Razeen Sally’s restated case for a truly free market

By Channa Fernandopulle

Sri Lanka is a nation with a historic affinity towards leftist politics. This legacy has been entrenched even in our nation’s Constitution through the phrase “Democratic Socialist Republic”. However as our nation strives towards greater development and an escape from the infamous middle-income trap that has arguably plagued even the most successful contemporary global economies, important questions are being raised over the models and ideologies adopted by policy makers and their relevance in the highly complex and volatile global marketplace.

Speaking at a recent forum organised by the Sri Lankan chapter of the Bastiat Society – an international organisation which promotes open, principled wealth creation through trade and a respect for individual freedom – prominent academic and visiting Associate Professor at Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, National University of Singapore Razeen Sally delivered an erudite lecture on the development of capitalism in Asia, trade liberalisation, the role of Government intervention in economics, the questionable contribution of giant multinational corporations to innovation, current interpretations around the problem of inequality, the implications of such knowledge for Sri Lanka’s own development story and even described a Buddhist perspective of the market economy.

Prefacing his lecture by noting that the case for free markets, competition, and individual freedom had largely passed by default in Sri Lanka with the resulting void in ideology being quickly filled by more collectivist ideas, Sally proceeded to describe the development of capitalist ideology and its development up until the global financial crisis (GFC) and the drastic shift in its application in its aftermath.

“By capitalism I mean of course the operation of the market economy; something we’ve been talking about since the publication of the Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith. This means freely forming prices, a system of production and consumption based on the security of individual property rights,” he qualified.

Commenting on the conceptual development of a free market from the initial rigidly mechanical ideas of Smith, who placed the concepts of economic freedom – the freedom to produce and transact- and market liberalisation at the heart of his system to Friedrich Hayek’s conception of a system which focused on “using your own knowledge for your own purposes,” Sally settled on the notion of capitalism as espoused by 20th Century Austrian-American economist and political scientist, Joseph Schumpeter.

“To Schumpeter capitalism is very much more than the narrow system of the operation of the market economy. It is the central nervous system of modern civilisation, the greatest agent of material progress that man has ever seen, the central agent of the wholesale transformation of society, uprooting whole social fabrics and transplanting them with new social fabrics and of course of shaping politics. This is something very different from what existed in pre-capitalist terms.

“Secondly, capitalism to Schumpeter is biological; it is not physical or mechanical. If you look at his works on capitalism, starting with his theory on economic development – probably the best textbook on the theory of economic dynamics as opposed to a theory of economic statics – Schumpeter argues that the capitalist system is this thing that constantly changes, it is in constant motion. There is hardly ever such a thing as equilibrium, so it is quite different from the mainstream 20th century economic theories which considered a system of general static equilibrium and movements from one moment of equilibrium to another, which is what’s known as comparative statics,” Sally explained.

In that context, he argued for a change in perspective when analysing economic models, moving away from a theoretical perspective to one which embraces the full kinetic spectrum of the free market.

“It appears to me while reading Schumpeter that this actually has quite a strong parallel with Buddhism curiously enough, because if you think about the central tenants of the Dhamma, it is actually about the individual human being and everything around him or her being in constant motion, nothing is static, everything changes from one moment to another,” Sally observed.

Entrepreneurs and creative destruction

Describing the role of the entrepreneur in a capitalist system as envisioned by Schumpeter, Sally noted that the motivations of such individuals were rarely driven by pure profit as described by mainstream economic theory and the idea of “rational utility maximisers”.

“Rationality – narrowly defined – might play a part but what motivates the entrepreneur is the very complex psychology whereby maximising returns is just one element but there may be many other elements that might actually be more important.

“If you think of some of the great entrepreneurs of yesterday and today, many of them have not been motivated, at least overwhelmingly, by the desire to make as much money as possible but there have been all sorts of other motivations that have come into it,” he pointed out.

Utilising this new perspective, Sally set forth a revised perspective around entrepreneurship and innovation driven by individuals who, broadly speaking, swarm around new inventions or technologies in order to convert those ideas into items or services which could be profitably marketed with a focus on innovation all along the value chain, from production to consumption in a process fondly described by Schumpeter himself as being a “perennial gale of creative destruction”.

