event, in my presentation today, I will place the center of my arguments, in the topic I am discussing, on the impact of the financial and economic crisis in 2008. Let me also mention that my topic here flows as a specific area of study of my Masters thesis. The short video, which will accompany my speech, though muted, would remind you of the events that I would be enumerating during the presentation. I have prepared a brief note of my paper and, for fear of losing to mention the significant points, I will be reading-out from my note.
It is almost a decade since the collapse of subprime mortgage market and the big enterprises of financial capital, the Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and American International Group, and investment Bankers like Lehman Brothers and Goldman Sachs in the United States, which initiated the most damaging financial and economic crisis since the Great Depression of 1931. This crisis, termed as the Great Recession, subsequently led to irrevocable economic calamities all around the world.
The States resorted to unpopular austerity measures in order to bail out the economies and the financial capital. This turn of the governments to respond to economic crisis caused major reformations in the constitutional setup and all the organs of the States were seemingly compliant to facilitate the reforms.
Indebted to the core, the States of the Third World heavily depend on the bailout loans from the international financiers, prominently the International Monetary Fund(IMF) and the World Bank, dispersed on drastic conditionalities of reduction of budget deficits and repayment of debts and for implementing policy reforms of the World Trade Organization(WTO). Intending to reduce budget deficit and government debt, States around the world implemented austerity measures, which included a range of public welfare and subsidy cuts, cuts of wages, unemployment benefits and pensions and, increase of taxes on consumer products and services, often referred to as fiscal austerity. Austerity also includes deregulation, commercialization and privatization of State-owned enterprises and extensive labour market liberalization.
Last year, for example, the Sri Lankan government made overhaul amendments to its tax law and passed the Inland Revenue Act No. 24 of 2017, targeting a greater spectrum of the working class, in strict compliance with the recommendations of the IMF, which felicitated and encouraged the government in releasing the fifth tranche of the bail out loan under the Extended Fund Facility negotiated in 2016.
Many research and reports available on this phenomenon have shown that such austerity measures have largely undermined economic and social rights[1], civil liberties and freedoms of the people of the third world, as well as in major capitalist market States. The United Nations Independent Expert on the effects of foreign debt and other related international financial obligations of States on the full enjoyment of all human rights, particularly economic, social and cultural rights, in his January 2016 report reveals that “Austerity measures adopted in response to financial crises have pushed many individuals below minimum income levels."[2]
These drastic measures have been met with militant struggles of the working class, youth and the poor, which the States have been suppressing by way of police and military apparatus and the judicial systems, all at the expense of the international human rights standards, democratic values and rule of law. At the same time, the States of the Third World are victim of inter imperialist rivalries, while the United States is openly preparing for the next world war with China and Russia, in order to resolve its own economic crisis by destruction of competitive markets.
The age of austerity is also the grounds for protectionism and for the rise of all forms of reactionary tendencies such as populism and racism, which the States are prone to deal with by force. Outside the democratic discourse, geo-strategic decisions are made and laws are passed through national legislatures to suit the imperialist demands and the dictates of the International lending institutions. The third world States increasingly seem to lose their democratic credentials. The danger of authoritarianism[3] haunts the Third World.
The right to peaceful assembly and association, the freedom of speech , media freedom, freedom of information , right to individual liberty, right to non-discrimination are significant rights badly affected by the counter measures implemented by the States under austerity conditions. The minority and vulnerable groups are discriminated against forcing them to face the risk of social marginalization and exclusion[4]. Access to justice is severely affected due to non-affordability and lack of State legal aid.
In India, last year, 31 workers of the Maruti-Suzuki company were victimized by the terror sponsored by the State-Company partnership, for the simple reason that they demanded job security, higher wages and trade union rights, in the backdrop of severe austerity measures and IMF sanctioned free-market policies implemented by the Indian government. Found guilty on framed-up charges of culpable homicide, 13 workers were sentenced to life imprisonment. Last May, Indian police shot and killed a dozen demonstrators protesting against a copper smelter in Tuticorin, in Tamil Nadu, that was emitting hazardous polluters for years.
