Politics
Existential contest between democracy and autocracy: Where does SL stand?
DR. DAYAN JAYATILLEKA
Watching President Biden’s opening address to the Summit on Democracy, I thought that Stephen Collinson and Caitlin Hu of the CNN were spot on when they opined that the meeting was “dedicated to the idea that the people should get to elect their own leaders”, and highlighted “the President’s belief that there is an existential global contest between democracy and autocracy…”
Where does Sri Lanka stand in this existential global contest, the defining issue of our time?
The Biden line was different and correctly so, from Sri Lanka’s contending political and politico-intellectual forces, except, arguably, for the New Opposition—and that too, not all of it.
Given the time that Biden spent on explaining in his address, the logic for democratic renewal of the several huge spending initiatives he had taken, his was clearly a Keynesian-Rooseveltian, and Bobby Kennedy paradigm, which is very far cry indeed from Sri Lanka’s liberal democratic policy wonks who are so reactionary and rightwing that they are allergic to Keynes and Roosevelt’s New Deal.
Let’s move on from the liberal democratic Opposition to the far from liberal democratic Gotabaya regime.
Imran Khan was invited to the Summit for democracy but Gotabaya Rajapaksa wasn’t. So, Sri Lanka’s absence wasn’t about friendship with China. Obviously Modi was invited. Duterte was there too. Viktor Orban was not. What makes Orban and Gotabaya Rajapaksa different from Imran Khan, Modi and Duterte?
Orban and GR are elected but flaunt a profile and discourse which is not committed to the idea that systems in which the people get to elect their own leaders are morally and ethically superior to those which do not.
In a global contest between democracy and autocracy, GR and Orban do not seem to belong to, still less remain committed to, the former.
Furthermore, they have made moves to narrow the democratic space while marching in the direction of greater authoritarianism and autocratism.
Militarized Autocracy
The TV News of December 8, 2021 showed Army chief Shavendra Silva striding out of the Ministry of Agriculture, trailed by the state minister and the Minister of Agriculture. The newscast of Dec 9 showed the Army chief saying that the Task Force on combatting Covid-19 had been switched to organic agriculture.
President Gotabaya Rajapaksa seems to be turning the Sri Lankan state into military-occupied territory. The process could be termed a creeping coup from above.
What political perspectives for resistance issue from these manifest contemporary phenomena and accompanying warnings?
I would say that the bottom-line is twofold:
(1) The main political contradiction of the current stage of Sri Lankan process is that between, on the one hand, encroaching military rule under presidential auspices, and on the other, civilian democracy.
(2) Therefore, the main strategic project and slogan must be to appeal to and persuade all civilian democratic political forces, whether they be in Opposition or Government, to rally to resist growing military encroachment and to safeguard civilian democratic governance, rule and processes of transition.
This is vital, because if the ongoing process of militarization accelerates, there will neither be elections by which to effect change – which may not concern the governing party–nor any elected civilian dominated sector and function of the Sri Lankan state—which will concern the governing party.
The broad bloc that is necessary for this battle goes beyond the Opposition; it must reach out to sectors of the government as well. It should also appeal to the democratic sectors of the military and its officer corps.
The old slogans of uniting Opposition forces on the basis of the abolition of the executive presidency should be cast aside promptly. What is at stake is far more fundamental. It is not the form –presidential or parliamentary–of the (democratic) state, but the very content and character of the state: will it be civilian democratic or military despotic?
Presidentialism isn’t the Problem
The absurd assumption that autocracy is coterminous with the presidency and democracy with the parliamentary system, brings to mind Lenin’s phrase “parliamentary cretinism”.
The universal relevance of the American contribution not only enables the USA to stand at the helm of the world’s democratic camp but made America the pioneer of the Presidency which four of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council have adopted as an apex structure, irrespective of their divergent ideologies and economic systems.
The unreason which manifestly characterizes the policies of President Gotabaya Rajapaksa is hardly proof of the dangers of the presidential system. It took the anti-Poll Tax riots to force Maggie Thatcher’s resignation into her third term as PM, while Donald Trump lost the presidency at the end of one term.
America opted for the presidential system precisely after it had made a revolution-cum-war of independence against Mad King George. Steeped as its leading elite was in Lockean liberalism it could very well have opted for the supposed virtues of the parliamentary system. Instead, it chose an ‘elected monarch’, countervailed and hemmed in by the Lockean separation of powers.