“In doing so they destroy the old. So you have this process of renewal whereby the new replaces the old and that is the true engine of the capitalist system. It is the origin of business cycles; it is the cause of periods of spurts in growth and then recessions and on the odd occasion depressions. Capitalism is never even and it is never stable. In fact it is always unstable, and it is very much the motor of prosperity for the human race,” Sally asserted.

However, he qualified that this process was by no means an automatic one, equipped with any internal logic or natural end-point; a fact which distinguished Schumpeter’s theory from Karl Marx’s, but was informed instead by the ‘economic sociology’ of German sociologist Max Webber.

“The basic framework of this capitalist system is very much focused on keeping the system open so that the entrepreneur can use his animal spirits to work his magic if you like. If Government intervenes too much, it will gum up the system and the entrepreneur is trapped and can’t work his magic to put it in simplified terms,” he noted.

Charting the history of the free market

Stepping back from Schumpeter’s theories, Sally charted the historical development of capitalist ideology from the Commercial Revolution in the Western half of Europe during the Middle Ages to the sudden burst of development through the Industrial Revolution in the 19th century that was characterised by international- and often times forceful – liberalisation of global markets in combination with promethean growth led by the type technological innovation described by Schumpeter.

This growth, Sally observed, grinded to a sudden halt during the first half of the 20th Century due to World War I and II but was thereafter restored and re-globalised after the end of the WWII in a phase that he defined as lasting up until the 1980s when globalisation was primarily focused on Atlantic economies of North America, Western Europe and a few East-Asian offshoots.

“This growth was largely confined to those nations and hardly took place anywhere else but was followed by the biggest phase of globalisation the world has ever seen,” he stated, referring to a period of time spanning the 1980s up to the onset of the GFC.

“This is when most of the rest of the world came on board; the developing world as well as most of the communist economies. During this period we saw big waves of liberalisation and then of course a big expansion of economic freedom and a shift in the pendulum of economic ideas,” Sally observed.

Impact of GFC on the free market ideology

Noting that the ensuing turmoil caused by the global financial crisis had created obvious surface-level changes to global society including but not restricted to a massive drop in production levels, employment and a massive recession; the impact of which still resonates today, Sally noted that another less tangible change in the aftermath of the GFC had been its impact on policies and ideas.

“Since the GFC we’ve seen a much more interventionist turn in macroeconomic policies in terms of fiscal and monetary policy, fiscal stimuli. More importantly – and this is the big difference between the post GFC and era and the post 1930s era – much more reliance on monetary policy over fiscal policy.

“We have also seen a much more interventionist turn in micro-economic policies. The most obvious area is financial regulation. To a significant extent we have seen the re-nationalisation of finance around the world and much more regulation; most of it discretionary. These regulations essentially sought to put ring fences around banks within national borders and that has done a lot to gum up global finance since the crisis,” Sally stated.

Giving examples of such micro-economic interventions, Sally cited American policies to protect the Detroit car industry, first by the Bush administration and followed by the Obama administration along with other industrial policy in Europe, and the move to support “national champions” such as Chinese state-owned enterprises.

“The silver lining is that we have not gone back to the policies and conditions of the 1930s. Of course the economic base is much wider than in that time, people are generally better off than they were in the 1930s and we haven’t seen a wholesale reversal of those policies of liberalisation that occurred during those two phases of post-war liberalisation.

“What we have seen is a kind of creeping re-regulation on macro and micro fronts and for me the comparison is much more apposite with the international situation in the 1970s than the 1930s,” Sally noted.

Overall however, Sally conceded that the pendulum had swung away from defenders of the free market and classical liberalism, leaving supporters of a classic free market system in their weakest state since before the 1980s.

He added that this current situation was partially attributable to the lack of public intellectuals who could be considered true successors to the legacy of Hayek and Milton Friedman, with the possible exception of Paul Krugman – a figure who is generally perceived as being in opposition to neo-classical economic theory.

Sally speculated that the lack of public understanding or debate over free market policies could be playing a role in the waning popularity of such ideas which had retreated into the province of narrow academic circles in modern times.

The resurgence of Keynesian economics

Turning his attention to the role of Governments in mitigating the effects of the GFC, Sally noted that the ‘hands-off’ approach of classical liberal economists had taken a back-seat while the ideas of British economist John Maynard Keynes had enjoyed somewhat of a resurgence in the wake of the crisis.

“Back in the 1920s and 1930s Keynes was very worried about the short term circumstances of debt combined with deflation. To him this showed a chronic lack of demand because savings were not being turned into productive investment by businesses so it required Government intervention to orchestrate the circumstances to give an artificial boost to demand.

