Sat Mag
From the eagle’s backyard:

A brief account of US foreign policy
By Uditha Devapriya
Jenny Pearce titled her book on US intervention in Central America and the Caribbean “Under the Eagle.” Though there had been a vast literature on US intervention in the region, Pearce’s study would be one of the first to document its crippling impact on Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Panama in Central America, as well as Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, Barbados, Guyana, St Lucia, Grenada, St Vincent, Dominica, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, and Cuba in the Caribbean.
US foreign policy has generally been a softened down version of its policy towards its neighbours. The realities of the Cold War made it imperative for the richest country in the world to stabilise its backyard, even if it meant rigging elections, supporting coups, installing dictators, and funding counterinsurgents. And yet such interventions predate the Cold War: they began with the Monroe Doctrine (1823), which laid down in diplomatic argot the need to project US dominance over its immediate surroundings.
Between 1870 and 1916 the value of goods manufactured by US industry increased almost tenfold. By 1880 the US economy had become twice the size of Britain’s. Fareed Zakaria (“The Future of American Power”, Foreign Affairs, May/June 2008) sums up the reasons for this concomitant rise and decline on each side of the Atlantic, including the antiquated nature of British capitalism, bad labour relations, low investments in new equipment, and the feudalisation of British schools and universities; “the wonder,” writes Zakaria, “is not that it declined but that its dominance lasted as long as it did.” The reasons for this need not detain us here. What is relevant is that with these spurts in industry, the US government recognised that it had to match its economic superiority with military clout.
It went about the task slowly, cautiously. In 1892 it built its first battleship. The timing was right: two years earlier, Alfred Mahan’s book The Influence of Sea Power upon History, which contended that maritime power was the key to global supremacy, had come out.
Six years later the US defeated the Spanish and took control of Cuba. Following that it invaded the Puerto Rico and purchased the Philippines for $20 million. In 1902, after its annexation of the Philippines, it recognised Cuba as an independent republic, yet made a sham of it by inserting the Platt Amendment, which reserved to the Americans the right to intervene in the internal affairs of the country. It invoked this several times and went on to dominate Cuba’s political and economic life until 1959.
Gunboat diplomacy began with Theodore Roosevelt. Roosevelt won the Nobel Peace Prize at around the same time he inserted a corollary to the Monroe Doctrine which justified “the intervention by some civilized nation” and “the exercise of an international police power” for the US. He was followed by William Howard Taft, who in 1912 argued that “the whole hemisphere will be ours… by virtue of our superiority of race.”
Taft and Woodrow Wilson substituted dollars for gunboats. The sugar plantations of the Caribbean and the banana plantations of Central America lured financiers and government officials alike. The US quickly moved in: it occupied Nicaragua in 1912 and stayed there until 1925. It returned two years later and withdrew in 1933, creating a rightwing National Guard headed by one of the first US allied military dictators, Anastasio Somoza. Somoza would be followed by Jorge Ubico in Guatemala, Tiburcio Andino in Honduras, Maximiliano Martinez in El Salvador, and Gerardo Machado (and Fulgencio Batista) in Cuba.
Gunboats and dollars gave way to Franklin Roosevelt’s “Good Neighbour Policy.” As with all previous policies, it was a convenient cover for the pursuit of national self-interest. The US made it clear to the British that their time in the region was over, and to this end penetrated the Commonwealth Caribbean. Soon it got to dominate these economies: between 1930 and 1944, its share of coffee exports from Central America rose from 20% to 87%. In such a state of affairs the colonial powers had to leave, making way for the new superpower. This was true of other regions as well; thus after nationalists took up arms against the Dutch in Indonesia in 1945, US diplomats chose to side against the colonial overlords.
When the D. S. Senanayake government chose to side with the nationalists, it was arguably affirming the fading away of Dutch and the rise of American power in South-East Asia. The distinction the government made between communists and non-communists involved in the uprising and its cautious emphasis on support for the former indicate where exactly its ideological preferences lay: certainly not in Moscow.
Interestingly enough, through all this, while US interventionism didn’t explicitly emulate European colonialism, the latter shaped it. The Europeans never pretended to be motivated by anything other than the lure of trade and theft. The British did establish an efficient bureaucracy extending into the fields of health, education, the legal system, and so on, yet it was the last, and arguably the first, European superpower to do so.
