AKD; promise and performance

Caption: Left leaders must set out a coherent path towards a just society

John Maynard Keynes once described the ideal economist as someone who was a “mathematician, historian, statesman and philosopher” in equal measure. 

Keynes isn’t fashionable anymore. Economics, which is about human behaviour, has become a mathematical science. So much so, Larry Summers as chief economist of the World Bank wrote in 1991 “the laws of economics are like the laws of engineering. One set of laws works everywhere.”

Under the NPP Government which is now following the straight narrow corridor to a possible debt-free Walhalla as promised by the IMF, a car dealer has airlifted exotic luxury chariots under amended regulations on vehicle imports. Hence, these random musings on AKD’s promise and performance. 

“A brand-new Rolls-Royce Phantom Series 8 II, Bentley Bentayga and BMW M3 CS have officially arrived in Sri Lanka, marking the high-profile return of ultra-luxury vehicles following the recent easing of the vehicle import ban.

The vehicles were spotted unloaded from an air cargo shipment at Bandaranaike International Airport. The delivery is reportedly considered one of the most expensive air cargo shipments in Sri Lanka’s history. Pictures courtesy social media – (https://www.dailymirror.lk/breaking-news/Rolls-Royce-Phantom-touches-down-in-SL/108-308998).

This piece of reassuring news of ‘entrepreneurs with cash to splash’ in the Daily Mirror of 16 May 2025 is an incontrovertible vindication of our Treasury Secretary’s treatise “Sri Lanka’s Economic Revival – Reflection on the Journey from Crisis to Recovery”. 

The link cited should help readers interested, concerned and nosey enough to scroll down for a look see of these fabulous chariots unloaded from a Turkish Airlines freighter.

It appears that Sri Lanka’s economic recovery and the new NPP Government’s steely steady stabilising process is the kind of stuff that makes history. 

Crawling out of the abyss of sovereign default we have restructured our domestic debt by cropping the largest pension fund, by boldly invigorating wobbly domestic banks saddled with ISBs bought at discounted rates during the pandemic with Rupee bonds and keeping the Dollar exchange steady in a disorderly world of tit for tat tariff ultimatums traded between the world’s two largest economies. 

President AKD made two lengthy sermonising exercises this month. He addressed an impressive May Day rally where the backdrop setting was a large Hammer and Sickle symbol emblematic of the universal call for worker and peasant solidarity. 

He then addressed the party cadres and adherents on the 60th anniversary of the JVP. While his May Day address was a polemical panzer thrust before Local Government elections, his eloquent exhortation at the 60th anniversary at the open-air theatre at the Viharamahadevi Park was a veritable ideological expedition on ‘what is to be done’ and how it should be done. In Leninist terms a kind of ‘concrete analysis of the concrete situation.’ 

Only incorrigibly imbecilic minds or conscienceless charlatan minds would hold that the JVP instigated the violence in the late eighties.

True they too committed mindless violence but it was reactive to State-sponsored terror. As Walter Benjamin did in his ‘concept of history’ AKD was the chronicler who recounted events without distinguishing between the great and small resurrecting the truth that was lost in the history written by the oppressive state. All that was good. 

It seems the JVP has ceased incantation and opted for pragmatic politics. While Marx was proven wrong on his theory of value his profoundly accurate reading of the intrinsic contradictions of capitalism remain valid as has been repeatedly demonstrated by boom and bust cycles in global commerce. For the NPP to abandon the profound critique of capitalism as expounded by Marx is a denial of its revolutionary past

An abrupt end

But the dream arrives at an abrupt end. Not a whiff of Karl Marx – the chap who wrote Das Kapital and the Communist Manifesto where he attempted to locate a heart in a heartless world. Yes. Marx wasn’t infallible. As H.G. Wells points out Marx was accurate in his diagnosis but instead of a cure he suggested an incantation! 

It seems the JVP has ceased incantation and opted for pragmatic politics. While Marx was proven wrong on his theory of value his profoundly accurate reading of the intrinsic contradictions of capitalism remain valid as has been repeatedly demonstrated by boom and bust cycles in global commerce. 

For the NPP to abandon the profound critique of capitalism as expounded by Marx is a denial of its revolutionary past. 

For the sake of accuracy, one must use the precise Sinhala words he deployed. The NPP’s future trajectory would be based on three essentials ‘Edithara-Bawa, Herdha-Sakshiya Viyawaharika Budhdhiya’. As I understand it, that would be unflinching Courage, a righteous Conscience and Practical Wisdom. The qualifying adjectives are mine. 

AKD is not the first Left Revolutionary Leader to attain the Presidency of a broke country by popular vote. It happened in Uruguay in 2010. 

José (Pepe) Alberto Mujica Cordano, revolutionary leader of the Tupamaros Movement was elected President of Uruguay in 2010 and served only one term as permitted by the Uruguayan constitution. By a strange coincidence, he passed away on 13 May 2025 at age 89. 