“For Keynes this was not just a short term phenomenon but was systemic to the capitalist system. In other words lack of demand was a long term problem and governments had to constantly intervene in order to shift demand upwards because otherwise the system would not be able to sort itself out even beyond the Great Depression,” Sally said.

Returning to the present day, he pointed to leading economists like Larry Summers who had revived Keynes’ view that chronic lack of effective demand will carry over into the long-term due to a structural slowdown in globalisation which would require government intervention to spur demand at a macro-economic level.

Meanwhile in the realm of micro-economics, Sally noted that the echoes of Arthur Cecil Pigou, father of welfare economics could be seen, particularly in the presumption that governments must intervene to rectify market failures.

“The implicit assumption here is that governments are clean, competent and possess the requisite knowledge to rectify such market failures. This train of thought, while less influential than those of Hayek and Keynes, has still become a part of mainstream economics from the 1920s onwards.

“In the past people paid more attention to government failures over market failures so Pigou’s views were less prominent however they too have been enjoying a revival post-GFC as people become more able to perceive market failures,” Sally suggested.

He added that while such ideas had originated in the West, they had since been imbibed by other nations across the globe and could now be seen in Asia and other parts of the world in the wake of the GFC.

The assumptions and perils of interventionism

Setting up his argument against such a resurgence, Sally delved into the assumptions upon which an interventionist policies are based on, namely: the assumption that a group of policy makers could be acquire the knowledge necessary to effectively and successfully intervene in economic matters, that such a group could be immune interest group capture and that such interventions could be accomplished without impinging on individual freedom and property rights.

“Hayek tells us that in complex societies structured around the spontaneous order of the market, no one person or committee can ever have the requisite knowledge to intervene in detail. To set common rules yes, but anything more will inevitably lead to all kinds of unwanted, messy and unanticipated outcomes.

“Further, you cannot simply assume that such collectives will be totally clean and immune to interest group capture and thirdly I believe there is a moral issue because you are talking about interventions that intrude on the space of the individual and his property rights,” Sally observed, warning that such initiatives could risk compromising the ability of entrepreneurs to function freely.

In that context, Sally noted that the move away from classical liberal economics towards a more interventionist approach in actual fact represented a shift towards greater discretion to bureaucrats and politicians, particularly in fields of micro-economic, fiscal and monetary policy.

Consequently, he warned that rules that had been set up to discourage governments from running large budget deficits and contracting excessive public debt and above-all, to secure greater independence for Central Banks had been eroded in the wake of the GFC.

He cited examples of the Obama fiscal stimulus package and prolonged periods of quantitative easing in America, along with Japan’s version of ‘Abe-nomics’ which centred around fiscal and monetary stimulus which had been implemented but complemented by the outstanding promise of structural reforms.

Sally argued that empirical evidence was mounting that such interventions while potentially of some value in the very short-term, did little to address the true challenges facing most economies in the wake of the GFC.

“You have a kind of heroin like addiction to practically zero interest rates that is very difficult to reverse, it entrenches inequality because these are the kind of policies that benefitted – to use the populist term – ‘greedy bankers’ even more.

“It’s favoured those with huge financial assets; it’s disfavoured those with small savings; it has caused all sorts of complications with the management of monetary policy and exchange rate policies in many emerging markets, and it has also led to Central Banks now going into other areas of policy, particularly fiscal policy, adding more and more objectives to their repertoire as opposed to the singular objective of price stability,” he cautioned.

In that context, Sally pointed to the more simplistic approach of German ‘ordoliberalism’ which itself was predated by the conservative approach of 19th Century British Chancellor of the Exchequer William Gladstone.

“Such a system is based on fiscal, monetary and exchange rate policies that prioritise predictability, simplicity and consistency of policy so that a framework of rules is established that is as stable as possible in the medium-long term.

“This requires that the discretion of policy makers is limited as much as possible in order to allow maximum freedom to entrepreneurs within a stable secure system of property rights,” Sally elaborated.

Further hallmarks of such a system would be a greater priority being given to balanced budgets, low taxation and low expenditure to avoid government intrusion into the micro-economy.

“The point that the classical liberal should emphasise on is that when it comes to macro-economic policy, these principles of stability, consistency and predictability of policy are based on rules rather than discretion. That I think is the constitutional counter to the prevailing trend to thinking on macroeconomic policy today,” he added.