Scholars have observed that of all historical transitions between superpowers, the transition to the US from Britain proved to be the most peaceful. The reason, they conjecture, is that economic ties between these two countries were great, certainly greater than had been the case between previous contending powers. Against that backdrop the US absorbed British imperialism, and rather than abandoning it, it fine-tuned it.
The language it used differed little, initially, from the language the British had employed. As seen in its conquest of Cuba, the Monroe Doctrine and the Roosevelt Corollary were put into effect to justify foreign interventions in terms of what it saw as the inability of “natives” to govern themselves. This was what the British had done in their colonies as well, having consistently denied them self-government. Thus Woodrow Wilson wrote of “our peculiar duty, as it is also England’s”, to teach the natives “order and self-control.”
Later with the onset of the Cold War, it changed its rhetoric: as James Peck argues in Ideal Illusions, “Washington predicated its war of ideas on a set of deep divisions.” Accordingly the world split into two for US political theorists: “between freedom and equality, reform and revolution, self-interest and collective interests, the free market and state planning, and pluralistic democracy and mass mobilization.” To legitimise that new rhetoric, theorists cloaked it under the cover of a commitment to a rights-based world order: what Mangala Samaraweera in a tweet on the foreign policy of the current government calls “the three pillars of democracy, freedom and the rule of law.”
This conception of rights paradoxically emphasised freedom from restraints of caste and other social fetters but not from economic subjugation, so much so that while attempts to nationalise corporations invited threats of withholding aid, growing inequalities in the Third World, particularly in Latin America, didn’t raise much concerns in Washington. The Alliance for Progress, established by the Kennedy administration, did recognise the need for reform in these countries, yet it too ended up enriching an oligarchy.
Despite its emphasis on agrarian reform, the Alliance did little to combat the dependence of the plantation sector on the export market. Between 1960 and 1965, per capita agricultural production in Central America grew by an inconsequential 2.2%. Between 1965 and 1970 it grew by a dismal 1.6%. Meanwhile, multinational companies gained ground, reversing any progress the Alliance might have made: rather than supporting agriculture, they processed junk food, promoting low nutrition among locals. Instead of preventing revolution, in other words, the Alliance succeeded in fermenting it.
Soon enough the backyard began to unravel: 20 years after Castro overthrew Batista, Daniel Ortega overthrew Somoza in Nicaragua. Then civil war broke out in El Salvador: the US gave the government there more than three billion dollars in aid to quell the rebellion. But as in Cuba, support from Washington couldn’t make up for popular hatred of the regime. After a decade of insurgency and counterinsurgency, El Salvador fell apart.
The lesson to be learnt here is that the US failed to pursue its foreign policy objectives to their logical conclusion because it couldn’t match intervention with aid. This proved to be true of its policies in the world beyond the Americas as well.
To give just one example, though every pro-Western government here distanced itself from Moscow and Beijing, the US failed to fill the gap. The Rubber-Rice Pact, for instance, was signed after Washington refused the D. S. Senanayake government’s request to buy rubber at premium prices, while not even a visit to Lyndon Johnson by Dudley Senanayake could persuade the US, then caught up in Vietnam, to resume aid years after it had invoked the Hickenlooper Amendment in response to the Sirimavo Bandaranaike government taking over several multinationals. J. R. Jayewardene expected the US to come to its support when India began to interfere two decades later, yet it explicitly refused to do so. The yahapalana government came to power on a tidal wave of Sinophobia (Humphrey Hawksley called Maithripala Sirisena “Sino-skeptical”), but when it turned to the US, it received neither aid nor investment. Barely two years later, it was crawling back to Beijing.
This rift between the reality of intervention, the promises of aid, and the failure to make good on those promises led to the defeat of successive West-friendly regimes in Sri Lanka. John Kotelawala’s government fell despite its McCarthyist tactics against the Left; Dudley Senanayake’s third government fell despite, or rather because of, its ambivalent attitude to Vietnam; and J. R. Jayewardene’s government gave way to Ranasinghe Premadasa, who proved himself to be far less deferential to Washington. As for the yahapalana regime, the results of the 2019 presidential and the 2020 parliamentary election should put to rest any notion that its pro-US tilt ever received the support of the local population.
