The peasantry and the middle-class

by Uditha Devapriya

Faced with the prospect of pauperisation, Sri Lanka’s lower middle-class is getting restive and radicalised. With hiking prices and plummeting incomes, they are on the verge of taking to the streets. The government’s policies may well push them over the edge.

This is the closest the country has come, since the second JVP insurrection, to a full-scale middle-class rebellion. Of course it is unfair to put the blame entirely on the government. Like every other such institution, it is limited in what it can do. Yet, its mismanagement of the present situation has served to alienate the middle-class further.

The peasantry, too, is getting restless. The tipping point has been the government’s policy on fertilisers. While the adverse impact of chemical fertilisers has gone on record and while a transition to organic fertiliser, or less harmful chemical varieties, has been in the offing for decades, the transition itself has not been phased out. The government for its part remains optimistic about crop yields, while foreign news outlets publish report after report exposing the flaws of its policies. Even the latter outlets take a balanced approach on the issue: hence both The Economist and Al-Jazeera, in otherwise cogent critiques of the fertiliser imbroglio, quote farmers saying that they would prefer organic, and that conventional pesticides have been affecting their health badly for years.

If recent developments tell us anything, it’s that the situation forebodes a conjuncture of the middle-class and the peasantry. Political commentators have noted as much: many of them seem to think that, in banning imports of chemical fertilisers on the one hand and of luxury and consumer goods on the other, the government has united two otherwise diametrically different classes. While they do not jump to conclusions yet, they contend, if not suggest, that this could lead to full-scale protests and riots in the future.

The argument has to be further analysed for its implications to fully seep in. Historically, Sri Lanka’s lower middle-class has always been upward-aspiring and conservative in its outlook. Yet to speak of a monolithic social group would be a little fallacious: like the peasantry with whom they are united today, they remain stratified and diverse.

The main difference between these classes lies in the pecking order in which they feel the heat of economic downturns: despite the crunch they have suffered over successive periods and governments, the middle-class has managed somehow to realize their aspirations. I am by no means contending that the ride has been easy for them; merely that they have had much less scope for radicalisation than has the peasantry.

What then would a conjuncture between these two groups imply? It would imply, first and foremost, a reconciliation of their class interests. Such a reconciliation would in turn aid the Left when it formulates its tactics against the regime. This, in turn, would help the Samagi Jana Balavegaya, the country’s foremost Opposition, to turn from its pandering to orthodox economic theory to a more fire-in-the-belly approach to the issues at hand.

For its part the Left has not let off the possibility of these developments. That might explain, on the one hand, the recently held discussion between the JVP and the FSP, and on the other, the dissensions within the Communist Party over the teachers’ salary issue. The SJB seems tentatively to be undergoing a paradigm shift within its ranks, but it remains divided – split would be a better way of putting it – between its left and right wings. That is why, while not a few MPs advocate a reversal of price controls, other MPs call for such measures.

The SJB is yet to come out with a coherent programme. To be fair, the JVP and FSP are yet to come out with one too, but they have held more consistent stances on economic issues, and issues to do with the peasantry and working class, than the SJB. The UNP for all intents is dead as a dodo, and while I will not dismiss the possibility of elements in the SJB calling for a return to the parent party, the latter remains united only in the person of its sole MP. By contrast, the SJB is more diverse, though much less articulate. The present crisis and its class conjunctures might radicalise it. This, however, remains to be seen.

The question as to whether a radical class bloc consisting of the lower middle-class and the peasantry remains viable, in the long term, is one I really can’t answer. Certainly, as long as the present crisis – a crisis not wholly of the government’s doing – will continue, so long will these groups remain united with each other. But to hedge all bets for a radical formation on the unification of these groups would be untenable. Why do I say that?

For all its defiance of the government, Sri Lanka’s lower middle-class is only as radical as circumstances permit it to be. While a sociological study of this milieu is yet to be written, all one can say, based on its behaviour and voting patterns, is that it has traditionally chosen the path of radicalisation only in the absence of countervailing influences.