Unfinished business in the Asian micro-economy

Commenting on the current status of microeconomic policy in Asia, Sally acknowledged that the region had made significant progress in terms of product liberalisation however in terms it still lagged behind in terms of factor market liberalisation.

“Looking at what’s happening around Asia today, there is a huge amount of unfinished business about microeconomic policy broadly writ. You see that around the world and perhaps most dramatically in certain parts of Asia. This leaves a lot of unfinished business in product markets because some haven’t been liberalised and it leaves a lot of unfinished business in trade policy with tariffs and quotas and so on.

“This issue is even more of a problem when it comes to allowing foreigners to come into the country and work and bring their families. But perhaps the most difficult nut to crack politically is the regulation of factor markets – land, labour and capital. There lies the biggest chunk of unfinished business. There has actually been much less liberalisation there and almost no introduction of competition or individual freedom when it comes to factor market regulation,” Sally criticised.

Noting that such protectionism was typical across most Asian markets, Sally cited the example of China where thirty years of product market liberalisation had transformed and globalised the Chinese economy while still maintaining a stranglehold on other markets, particularly in land market, the banking sector where state-owned banks dominate the market and labour markets where movement of labour from the countryside into urban areas is tightly controlled.

“Regulation of factor markets is perhaps the most difficult nut to crack from a political standpoint because it comes much closer to the heart of the political system itself. Liberalising the import of IT products, the import of all sorts of consumer electronics products is much less politically sensitive than liberalising your banking system or having proper property rights for land, or liberalising labour markets or industrial relations regulation.

“In the Chinese case, what they need to do among other things is transform the banking system with a much better pricing mechanism to allocate resources better from savings to investment to make it more productive. But doing that would tread on the toes of the state-owned bank and state owned enterprises which are of course linked umbilically to the Government and the upper reaches of the Communist party so it’s very difficult to do,” Sally pointed out.

Referring back to the ‘hands off’ approach advocated by classical liberalist economic theory, Sally stated that governments risked compromising their role as umpires setting up the rules of property rights by maintaining protectionist policies. He warned that when such interventionist policies were followed in the micro-economy they ended up supporting one group of citizens at the expense of another; a policy which would only hinder the smooth functioning of a capitalist system driven by entrepreneurial culture.

Inequality and globalisation

Switching his focus to the controversial topic of wealth and income inequality, Sally targeted the increasingly popular arguments of Thomas Piketty advanced in his “unlikely best-seller” ‘Capital’, namely that the long-term rate of capital accumulation among the world’s economic elite had negated the ability of the capitalist system to self-correct and that a radical global tax would be necessary in order to redistribute wealth and correct such anomalies.

He argued that such an analysis had failed to consider the impact of technology, globalisation and the immense progress made in improving inequality from a global perspective. Sally noted that modern technology had put a premium on skilled labour leaving the low-mid skilled labour force on the losing end of widening wealth disparities.

Additionally, new technology – including 3D printing and robotics – would likely result in the destruction of more low-mid skilled jobs which would be difficult to replace with well-paying jobs in a similar skill bracket.

Further, he noted that globalisation had a similar effect in terms of increasing competition from low-wage countries, which also served to put pressure on low-income and low-skilled labour in developed countries

“If you look at editorials in the Economist, the solution to this problem is through more competition, and opening more markets. Any other measures will not be productive and will just leave people worse off. You need more education, more skills but above all, you need to liberalise service markets in order to create more jobs in different sectors,

“On the other hand, the collectivist argument on inequality is centred round more taxes and subsidies. Piketty goes to one extreme and argues for a global tax on the rich in order to re-distribute wealth to the poor,” Sally stated.

Noting at the outset that Piketty’s analysis of inequality was centred around a few key nations including the United States, the United Kingdom and in China – where the GINI coefficient that records income distribution has returned to approximately the same levels since before Chairman Mao first launched his communist uprising – Sally advanced a classical liberalist critique of Piketty’s analysis.

“Firstly we have seen a huge decrease in global inequality if you measure inequality as between people – between global households – rather than nations. That is a result of markets and globalisation. We’ve seen a huge number of people being taken out of global poverty around the world and particularly in the hugely populace nations of China and India and in that measure we have seen a huge decline in global inequality, not the other way around,” he argued.

