By Vishwamithra –

“The successful revolutionary is a statesman, the unsuccessful one a criminal.” ~ Erich Fromm

Revolutions have always been associated with bloodshed, violence, riots and breakdown of law and order. What follows a revolution may be an entirely a new order, new vistas and new hope. A change of regime, a change of class or even a total system change would follow, another set of new rulers replacing the old.

Ever since the much celebrated Russian October Revolution which displaced the Czars from power, the communists led by Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin assumed power and replaced the Czarist dictatorship with a so-called ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’. Lenin did not come to the seat of power via a democratically held universal franchise. Those who took part in the revolution were fully educated on the lines of dialectical materialism, made aware of the fact that they were installing that ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’. At the time Russia did not know how a system of government founded on democratic principles could be elected. They willfully ‘selected’, as opposed to ‘elected’, another dictatorship, one of the so-called proletariat.

Fidel Castro and his band of revolutionaries banished Fulgencio Batista , another military dictator, and established a Marxist-Communist dictatorship in Cuba. In Vietnam, Ho Chi Minh, the military commander who withstood America, presumed to be the greatest military power of the day, during the infamous Vietnam war, installed a Communist revolutionary rule.

Then in 1949, the great Mao Zedong was the undisputed head of the Chinese revolutionary movement who replaced Chiang Kai-sheck, drove him to Formosa (Taiwan) and installed himself as the dictator with all the powers a ruler could enjoy in any circumstances. Chairman Mao became the founder of the People’s Republic of China. That power Mao enjoyed after the revolution, in his own words, streamed through the barrel of the gun.

Lenin, Castro, Ho Chi Minh and Mao, all of them were die-hard, determined communists who told their respective soldiers that they were replacing a cruel and murderous regime with a dictatorship of the proletariat; the phrase dictatorship of the proletariat was first used by Karl Marx in a series of articles which were later republished as The Class Struggle in France 1848–1850. The term dictatorship indicates full control of the means of production by the state apparatus. Friedrich Engels considered the Paris Commune (1871), which controlled the capital city for two months before being suppressed, an example of the dictatorship of the proletariat. There are multiple popular trends for this political thought, all of which believe the state will persist following the revolution for its enforcement capabilities.

Nevertheless, all these theoretical approaches to the definitions of communist-based rule are redundant today. Marxism-Leninism is not even in the vocabulary of the communist countries today. The collapse of Russian communism and its replacement by a plain political thug like Putin has made it an item of anachronism; China’s Deng Xiaoping revolutionized the outdated theories of Maoism in his own way and today’s China is a thriving communist dictatorship with a quasi-capitalist economy. Vietnam, albeit they call themselves a communist country, is a fast developing economy that pursues profits, a dreaded word in the old communist world. Only Cuba is rotting away with her own style of communism and a closed economy.

Yet the common and cruel thread that weaves all these communist countries together is the way in which they are being governed by dictatorship. The rulers may call themselves as ‘elected’ leaders, but in actual fact, they are far from it. Those who are supposed to elect them are not given a multiple or binary choice. Only a single choice; a choice without an option.

That is the historical context within which we need to discuss the distinct appearance of entry into the enclosures of Executive Presidential powers of Anura Kumara Dissanayake (AKD), head of the National People’s Power (NPP). AKD’s recent history is being questioned by his opponents, quite pertinently so, as to his allegiance to the old Marxist principles, both of economic policies and governance methodology. Such questioning is pertinent too and if found not satisfactory, there is every reason a reasonable voter would have second thoughts about voting for him.

But the real situation and the ground level context has changed drastically so much, one would find it exceedingly difficult to differentiate between the policies and principles of governance between the two fractions – Ranil-Sajith combo and AKD. Yet there is a nagging doubt, especially amongst the private sector businessmen and the so-called political pundits whether the NPP economic principles and policies would do damage and harm to the smooth running of the open economy. Consequently, this segment of our population has resorted to unjustifiable and unprovable innuendo as to the would-be execution of Marxist-Socialist policies bordering on the infamous collectivization of all privately held lands in the Soviet Union in the aftermath of the October Revolution.