Today foreign aid has largely replaced military intervention in the race for superpower status. China vies with the US to prop up development in the Global South, and since 2017 Beijing has outpaced Washington. Xi Jinping’s coming to power has accelerated this trend, while Donald Trump’s isolationism has pushed China to almost every corner of the Third World. The election of nationalists and populists, meanwhile, has both supplemented and contradicted China’s rise: hence the Philippines under Duterte allied with China, while Tsai Ing-wen of Taiwan continues to play on anti-China sentiment.
The difference between these two superpowers lies in how they seek to shape the world. The US projects its version of European-style intervention, imposing sanctions on unfriendly states while failing to reward friendly states with aid and investments. China, on the other hand, prioritises development over outright intervention. Its actions in the South China Sea notwithstanding, its record as a driver of growth in South Asia and Africa has bolstered its image among countries like ours that have listened to the rhetoric of rules and rights from the capitals of the West without receiving any money.
Here we see an almost primeval difference in how each views the needs of the Third World: while the US emphasises fidelity to norms such as democracy, freedom, and the rule of law, which in its interactions with the world have been more honoured in the breach than the observance, China delivers development without questioning whether the governments it supports are committed to such norms. The latter is viewed, justifiably, as sign of respect for the sovereignty and territorial integrity of a country; the former is viewed, and resented, as an infringement of these values. Hence China’s rising influence in the Indo-Pacific, and the US’s waning popularity. Things may change with a Joe Biden presidency or remain as they are with a second Trump presidency, but as of now, that’s only conjecture.
The writer can be reached at udakdev1@gmail.com
Sat Mag
October 13 at the Women’s T20 World Cup: Injury concerns for Australia ahead of blockbuster game vs India

Australia vs India
Sharjah, 6pm local time
Australia have major injury concerns heading into the crucial clash. Just four balls into the match against Pakistan, Tayla Vlaeminck was out with a right shoulder dislocation. To make things worse, captain Alyssa Healy suffered an acute right foot injury while batting on 37 as she hobbled off the field with Australia needing 14 runs to win. Both players went for scans on Saturday.
India captain Harmanpreet Kaur who had hurt her neck in the match against Pakistan, turned up with a pain-relief patch on the right side of her neck during the Sri Lanka match. She also didn’t take the field during the chase. Fast bowler Pooja Vastrakar bowled full-tilt before the Sri Lanka game but didn’t play.
India will want a big win against Australia. If they win by more than 61 runs, they will move ahead of Australia, thereby automatically qualifying for the semi-final. In a case where India win by fewer than 60 runs, they will hope New Zealand win by a very small margin against Pakistan on Monday. For instance, if India make 150 against Australia and win by exactly 10 runs, New Zealand need to beat Pakistan by 28 runs defending 150 to go ahead of India’s NRR. If India lose to Australia by more than 17 runs while chasing a target of 151, then New Zealand’s NRR will be ahead of India, even if Pakistan beat New Zealand by just 1 run while defending 150.
Overall, India have won just eight out of 34 T20Is they’ve played against Australia. Two of those wins came in the group-stage games of previous T20 World Cups, in 2018 and 2020.
Australia squad:
Alyssa Healy (capt & wk), Darcie Brown, Ashleigh Gardner, Kim Garth, Grace Harris, Alana King, Phoebe Litchfield, Tahlia McGrath, Sophie Molineux, Beth Mooney, Ellyse Perry, Megan Schutt, Annabel Sutherland, Tayla Vlaeminck, Georgia Wareham
India squad:
Harmanpreet Kaur (capt), Smriti Mandhana (vice-capt), Yastika Bhatia (wk), Shafali Verma, Deepti Sharma, Jemimah Rodrigues, Richa Ghosh (wk), Pooja Vastrakar, Arundhati Reddy, Renuka Singh, D Hemalatha, Asha Sobhana, Radha Yadav, Shreyanka Patil, S Sajana
Tournament form guide:
Australia have three wins in three matches and are coming into this contest having comprehensively beaten Pakistan. With that win, they also all but sealed a semi-final spot thanks to their net run rate of 2.786. India have two wins in three games. In their previous match, they posted the highest total of the tournament so far – 172 for 3 and in return bundled Sri Lanka out for 90 to post their biggest win by runs at the T20 World Cup.