Sally noted that massive progress had also been made on a global scale in terms of access to education particularly for females; a factor which he anticipated would prove to be a major equalising factor in the future.

He further noted that consumption and purchasing power had improved dramatically over the last few decades citing a sharp decline in the price of standard electronic consumer items and an equally dramatic increase in the quality of goods available in the market as a result of improved technology.

Multinationals sapping innovative spirit

However, addressing criticisms that innovation today had become more unequal and job destroying, Sally argued the reverse position; that the real problem was not that there was too much innovation but too little.

“For all the surface advances we’ve seen in the last 30 years – especially the internet – it’s actually not been as wide or impactful as previous waves of technological revolution had been, particularly in the 19th Century. We’ve seen innovations that are thin, not broad,” Sally noted.

Meanwhile, focusing on the ‘innovators’ themselves, he questioned the ability of large companies to generate true innovations when their focus was limited purely towards profit, and in that context, the validity of policies designed to protect such companies.

Noting that just five American multinational companies are currently sitting on $1 trillion worth of assets – including companies like Apple and Google – Sally questioned why such wealthy corporations chose to merely multiply their assets in financial markets instead of channelling larger portions of their stockpiled wealth into Research and Development.

“You could argue that over the last few decades, the biggest companies in the world have actually been rather complacent. They have earned a lot of money from Adam Smith’s type of economics, through globalisation and liberalisation of markets around the world, particularly in emerging markets and in China but what they haven’t done is really put their shoulders down to the wheel with the promethean growth envisioned by Schumpeter as we have seen with past technological waves.

“In other words we have seen a bit too much of a kind of ‘cushy corporate capitalism’ in the world today. Some of that is due to regulations that place protective walls around companies big or small so government can be complicit in it as well,” Sally criticised.

Consequently, he advocated greater liberalisation of supply side markets in order to keep multinationals on their toes while providing fresh opportunities for entrepreneurs to unleash their “perennial gales of creative destruction”.

Noting that such a situation would destroy many jobs, Sally argued that such destruction would be balanced out by greater levels of productivity in other sectors and a requirement for infrastructure improvements to accommodate growth in other sectors of the economy, which would itself be job intensive.

“To sum up: the classical liberal believes in equality, but it is about equality of procedure, not outcome. Equality of procedure is something different. It is about implementing a framework of rules that allows as much openness for entry to other players.

“But the game then goes on and the outcome cannot be predetermined and should not be predetermined. Within that competition one can emphasise education, skills development, productivity and all that. That is the broad approach we should take,” Sally stated.

Quality of state institutions

Narrowing the discussion to the quality of state institutions – the Executive, Legislature and Judiciary –along with regulatory agencies and the wider political systems of a state, Sally built up a strong argument in support of a transparent, inclusive and democratic system of governance as being the crucial pre-requisite to long term economic prosperity within the capitalist framework.

Drawing a general comparison between Asian nations, he noted that the region was home to a small number of highly developed countries that maintained the best quality institutions, middle-income nations that tended towards average quality institutions and low-income countries which housed predictably low-quality institutions.

“Generally governments that are going through a phase of catch up growth will mobilise as much land, labour and capital as possible to supercharge growth. Providing they get some basics right in macro and micro economic policy, they don’t need advanced institutions to spark growth. They can actually tolerate quite a bit, including corruption and authoritarian political systems,” Sally noted.

He cited examples of China, South Korea and Taiwan as being good examples of authoritarian governments that successfully managed periods of catch-up growth but noted that such authoritarian states could just as easily fall apart, as evidenced by examples in Europe, the Middle-East, Latin America and Africa.

“The problem arises when you get to the end of this period of catch up growth and you then have to move on to productivity led growth. When you try to make that transition; usually at a middle-income level, the quality of institutions – including political institutions – becomes much more important,” he noted.

He asserted that authoritarian political institutions or extractive institutions as defined by economist Daron Acemoğlu and political scientist James A. Robinson, had a tendency to hold only a handful of individuals in places of power while excluding the majority of citizens, a situation which makes a transition to real innovation difficult if not impossible.

“Why? Because the insiders keep the outsiders out and they conserve the rest and prevent structural reform from happening so you need to make that transition from a political system from extractive institutions to inclusive institutions and this basically means democracy.