As president, he celebrated his revolutionary past. But he too persuaded himself to operate within the established system: “I need capitalism to work, because I have to levy taxes and attend to the serious problems we have,” he asserted to those who questioned his patience and cautious approach. 

The Uruguayan constitution does not permit a second consecutive term in office. He withdrew to a farm in a rural part of Montevideo to set up an agricultural education centre.

He continued to be active in politics. He never abandoned his radical idealism and inspired a new generation of the young. How Uruguay handled its sovereign debt default is another story for another day. 

“Life is a beautiful adventure and a miracle,” he said. “We are too focused on wealth and not on happiness. We are focused only on doing things and, before you know it, life has passed you by.”

Before his death he wrote a poignant epitaph for himself. Just as I sat down to write this brief missive, I discovered it in this week’s Jacobin magazine. 

In it he argues that capitalism is not just about private property, accumulating wealth and monetary jiggery pokery. The left must live with liberal market economics but must confront its excesses with a culture of solidarity.

Left leaders must set out a coherent path towards a just society.  

“My generation made a naive error. We believed that social change was only a matter of challenging modes of production and distribution in society. We did not understand the immense role of culture. Capitalism is a culture, and we must respond to and resist capitalism with a different culture. Another way to put this: we are in a struggle between a culture of solidarity and a culture of selfishness. 

I am not thinking of culture that is sold, like professional music or dance. All that is important, of course, but when I speak of culture I am referring to human relations, to the set of ideas that govern our relationships without us realising it. It is a set of unspoken values that determine the way in which millions of anonymous people around the world relate to each other.

Consumerism is part of that culture. It is an ethic needed for capitalism in its struggle for infinite accumulation. The worst problem for capitalism would be for us to stop buying or to buy very little. And this has generated the consumerist culture that envelops us.”

His entire missive appears in this week’s Jacobin magazine. 

Practical wisdom, a righteous conscience and unflinching courage are all good. But is that adequate to fill the chasm between promise and performance. 

I am 83 years old. With an annoyingly inconvenient calcified aortic valve I am in approaching winter watching falling leaves. I voted for AKD. Had I known that he would make the Chairman of the Ceylon Chamber of Commerce his principal economic advisor I would have stayed home. 

A free market needs a social framework

The NPP promised an inclusive social contract. As Mark Carney the famed central banker now elected Prime Minister of Canada points out in his time tome on how to build a better world a free market needs a social framework.

There are common values and beliefs that underpin a just and successful economy. 

Dynamism that promotes human creativity. That requires the kind of English and Math teachers found in Royal College Colombo serving in Thanthrimle, Kilinochchi or Siyambalanduwa. 

Resilience to bounce back from shocks while protecting the most vulnerable in society. That doesn’t mean shaving off the EPF. 

Sustainability with long-term perspectives that align incentives across generations. That doesn’t mean making it easy for desperate mothers to obtain passports to venture out as housemaids to feed their undernourished offspring.

Fairness, particularly in markets to sustain their legitimacy. We must ask our paddy farmers for comments on the fairness of the market. Or better still. Ask the crusading Minister in charge of Ports what he proposes to do with the Ceylon Association of Shipping Agents who claim omnipotence in Sri Lanka’s shipping industry. 

Solidarity whereby citizens recognise their obligations to each other and share a sense of community and society. On this question we should interrogate Garrulous Gamunu who speaks for private bus owners. 

Humility to recognise the limits of our knowledge, understanding and power so that we act as custodians seeking to improve the common good. To identify humility, we must listen to the Economic ‘Osthars’ whose blueprint the people failed to understand at the last presidential election. The Left must discover a new set of values instead of sharing the values of unbridled capitalism. 

In our general political discourse since 1948, the Right has remained trapped in tradition while the left has consistently stressed on a caring society keeping pace with progress. The visionary chairman of Hayley’s the late D.S. Jayasundera once narrated to me how Dr. N.M. Perera helped his conglomerate to set up shop in Texas to circumvent US restrictions on supplying activated carbon to meet the demand for it by NASA. Business process efficiency was integral to Dr. N.M. Perera’s world view. It is not surprising. The finest penetrative essay on Karl Marx was authored by his famed teacher Harold Laski sometime in the 1920s. 

The widening chasm between progress and hidebound Eurocentric tradition is reflected in the frenzied exasperation of a divided Opposition after the recent Local Government elections. 

To navigate the complexities of a rapidly changing world AKD must focus on Asia and its rising star – China. Sooner than later Kautilya and Confucius will need to coalesce on an alternative strategy to combat the vagaries of the hegemonic hold of the US dollar in global commerce. 

I am weary of this unjust world. I can only echo the incisive words of Immanuel Wallerstein who unravelled the world systems in the seventies long before Raegan and Thatcher. “People resist exploitation. They resist as actively as they can, as passively as they must.”