Players to watch:
Two of their best batters finding their form bodes well for India heading into the big game. Harmanpreet and Mandhana’s collaborative effort against Pakistan boosted India’s NRR with the semi-final race heating up. Mandhana, after a cautious start to her innings, changed gears and took on Sri Lanka’s spinners to make 50 off 38 balls. Harmanpreet, continuing from where she’d left against Pakistan, played a classic, hitting eight fours and a six on her way to a 27-ball 52. It was just what India needed to reinvigorate their T20 World Cup campaign.
[Cricinfo]
Sat Mag
Living building challenge

By Eng. Thushara Dissanayake
The primitive man lived in caves to get shelter from the weather. With the progression of human civilization, people wanted more sophisticated buildings to fulfill many other needs and were able to accomplish them with the help of advanced technologies. Security, privacy, storage, and living with comfort are the common requirements people expect today from residential buildings. In addition, different types of buildings are designed and constructed as public, commercial, industrial, and even cultural or religious with many advanced features and facilities to suit different requirements.
We are facing many environmental challenges today. The most severe of those is global warming which results in many negative impacts, like floods, droughts, strong winds, heatwaves, and sea level rise due to the melting of glaciers. We are experiencing many of those in addition to some local issues like environmental pollution. According to estimates buildings account for nearly 40% of all greenhouse gas emissions. In light of these issues, we have two options; we change or wait till the change comes to us. Waiting till the change come to us means that we do not care about our environment and as a result we would have to face disastrous consequences. Then how can we change in terms of building construction?
Before the green concept and green building practices come into play majority of buildings in Sri Lanka were designed and constructed just focusing on their intended functional requirements. Hence, it was much likely that the whole process of design, construction, and operation could have gone against nature unless done following specific regulations that would minimize negative environmental effects.
We can no longer proceed with the way we design our buildings which consumes a huge amount of material and non-renewable energy. We are very concerned about the food we eat and the things we consume. But we are not worrying about what is a building made of. If buildings are to become a part of our environment we have to design, build and operate them based on the same principles that govern the natural world. Eventually, it is not about the existence of the buildings, it is about us. In other words, our buildings should be a part of our natural environment.
The living building challenge is a remarkable design philosophy developed by American architect Jason F. McLennan the founder of the International Living Future Institute (ILFI). The International Living Future Institute is an environmental NGO committed to catalyzing the transformation toward communities that are socially just, culturally rich, and ecologically restorative. Accordingly, a living building must meet seven strict requirements, rather certifications, which are called the seven “petals” of the living building. They are Place, Water, Energy, Equity, Materials, Beauty, and Health & Happiness. Presently there are about 390 projects around the world that are being implemented according to Living Building certification guidelines. Let us see what these seven petals are.
Place
This is mainly about using the location wisely. Ample space is allocated to grow food. The location is easily accessible for pedestrians and those who use bicycles. The building maintains a healthy relationship with nature. The objective is to move away from commercial developments to eco-friendly developments where people can interact with nature.
Water
It is recommended to use potable water wisely, and manage stormwater and drainage. Hence, all the water needs are captured from precipitation or within the same system, where grey and black waters are purified on-site and reused.
Energy
Living buildings are energy efficient and produce renewable energy. They operate in a pollution-free manner without carbon emissions. They rely only on solar energy or any other renewable energy and hence there will be no energy bills.
Equity
What if a building can adhere to social values like equity and inclusiveness benefiting a wider community? Yes indeed, living buildings serve that end as well. The property blocks neither fresh air nor sunlight to other adjacent properties. In addition, the building does not block any natural water path and emits nothing harmful to its neighbors. On the human scale, the equity petal recognizes that developments should foster an equitable community regardless of an individual’s background, age, class, race, gender, or sexual orientation.
Materials
Materials are used without harming their sustainability. They are non-toxic and waste is minimized during the construction process. The hazardous materials traditionally used in building components like asbestos, PVC, cadmium, lead, mercury, and many others are avoided. In general, the living buildings will not consist of materials that could negatively impact human or ecological health.
Beauty
Our physical environments are not that friendly to us and sometimes seem to be inhumane. In contrast, a living building is biophilic (inspired by nature) with aesthetical designs that beautify the surrounding neighborhood. The beauty of nature is used to motivate people to protect and care for our environment by connecting people and nature.
