Writing in Times of Crisis: One Hundred Red Notes

One of my earliest memories as a five year old was of sitting on my father’s shoulder and watching the motorcades of Third World leaders who had arrived in Colombo for the Non-Aligned Movement Conference in 1976. Issues such as apartheid in South Africa, Israeli settlements in Palestine and the aftermath of the Vietnam War, were highlighted at the conference. Those were hopeful times for even a small country to take up the cause of equality and freedom internationally. No one imagined the tremendous tragedy that would befall Sri Lanka itself in the ensuing years with civil war.

At home, my mother read out children’s books to improve my reading and writing, but I was more interested in watching the bigger boys playing cricket and keeping score for them, as numbers came naturally to me. Average in athletics, I dreamt of becoming a cricket player, but that was negated as we were exiled to Japan with the civil war, to a country where cricket was hardly known. Decades later, I find some satisfaction today of having scored a century, not in cricket but in writing a column! This is my 100th Red Notes column, and first I must thank those who follow my column and engage with it. I am also grateful to the many people I converse with and develop my ideas, which I have sought to articulate in my articles.

"The structures of our society may be unravelling; our food system has been shaken with fears of famine, the future of our youth including their employment prospects are bleak and there are worrying dangers of further militarisation and chauvinist attacks on minorities"

When I began writing this column five years ago, I had finally completed my PhD after slogging and dragging it for over eight years. My doctoral studies exposed me to some of the finest scholars and engaged me in reading groups with fellow students and activists. After that, in the relative intellectual solitude of Jaffna, my continuing education is thanks to the rural folk who have opened the new worlds of agriculture, fisheries and a range of other livelihoods and ways of living. Working with the vast network of co-operatives have brought me in contact with diverse peoples and communities that struggle for a meaningful future in the many corners of the North.

Coincidentally, another of my memories from childhood is my father writing a weekly column in the local Tamil newspaper on international issues; that was a time when Tamil youth in Jaffna were enamoured by the history of national liberation movements around the world. I remember much talk about the Israeli attack on Lebanon, the Falklands war and the tragic legacy of Biafra out of the civil war in Nigeria. I say all this, because to write in times of crisis involves anticipating the future, and that involves reflecting on our past and learning from the world around us. 

Pessimism of Intellect and Optimism of will

My first Red Notes column was about the rise of Trump in the US and Brexit in Europe, and the challenges facing Sri Lanka with an unravelling global order. Today our country is mired in the worst economic crisis since Independence. The structures of our society may be unravelling; our food system has been shaken with fears of famine, the future of our youth including their employment prospects are bleak and there are worrying dangers of further militarisation and chauvinist attacks on minorities. Worryingly, the country seems to be descending into economic, social and political anarchy.

The open economy reforms of the late 1970s got rid of the food subsidy, so central to the food security of our people. How much stronger and stable would we be today, if the food subsidy had continued and the nutritional foundation of our people had been secure. Instead, our successive governments took larger loans to invest liberally in massive infrastructure and trophy projects including highways, malls and towers, while reducing the people today to struggle for three meals a day. Thankfully, attempts to completely privatise the free education and the universal healthcare systems were resisted by the people. And despite the commercialisation of healthcare through the back door, it is the right to free healthcare that has been a great boon for working people during the pandemic.

We are in a very different moment from the international space afforded to smaller countries during the Non-Aligned era. The continuing global capitalist crisis and the heightening geopolitical tensions signal dangerous times ahead. The situation is getting worse than the processes of global capitalist expansion and accumulation characterised by exploiting developing economies through terms of trade – the steady decline in the value for Third World agricultural exports compared to their manufactured imports – and high interest loans from global finance capital such as with the extractive International Sovereign Bonds, which have undermined Sri Lanka’s economy to this day. In the years ahead, we may be clawed in by powerful global actors such as India, China and the US as they attempt to stake their geopolitical presence in the region. They may attempt to take charge of strategic assets such as ports and airports as well as appropriate public services and utilities of electric power and oil supply and even educational and health institutions, in exchange for financial bailout as Sri Lanka avoids bankruptcy.

My intellectual collaborators and I, over the last two years, have been for the most part correct in our analysis of the deepening economic crisis towards the current quagmire. However, the future resolution of this crisis is much harder to analyse as it can take different paths. I end by drawing from the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci from his ‘Prison Notebooks’, particularly the section “Analysis of Situations: Relations of Force”. 

“These levels range from the relations between international forces (one would insert here the notes written on what a great power is, on the combinations of States in hegemonic systems, and hence on the concept of independence and sovereignty as far as small and medium powers are concerned) to the objective relations within society – in other words, the degree of development of productive forces; to relations of political force and those between parties (hegemonic systems within the State); and to immediate (or potential military) political relations.”
In these worrying and dangerous times facing Sri Lanka, analysing future developments and changing the course of our history will require paying attention at many levels; international engagement of great powers; the class question involving how, what and for whom we produce; how the state gets shaped by political parties and regimes; and what the military will do and how people resist and struggle. These are issues I hope to write about during the crisis-prone months ahead, while remembering Gramsci’s words that we can be a “pessimist because of intelligence, but an optimist because of will.” We must all act to change the conditions shaping our future.