Its animus against the regime is based in the restrictions imposed on luxury goods, as well as the controls imposed, and then eliminated, on food prices. While it has reacted much more angrily to the latter owing to the essential nature of food items, its response to the clampdowns on imported goods has been no less intense.

A closer examination of these reactions gives us a glimpse into the thinking underlying this social group. Middle-class opposition to restrictions on imported consumer goods depends largely on the extent to which the middle-class has turned those goods into status symbols. The government, to be clear, has imposed limits on high-end products: this is obvious if one examines the full list. What, then, can we conclude about middle-class responses to those restrictions? Not just that this class forms a crucial part of an economy that rests so much on imports, but that it has come to measure itself based on whether it can afford such imports. This is what explains the many memes, posted well before the pandemic hit, that compare vehicle prices in Sri Lanka with prices elsewhere. Insofar as their aspirations as a globalised middle-class remain denied, then, they remain a radicalised group.

Their attitude to price controls reveals their thinking even more. Before the Gotabaya government backtracked on emergency regulations, the urbanised middle-class opposed price controls. This had less to do with their opposition to the regime than with their animus against government-imposed controls: then as now, much of this milieu, especially its youth, prefer free markets to state intervention. The more suburbanised or ruralised middle-class, on the other hand, remained divided: while poorer sections seemed to favour price controls, more affluent sections appeared to oscillate between acceptance of a need to impose such controls during a crisis and opposition to the notion that such measures need to be in place even after a crisis. There was also anger, among this particular segment of the middle-class, at hoarders, but no critique as such of how market forces, in the long term, ensure supplies for those who can afford them and shortages for those who cannot.

With the opening up of the food sector to market forces – forces determined less by vague laws of demand and supply than by the diktats of hoarders and intermediaries – the poorer middle-class, the lower middle-class, has united itself against the government’s reversal of price controls. Of course the more affluent segments remain in favour of the government’s backtracking – “not a popular decision, but the right decision”, one tweet runs – but this is a view shared by an elite minority; for the rest, even the rest of the middle-class, the controls remain preferable to the squeezing of disposable incomes that awaits them with ever-rising prices. Not that the latter group has completely abandoned their thinking about privatisation and state regulations: “Free markets are good,” one of them told me the other day: “just not when there’s a pandemic.” I prefer what another friend said, only half in jest: “free markets are good, just not when real free markets are tried.”

The implications of these points to the formation of a radical class bloc should not be lost on anyone, certainly not on the SJB and even less so on the Left (JVP-FSP). If the point that the country’s lower middle-class can swing both ways (opposing import restrictions and also the lifting of price controls) holds true, then the impact of economic recovery on this class must be appraised by any opposition hedging all its bets for a resistance against the government on the unification of the middle-class with the peasantry and working class. Put simply, the Left should, when joining hands between a pauperised middle-class and subaltern groups – what Partha Chatterjee once called “the dangerous classes” – consider the possibility of the middle-class to revert to its comprador instincts once recovery kicks in.

In a column I wrote not too long ago, I predicted that when the global economy would start to recover from the slump it was going through earlier this year, the harmony that prevailed between the government and its corporate backers would dissipate. I realise now that I was wrong in thinking this honeymoon would break up two years into the future: it is very much happening now, even if only slightly. I am certain, nevertheless, that whatever unity is there between the radicalised middle-class and the peasantry will also not last for long: it too will start dissipating once recovery kicks in. The task of a Left formation should therefore be, not to incorporate middle-class elements and cave into them, but to chart a programme which prioritises the interests of those done down hardest by the crisis: not a class that opposes the government over the jacking up of iPhone prices, but a class that stares helplessly as policies not of their choosing push them deeper into the pit. The role of the Left, accordingly, should be to radicalise the mainstream, and not be co-opted by the mainstream.

The writer can be reached at udakdev1@gmail.com