Health & Happiness
The building has a good indoor and outdoor connection. It promotes the occupants’ physical and psychological health while causing no harm to the health issues of its neighbors. It consists of inviting stairways and is equipped with operable windows that provide ample natural daylight and ventilation. Indoor air quality is maintained at a satisfactory level and kitchen, bathrooms, and janitorial areas are provided with exhaust systems. Further, mechanisms placed in entrances prevent any materials carried inside from shoes.
The Bullitt Center building
Bullitt Center located in the middle of Seattle in the USA, is renowned as the world’s greenest commercial building and the first office building to earn Living Building certification. It is a six-story building with an area of 50,000 square feet. The area existed as a forest before the city was built. Hence, the Bullitt Center building has been designed to mimic the functions of a forest.
The energy needs of the building are purely powered by the solar system on the rooftop. Even though Seattle is relatively a cloudy city the Bullitt Center has been able to produce more energy than it needed becoming one of the “net positive” solar energy buildings in the world. The important point is that if a building is energy efficient only the area of the roof is sufficient to generate solar power to meet its energy requirement.
It is equipped with an automated window system that is able to control the inside temperature according to external weather conditions. In addition, a geothermal heat exchange system is available as the source of heating and cooling for the building. Heat pumps convey heat stored in the ground to warm the building in the winter. Similarly, heat from the building is conveyed into the ground during the summer.
The potable water needs of the building are achieved by treating rainwater. The grey water produced from the building is treated and re-used to feed rooftop gardens on the third floor. The black water doesn’t need a sewer connection as it is treated to a desirable level and sent to a nearby wetland while human biosolid is diverted to a composting system. Further, nearly two third of the rainwater collected from the roof is fed into the groundwater and the process resembles the hydrologic function of a forest.
It is encouraging to see that most of our large-scale buildings are designed and constructed incorporating green building concepts, which are mainly based on environmental sustainability. The living building challenge can be considered an extension of the green building concept. Amanda Sturgeon, the former CEO of the ILFI, has this to say in this regard. “Before we start a project trying to cram in every sustainable solution, why not take a step outside and just ask the question; what would nature do”?
Sat Mag
Something of a revolution: The LSSP’s “Great Betrayal” in retrospect

By Uditha Devapriya
On June 7, 1964, the Central Committee of the Lanka Sama Samaja Party convened a special conference at which three resolutions were presented. The first, moved by N. M. Perera, called for a coalition with the SLFP, inclusive of any ministerial portfolios. The second, led by the likes of Colvin R. de Silva, Leslie Goonewardena, and Bernard Soysa, advocated a line of critical support for the SLFP, but without entering into a coalition. The third, supported by the likes of Edmund Samarakkody and Bala Tampoe, rejected any form of compromise with the SLFP and argued that the LSSP should remain an independent party.
The conference was held a year after three parties – the LSSP, the Communist Party, and Philip Gunawardena’s Mahajana Eksath Peramuna – had founded a United Left Front. The ULF’s formation came in the wake of a spate of strikes against the Sirimavo Bandaranaike government. The previous year, the Ceylon Transport Board had waged a 17-day strike, and the harbour unions a 60-day strike. In 1963 a group of working-class organisations, calling itself the Joint Committee of Trade Unions, began mobilising itself. It soon came up with a common programme, and presented a list of 21 radical demands.
In response to these demands, Bandaranaike eventually supported a coalition arrangement with the left. In this she was opposed, not merely by the right-wing of her party, led by C. P. de Silva, but also those in left parties opposed to such an agreement, including Bala Tampoe and Edmund Samarakkody. Until then these parties had never seen the SLFP as a force to reckon with: Leslie Goonewardena, for instance, had characterised it as “a Centre Party with a programme of moderate reforms”, while Colvin R. de Silva had described it as “capitalist”, no different to the UNP and by default as bourgeois as the latter.
The LSSP’s decision to partner with the government had a great deal to do with its changing opinions about the SLFP. This, in turn, was influenced by developments abroad. In 1944, the Fourth International, which the LSSP had affiliated itself with in 1940 following its split with the Stalinist faction, appointed Michel Pablo as its International Secretary. After the end of the war, Pablo oversaw a shift in the Fourth International’s attitude to the Soviet states in Eastern Europe. More controversially, he began advocating a strategy of cooperation with mass organisations, regardless of their working-class or radical credentials.