In Latin America, Simon Bolivar known as The Liberator because he defeated the armies of the Spanish crown, opted not for the parliamentarism that everyone knew existed in England, but followed North America in choosing the presidential system.
Why? A 21st century explanation comes from one of the most influential leftists of today, Antonio Negri who spent 24 years in prison and exile for his membership of a far-left Italian movement. In the massive volume ‘Empire’ (Harvard) of which he was the principal author (he wrote in Rome’s Rebibia prison), and in the follow-up ‘Empire and Beyond’ compiled upon release, Negri, formerly Professor of State Theory at the University of Padua and lecturer in Political Science at the University of Paris, celebrates US Constitutionalism or what he calls ‘the US constitutional project’.
He revisits the established fact of the influence of Greek historian and political analyst of the Roman period, Polybius, on Montesquieu, Locke and most consequentially the American Founding Fathers.
Aristotle made the breakthrough classification of democracy, oligarchy and monarchy, and identified the tendency of each to degenerate into its opposite and the cycle to begin again. Polybius found the solution to be a ‘mixed system’ which accommodated all three forms but used them to check and balance each other.
The American constitutionalists consciously studied him and built a hybrid system with the elected presidency, judiciary, and bicameral legislature.
Sri Lankans have such an advanced system albeit distorted by two swings to opposite extremes: the over-centralization of the 18th and 20th amendments and the dysfunctional deadlock of the 17th and 19th amendments. The US system has powerful Congressional oversight but the UNP liberals gave the role of oversight to unelected civil society (NGO personalities).
JVP: Solution & Problem
As we enter the vortex of the crisis in 2022, does the JVP have the solution or is the JVP the solution?
There are three routes for the JVP to go before it is legitimately eligible for the top spot.
(1) Become the main Opposition as did the LSSP in 1947-1956 and again in 1960.
(2) Be a responsible, durable, progressive partner in a coalition with a center-left or centrist party/leader, i.e., what it could have been when Premadasa offered it three portfolios in 1989 and later when it served briefly in a cabinet under CBK and MR.
(3) Become the governing party of a Provincial Council, win the Chief Ministership and do a Kerala.
If the growing crisis tempts it into making an extra-parliamentary/extra-electoral lunge for power at the national level, skipping any and all of these intermediate stages (as usual), it will be disastrous for the country if successful, and disastrous for the JVP anyway.
Currently the main obstacle I see to the formation of the broadest possible bloc in defense of democracy, is the limited perspective of the current JVP leadership.
In Louis Althusser’s For Marx, ‘conjuncture’ is defined as “The central concept of the Marxist science of politics (cf. Lenin’s ‘current moment’); it denotes the exact balance of forces, state of overdetermination of the contradictions at any given moment to which political tactics must be applied.”
The JVP and FSP do not grasp and have never grasped “the Marxist science of politics”. One cannot grasp the Marxist science of politics without a rigorous study and application of the founder of Marxist political science: Antonio Gramsci.
For Marx, Engels and Lenin, it was hardly a matter of unconcern whether the political character of the state was an autocracy or a democratic republic.
For Trotsky, Gramsci, Togliatti and Dimitrov, it was hardly a matter of negligible importance as to whether the capitalist system had as a political superstructure, bourgeois democracy or fascist dictatorship, i.e., whether the capitalist state was a democratic republic or a military-fascist dictatorship.
However, for the JVP and the FSP, these are irrelevant. They see only two realities:
(a) The crisis of the capitalist system—and in the case of the JVP, the open economy—and
(b) The mobilization of the popular forces for a mass struggle against an enemy they see as on the defensive if not the retreat.
There is absolutely no understanding of the character of the enemy, its strategic project and the material forces at its disposal.
As usual the JVP possesses an objective understanding neither of itself nor of its enemy, when such understanding of both these categories is the prerequisite for strategic success, as Sun Tzu emphasized in The Art of War.
Neither the JVP nor the much more sincere and less sectarian FSP, grasp the political conjuncture, or more accurately, the politico-military conjuncture.
In non-Marxian terms, the JVP and FSP may grasp that we are at a hinge-point in Sri Lankan history, but they do not seem to know that a hinge can move both ways.