Including instances from Sri Lanka, Myanmar, Philippines, Chile, Argentina and Venezuela, hundreds more examples can be drawn from many countries of the third world, most considered belonging to modern democracies by 2008, to show their backsliding to police-state regimes. Many reports abound in this regard[5]. Parallel to many other States, Indian government, closely working with social media giants to restrict alternative thinking and expression, amended its Information Technology Act in 2011, which requires that Internet café owners photograph their customers, keep copies of client IDs and browsing histories for one year, and forward this data each month to the government. In Sri Lanka, where hardly a day passes by without even a single mass agitation against government's measures of budget-deficit reduction, the government is now planing to implement death penalty.
These anti-democratic measures are legalized and legitimized by the States on the basis of national security and economic stability. This is the very logic of the theory of neoliberal market economy propounded by Friedrich Von Hayek, who wrote that a State's legal system should guarantee "a constitutional framework that is capable of holding the power of the State in check, whilst respecting the general rules that underpin the market order." In other words, rule of law is to ensure that power of the State is held in check, so that the State does not interfere with the rules of the market, but, on the contrary, upholds them.
According to D.M.Kotz, Neoliberalism, as the new phase of capitalist economy after late 1970s, is often described by reference to a trilogy of policies known as liberalization, privatization, and stabilization[6]. This necessitated that the post-World War II welfare-State whither away. Austerity, therefore, inevitably becomes an enhanced demand of neoliberalism at times of financial and economic crises. Where budgets are constrained, the immediate casualty is social welfare and the living standards of the people. The new Social Structure of Accumulation(SSA) of neoliberal capitalism is constitutionalized internationally through global trade, investment and corporation agreements and nationally through domestic legislations. This new constitutionalism, which is the overarching economic and politico-legal ideology of the basic structure of the governance of the Third World in the age of austerity, I propose, could be best termed as neoliberal constitutionalism.
What can be observed therefore is that Capitalist crisis, austerity, poverty, inequality, social polarization and authoritarianism go hand-in-hand. A reversal of this phenomenon affecting millions in the third world, as well as in the centres of global capitalist economy, requires an internationalist response, a reversal of the class-biased[7] international legal system and the very Social Structure of Accumulation itself.
1. S.Kidd, Pro-poor or anti-poor? The World Bank and IMF’s approach to social protection, April 2018, http://www.brettonwoodsproject.org/2018/03/pro-poor-anti-poor-world-bank-imfs-approach-social-protection/ (accessed 16.07.2018)
2. Report to the 31st Session of the United Nations Human Rights Council(UNHRC).
3. Lynne Henderson describes authoritarianism as political structures and practices that directly threaten human freedom and dignity that lies in opposition to the liberal values of tolerance of ambiguity and difference, insists on obedience to rules, insists on conformity and uses coercion and punishment to ensure that obedience. L.Henderson,"Authoritarianism and the Rule of Law”,Indiana Law Journal,Vol.66,Issue.2,1991,pp379,456,p382
4. L.Ginsborg,"The impact of the economic crisis on human rights in Europe and the accountability of international institutions", Global Campus Human Rights Journal,Vol.1,2017,97-117, P104. A detailed analysis on the austerity's impact on human rights and about anti-Austerity protests in the Eurozone countries is provided in the following Report: "The impact of the crisis on fundamental rights across Member States of the EU- Comparative analysis", European Parliament, Brussels(February 2015), http://www.europarl.europa.eu/studies (accessed 12.10.2017), especially Chapters 9 & 10.
5. A lost decade for human rights? Assessing austerity and its alternatives 10 years on from the financial crisis, http://www.brettonwoodsproject.org/2018/04/lost-decade-human-rights-assessing-austerity-alternatives-10-years-financial-crisis/ (accessed on 16.07.2018); M.J.Abramowitz, Democracy in Crisis: Freedom in the World- 2018, https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-world/freedom-world-2018 ( accessed on 16.07.2018)
6. D.M.Kotz,The Rise and Fall of Neoliberal Capitalism (Harvard University Press,Cambridge, 2015)