Pablo argued that from an objective perspective, tensions between the US and the Soviet Union would lead to a “global civil war”, in which the Soviet Union would serve as a midwife for world socialist revolution. In such a situation the Fourth International would have to take sides. Here he advocated a strategy of entryism vis-à-vis Stalinist parties: since the conflict was between Stalinist and capitalist regimes, he reasoned, it made sense to see the former as allies. Such a strategy would, in his opinion, lead to “integration” into a mass movement, enabling the latter to rise to the level of a revolutionary movement.
Though controversial, Pablo’s line is best seen in the context of his times. The resurgence of capitalism after the war, and the boom in commodity prices, had a profound impact on the course of socialist politics in the Third World. The stunted nature of the bourgeoisie in these societies had forced left parties to look for alternatives. For a while, Trotsky had been their guide: in colonial and semi-colonial societies, he had noted, only the working class could be expected to see through a revolution. This entailed the establishment of workers’ states, but only those arising from a proletarian revolution: a proposition which, logically, excluded any compromise with non-radical “alternatives” to the bourgeoisie.
To be sure, the Pabloites did not waver in their support for workers’ states. However, they questioned whether such states could arise only from a proletarian revolution. For obvious reasons, their reasoning had great relevance for Trotskyite parties in the Third World. The LSSP’s response to them showed this well: while rejecting any alliance with Stalinist parties, the LSSP sympathised with the Pabloites’ advocacy of entryism, which involved a strategic orientation towards “reformist politics.” For the world’s oldest Trotskyite party, then going through a series of convulsions, ruptures, and splits, the prospect of entering the reformist path without abandoning its radical roots proved to be welcoming.
Writing in the left-wing journal Community in 1962, Hector Abhayavardhana noted some of the key concerns that the party had tried to resolve upon its formation. Abhayavardhana traced the LSSP’s origins to three developments: international communism, the freedom struggle in India, and local imperatives. The latter had dictated the LSSP’s manifesto in 1936, which included such demands as free school books and the use of Sinhala and Tamil in the law courts. Abhayavardhana suggested, correctly, that once these imperatives changed, so would the party’s focus, though within a revolutionary framework. These changes would be contingent on two important factors: the establishment of universal franchise in 1931, and the transfer of power to the local bourgeoisie in 1948.
Paradoxical as it may seem, the LSSP had entered the arena of radical politics through the ballot box. While leading the struggle outside parliament, it waged a struggle inside it also. This dual strategy collapsed when the colonial government proscribed the party and the D. S. Senanayake government disenfranchised plantation Tamils. Suffering two defeats in a row, the LSSP was forced to think of alternatives. That meant rethinking categories such as class, and grounding them in the concrete realities of the country.
This was more or less informed by the irrelevance of classical and orthodox Marxian analysis to the situation in Sri Lanka, specifically to its rural society: with a “vast amorphous mass of village inhabitants”, Abhayavardhana observed, there was no real basis in the country for a struggle “between rich owners and the rural poor.” To complicate matters further, reforms like the franchise and free education, which had aimed at the emancipation of the poor, had in fact driven them away from “revolutionary inclinations.” The result was the flowering of a powerful rural middle-class, which the LSSP, to its discomfort, found it could not mobilise as much as it had the urban workers and plantation Tamils.
Where else could the left turn to? The obvious answer was the rural peasantry. But the rural peasantry was in itself incapable of revolution, as Hector Abhayavardhana has noted only too clearly. While opposing the UNP’s Westernised veneer, it did not necessarily oppose the UNP’s overtures to Sinhalese nationalism. As historians like K. M. de Silva have observed, the leaders of the UNP did not see their Westernised ethos as an impediment to obtaining support from the rural masses. That, in part at least, was what motivated the Senanayake government to deprive Indian estate workers of their most fundamental rights, despite the existence of pro-minority legal safeguards in the Soulbury Constitution.
To say this is not to overlook the unique character of the Sri Lankan rural peasantry and petty bourgeoisie. Orthodox Marxists, not unjustifiably, characterise the latter as socially and politically conservative, tilting more often than not to the right. In Sri Lanka, this has frequently been the case: they voted for the UNP in 1948 and 1952, and voted en masse against the SLFP in 1977. Yet during these years they also tilted to the left, if not the centre-left: it was the petty bourgeoisie, after all, which rallied around the SLFP, and supported its more important reforms, such as the nationalisation of transport services.
