Democracy for the Exploiters
The social forces which have brought President Jayawardene to power are more powerful even than Mr. Jayawardene is in the full panoply of Presidential power. President Jayawardene is the creature of their sentiments and not their creator howsoever esteemable and strong his own sentiments may be. That is the reality of politics; or as the Germans would say: that is realpolitik - power-politics!
The President himself gives expression to this problem (his problem) in his own quotational way :-
"I wish I could shatter this structure to bits and then permit the people to build it close to their heart's desire. Will the voters understand ?"
The answer is: the voters will understand if in fact you go forward to socialism* That, let it be remembered, was the UNP promise – and Mr. Jayewardene's own incessantly repeated promise-before and during the general elections campaign. But where now are the promises of yester-year? They are reserved even by Mr. Jayewardene himself for special occasions. As for his UNP colleagues, they do not deviate even into occasional pretence. They are all on a straight big capitalist line.
President Jayewardene himself seems to be uneasily aware of the ; as appears from this curious sentence in his speech :-
"All our new development programmes, except the Free Trade Zone, are socialist."
What a startling exception! He repeats the familiar story of the four great objectives of his Government, namely, the accelerated Maha veli Project, the Free Trade Zone, the Sub-urban Colombo Expansion and Development Programme and the Colombo Development Programme; Only the first two can be termed national ventures. The others are concessions to his powerful Local Government Minister, now Prime Minister; in addition, though without additional power. Of the two national ventures, the President, in the very heart of a paragraph on socialist democracy, blandly admits that the FTZ is not a socialist venture.
But the FTZ is the heart and substance of his national policy which is directed first and foremost to the attraction to Sri Lanka in a major way of big foreign private capital, that is to say, the
imperialist overlords of the capitalist world. It is a policy of pledging, mortgaging and selling our country to these overlords in the name of the needs of development. It is a strange road to socialism that lies through the domination of Sri Lanka by big foreign private capital. For that is what the FTZ will achieve if it succeeds.
And what of democracy? Democracy without socialism, says the President, most correctly, is a democracy of exploitation. More accurately, it is democracy for the exploiters -- a democracy they readily jettison if the masses set about using democracy to abolish exploitation. The point we have reached today is shaping up as if, precisely, that stark alternative is beginning to face the capitalist class once again.
The President has talked of the caricature of democracy that was handed to us. Wherein lay that caricature? Certainly not in the C6nstitution he inherited. It is presisely that Constitution which
enabled an alienated people to express themselves clearly and overwhelmingly on the central question of all politics namely, "to whom the power ?" It is to the periodical resolution of this question that the processes of parliamentary democracy, both in their British and American form, are directed.
The contest no doubt is in the form of a contest between political parties--a form of contest which does have a certain constricting effect. But, in the manner in which the system has functioned in Sri Lanka and been utilised by the people, the system has shown a remarkable responsiveness to the shifts of public opinion and shown some unusualness in respect of the party-system itself. After all, it is through the processes of parliamentary democracy in Sri Lanka that (a) massive majorities have been reversed and (b) an entirely new political party was in a brief period of time brought into being and brought to power in correspondence with the will of the people.
It is precisely this use by the masses of the system of parliamentary democracy, conserved and strengthened in the 1972 Constitution, that the present Government of the UNP and the reactionary social forces on which they essentially rest fear and want to get away from. "Will the voter understand?" is essentially a question that expresses fear of, and not faith in, the voting masses. Underlying the question is the fear of letting the voters decide.
Once the matter is looked at in this way it will readily be seen who is making a caricature of democracy. It is not necessary to deny in this connection that Mrs. Bandarahaike during her last years of power did misuse the Constitution and make a caricature of democracy. The imperious wayward and addle-headed way she rode rough-shod in 1975 over the will of the masses so clearly expressed in 1970 and broke up from within the united front of the SLFP with the LSSP, which was the sole defence of the progressive masses against rising UNP reaction, was one little understood aspect of that caricature. The use of the Emergency system long after every excuse for it had disappeared, was another aspect. The abrupt prorogation of Parliament
three months in such a manner that she could rule without it right up to the very threshold of the General Election was a third aspect. The establishment of a private camarilla outside and above both Parliament and Cabinet, to advise her in taking decisions is a well-realised fourth step that reduced parliamentary democracy to a caricature at her hands. Other acts too of hers could be cited……
But the essential fact about Mrs. Bandaranaike's misdoings and trespasses was that they were excrescencies upon the constitutional system of 1972 and not organic components of that system. What we are seeing today under the UNP Government led by Mr. Jayewardene is the steady and continuing installation of a constitutional system which undermines the processes of parliamentary democracy and erects new barriers in the way of the use of those processes by the masses in their own anti-capitalist interests.
That is the meaning and significance of the substitution of the so-called executive president a system for the parliamentary system we have known, developed and strengthened in accord with our own genius. We have not even the American Separation of Powers which betokens a dispersion of power, but the African concentration of power in an executive President who has been made Head of State, Head of Government and Chairman of the Cabinet of Ministers. It is a concentration of power in a single personage that not only devalues the NSA and the Cabinet and Prime Minister but also, by that very concentration counters the power of the sovereign people over the processes of government.
To this new set of relationships between the Government and the people there is soon to be introduced, as the President has stated, still another set of relationship tending the same anti-people direction. This is the so-called system of proportional representation which has already been enshrined in the law relating to local government elections. It is not really a system of proportional representation of the people but essentially a system of proportional representation of established political parties. The voters will not be able to choose individuals (their representatives) as they do now; they will only be able to choose between political parties on the basis of lists prepared and put forward by parties; which have sufficient strength and disciple to put forward a statutorily designated number of "candidates one-third of whom cannot anyhow be elected at all!
How the President of the central government will emerge we still do not know. But if it is to be by the bizarre system by which the chairmen of local bodies emerge, all we can say is that the parliamentary democratic process will be reduced to a farcical level. If moreover the legislative joke in the new local government law, by which the budget presented by a minority chairman is deemed to have been passed though it has been rejected by a hostile majority, is to be introduced to apply to Central Government's Budget too, then we have, no farce but the dictatorship of a single party.
All this in the name of the "stability" which the President believes has prevailed in England over a couple of centuries! What precisely is that stability, if stability it has been? It has been the stability of the capitalist system which once ruled so much of the world directly, that it produced "the empire on which the sun never sets." But now that sun has set in the face of war and revolutions; and the instability of Britain, has begun to force it apart and to prolong its crises.
Are we in the same situation, without having lost an empire, and caught in the toils of the seemingly irremediable crises of under-development which has made socialism an imperative if we are to survive and emerge into another era as a united and prosperous country ?
Yes, Mr. President, democracy without socialism is a democracy of exploitation. But what we have to realize today is that, if we have to save democracy, we must have socialism. And socialism requires the destruction of capitalism. That, Mr. President, is the destruction called for; the reality we have to shatter to bits in order to build nearer to the heart's desire.
Omar Khayyam only wished it in his melancholy. The working people of Sri Lanka, in their hour of need will accomplish it. Where will you be then with your non-emergency laws which are worse than any emergency regulations we have known? Where? Everybody will be compelled to choose when the time comes……
June, 1978
* The reference here is to Mr. Jayawardene's claim that his Government is Socialist.