“It’s not just democracy as the Rajapaksas knew it – getting a democratic sanction once every few years – but it’s very much about liberalism in combination with democracy as perhaps best articulated in the Federalist Papers and in the American Constitution where democracy is checked and balanced with rule of law, transparency, accountability and entrenched liberal individual rights to protect the individuals and minorities,” Sally asserted.

In that context, he emphasised the importance of creating and maintaining such a system of checks and balances, drawing on the cautionary prediction of Acemoğlu and Robinson in the case of China; namely: that the Chinese economic and political experiment will fail without reform of its political institutions.

“You have to ask that question about Malaysia and Thailand today as well. Are they coming to the end of faster spurts of growth, are they going to judder to a halt in a middle-income trap like what we saw in Latin America and the Middle East? Their political systems are not moving forward and in some ways are moving backward thereby compromising the evolution of both markets and society.

And perhaps we have to ask the same question of Sri Lanka given its demographics, cost base, low-middle income status and the nature of its institutions?

“Unless you have not just basic policy reform but serious institutional reform that would more truly embody the principles of liberal democracy there is a chance that we too could get stuck in a middle-income trap,” Sally warned.

Notably, despite Sally’s praise for the quality of institutions in some Asian countries – including Singapore – he observed that despite all the success that the region had enjoyed in catch-up growth, there was still a serious lack of true innovation in Asia.

“Asia’s poor and middle income countries are very much about imitating the examples of more successful nations and that is the right thing for them to do in that stage of growth. But even high growth countries in Asia – Japan, south Korea, and even Hong Kong and Singapore – are still very much in the business of copying what the West does; they’re still mimic men.

“There’s actually very little real innovation going on, particularly when compared with the United States. I say this with feeling because I’d like Singapore, as a global city, to become really innovative and get closer to London and New York but they still have a long way to go when it comes to venture capital in the startup market and individuals with creative ideas. It’s just not there and that continues to be a real problem,” he noted.

Nevertheless Sally pointed to the drastic improvements in individual liberty and quality of life across Asia over the long-term, not just for the elites of Asian society but for ordinary working class citizens as well and expressed hope that such trends would continue well into the future.

Implications for Sri Lanka

Charting Sri Lanka’s policy trajectory since independence, Sally noted that there had been broad continuity in economic policy until 1956, followed by a drastic about-turn in three aspects: political chauvinism with the Sinhala Only Act, a shift from pro-Western orientation to “a supposed non-aligned stance” and a lurch away from economic liberalism.

Sally stated that such policies were further escalated by Sirimavo Bandaranaike in the 1970s followed by an attempted reversal in 1977 and periodic bouts of liberalisation until the end of Ranil Wickremesinghe’s last term in Government when reforms were derailed by macroeconomic instability and the ethnic conflict.

“Thereafter we had a decade of renewed illiberalism in economics, in politics, in terms of ethnic chauvinism and this time with a foreign policy bias towards China.

“Since the election we have seen a welcome reversal in three aspects of policy, more political liberalism, the beginnings of a rebalanced foreign policy and a rebalanced attitude towards minorities and an appreciation that this is a multicultural country – or at least the beginnings thereof – but what we haven’t seen in that quartet is a move back to economic liberalism,” Sally observed.

Consequently he expressed hope that policy makers would re-consider their economic stance and gradually move back towards a more liberal economic policy upon conclusion of general elections later this year.

“This is where ideas matter because these ideas are simply not out there in the public space. What we have had in this country for several decades has been a collectivist ideology brought to this country by Govigamas with mansions in Colombo 7 and walauwas outstation. One can think of prototypes in S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike and Phillip Gunawardena – coconuts that were brown on the outside but white on the inside,” he stated.

Concluding his lecture with an anecdote about an interview that Gunawardena – a historic figure hailed as the father of socialism in Sri Lanka – had conducted with a foreign journalist in the 1950s on the steps of his ancestral home in Colombo.

“He asked Gunawardena – the man who brought the germ of Marxism from Europe to Sri Lanka – how a man of such privilege came to do what he was doing in putting such ideas into practice. He responded by saying: ‘of course I grew up with a silver spoon so I had to go to the West to learn about the common man and what to do about him’.

“Of course politics and Marxism today is no longer the province of this clique of Govigamas but it has been democratised and spread to street thugs and the petite bourgeoisie of Beliatta and other places one could think of but that I think it has been the prevailing ideology in this country and I hope that we can correct it,” Sally concluded.

 

Pix by Upul Abayasekara