Such political propaganda could be extremely harmful for the cause of the NPP and its desired result at the Presidential Elections. AKD has made it crystal clear at the recently held Business Forum at which many leading private sector entrepreneurs were present, that allegiance to the smooth flow of business activities is unshakable and that they did not need to to be afraid of an NPP administration. However, both AKD and the NPP’s economic hierarchy must realize that at this eleventh hour your political opponents would resort to the meanest and most dishonest propaganda tactics. The NPP must be ready for that and the retort must be immediate and hard. Michelle Obama’s ‘when they go low we go high’ slogan would not mean anything in the context of Sri Lankan electioneering. Adoption of a premise of ‘when they hit hard, we must hit harder’ would not be too much to ask! Silence on the part of the NPP would only add to the veracity of the allegations made. That is a stark reality of electioneering.

If AKD and the NPP come out victorious on September 21^st night, they will have accomplished a unique task: that of launching and be successful in a true revolution without bloodshed and violence. National People’s Power is a left-wing political party. They may not be blindly in league with Marxian principles of governance and economics. In a fast developing world, the lines that divide capitalism and socialism have progressively become thinner. Profit as the fuel of the economic machinery and its validity in the twenty first century has surpassed all Marxian theories. Profit is no more a ‘no-no’ even amongst so-called left-oriented politicians and economists.

When profit is the motive, the whole argument for social justice and economic equitability becomes wholly subjective, absolutely reliable on the person or persons who are charged with the task of performing it. Left-wing pundits and theoreticians might argue that that is not the way in which Marx and Engels pontificated; yet such pontification may have been based on dialectical materialism where the total flow of society is evolving forward and ‘contradictions’ is the main organic methodology of such an evolution process. But such arguments may sound highly scholarly and erudite which could be argued about at the inner rooms of libraries and theoretical fora but not on the street corners and rural hamlets in today’s Sri Lanka.

In dialectical materialism, contradiction, as derived by Karl Marx, usually refers to an opposition of social forces. This concept is one of the three main points of Marxism. Mao Zedong held that capitalism is internally contradictory because different social classes have conflicting collective goals. These contradictions stem from the social structure of society and inherently lead to class conflict, economic crisis and eventually revolution, the existing order’s overthrow and the formerly oppressed classes’ ascension to political power. “The dialectic asserts that nothing is permanent and all things perish in time. Dialectics is the “logic of change” and can explain the concepts of evolution and transformation. Materialism refers to the existence of only one world. It also verifies that things can exist without the mind.

All these high-sounding socialist theories aside, what is pertinent to the current environs of Sri Lanka and in the context of the Presidential Elections is whether the NPP can transform Sri Lanka, its ailing economy and rotting political culture into a reasonably workable polity. What awaits on September 21^st is not merely a Presidential Election at which the country decides to empower one candidate to run the country for the next five years. It’s larger than that.

The NPP has taken the challenge of installing a system change, ensuring a new dimension and new system of governance and a new economy, in other words engaging itself in a political revolution without bloodshed and violence. It is a very tall undertaking. The challenge is not merely ensuring victory at the elections; the real challenge is governing the country with reasonable balance and reasonable intelligence. A doctrinaire approach to resolving our nagging issues, as adopted by our past leftist leaders such as NM Perera, Colvin R de Silva and Peter Keuneman will once again take us to the abyss and in such an event, the next revolution will be bloody and violent for sure.

As at today, all indications are that a greater majority of the people in Sri Lanka seem to be eager to elect AKD as our next President, thereby establishing a revolutionary change in our governing system. A long brewing a battle between the elites and non-elites, one between the haves and have-nots, urban vs rural is bound to climax in the wee hours of September 22^nd 2024. It’s time to make our plans, not for tomorrow, but for the day after.

*The writer can be contacted at vishwamithra1984@gmail.com