One must, of course, be wary of pasting the radical tag on these measures and the classes that ostensibly stood for them. But if the Trotskyite critique of the bourgeoisie – that they were incapable of reform, even less revolution – holds valid, which it does, then the left in the former colonies of the Third World had no alternative but to look elsewhere and to be, as Abhayavardhana noted, “practical men” with regard to electoral politics. The limits within which they had to work in Sri Lanka meant that, in the face of changing dynamics, especially among the country’s middle-classes, they had to change their tactics too.
Meanwhile, in 1953, the Trotskyite critique of Pabloism culminated with the publication of an Open Letter by James Cannon, of the US Socialist Workers’ Party. Cannon criticised the Pabloite line, arguing that it advocated a policy of “complete submission.” The publication of the letter led to the withdrawal of the International Committee of the Fourth International from the International Secretariat. The latter, led by Pablo, continued to influence socialist parties in the Third World, advocating temporary alliances with petty bourgeois and centrist formations in the guise of opposing capitalist governments.
For the LSSP, this was a much-needed opening. Even as late as 1954, three years after S. W. R. D. Bandaranaike formed the SLFP, the LSSP continued to characterise the latter as the alternative bourgeois party in Ceylon. Yet this did not deter it from striking up no contest pacts with Bandaranaike at the 1956 election, a strategy that went back to November 1951, when the party requested the SLFP to hold a discussion about the possibility of eliminating contests in the following year’s elections. Though it extended critical support to the MEP government in 1956, the LSSP opposed the latter once it enacted emergency measures in 1957, mobilising trade union action for a period of three years.
At the 1960 election the LSSP contested separately, with the slogan “N. M. for P.M.” Though Sinhala nationalism no longer held sway as it had in 1956, the LSSP found itself reduced to a paltry 10 seats. It was against this backdrop that it began rethinking its strategy vis-à-vis the ruling party. At the throne speech in April 1960, Perera openly declared that his party would not stabilise the SLFP. But a month later, in May, he called a special conference, where he moved a resolution for a coalition with the party. As T. Perera has noted in his biography of Edmund Samarakkody, the response to the resolution unearthed two tendencies within the oppositionist camp: the “hardliners” who opposed any compromise with the SLFP, including Samarakkody, and the “waverers”, including Leslie Goonewardena.
These tendencies expressed themselves more clearly at the 1964 conference. While the first resolution by Perera called for a complete coalition, inclusive of Ministries, and the second rejected a coalition while extending critical support, the third rejected both tactics. The outcome of the conference showed which way these tendencies had blown since they first manifested four years earlier: Perera’s resolution obtained more than 500 votes, the second 75 votes, the third 25. What the anti-coalitionists saw as the “Great Betrayal” of the LSSP began here: in a volte-face from its earlier position, the LSSP now held the SLFP as a party of a radical petty bourgeoisie, capable of reform.
History has not been kind to the LSSP’s decision. From 1970 to 1977, a period of less than a decade, these strategies enabled it, as well as the Communist Party, to obtain a number of Ministries, as partners of a petty bourgeois establishment. This arrangement collapsed the moment the SLFP turned to the right and expelled the left from its ranks in 1975, in a move which culminated with the SLFP’s own dissolution two years later.
As the likes of Samarakkody and Meryl Fernando have noted, the SLFP needed the LSSP and Communist Party, rather than the other way around. In the face of mass protests and strikes in 1962, the SLFP had been on the verge of complete collapse. The anti-coalitionists in the LSSP, having established themselves as the LSSP-R, contended later on that the LSSP could have made use of this opportunity to topple the government.
Whether or not the LSSP could have done this, one can’t really tell. However, regardless of what the LSSP chose to do, it must be pointed out that these decades saw the formation of several regimes in the Third World which posed as alternatives to Stalinism and capitalism. Moreover, the LSSP’s decision enabled it to see through certain important reforms. These included Workers’ Councils. Critics of these measures can point out, as they have, that they could have been implemented by any other regime. But they weren’t. And therein lies the rub: for all its failings, and for a brief period at least, the LSSP-CP-SLFP coalition which won elections in 1970 saw through something of a revolution in the country.
The writer is an international relations analyst, researcher, and columnist based in Sri Lanka who can be reached at udakdev1@gmail.com
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Beyond the Numbers: The real costs and benefits of migration for migrant mothers