Clean Sri Lanka: Lesson from Lenin

In November 1978, Dr. Colvin R. de Silva did a brief think piece on the ‘Open Economy’ which he called ‘The New Comprodorism’. He presciently identified the only path forward for the left. 

He said: “It may be that we revolutionaries have to study again – and closely – the old compradorism in order to understand the new comprodorism with which we have to deal for we shall have to bring the masses in to struggle on a new footing. We shall have to find new ways and means to bring a broad enough and clear understanding of the new situation and the new ways of the old-new foe.”  

The ‘New Comprodorism’ Colvin speaks of is the emergence of a brazen Merchant Class hell bent on state capture with a complicit regime that enjoyed unprecedented legislative power with a five sixth majority in parliament. Colvin wasn’t looking back on 76 years. He was assessing the results of comprador elite rule of only 30 years since independence. 

Heavy headwinds blowing to trivialise the “Clean Sri Lanka” project – a beginning towards creating a beautiful island with smiling people announced by President AKD on 1 January 2025, prompts this essay.

As Colvin rightly points out JRJ’s constitutional tinkering should have alerted the left and the revolutionary movement to identify the ‘old-new foe’ with its reservoir of strategies of deceit and disinformation. 

Old-new foe

It has taken another four decades for the Left movement to identify the ‘old-new foe’ and breach the hegemony of the new Compradors elite. 

Clean Sri Lanka confronts the old-new foe squirrely and convincingly. The NPP has as Colvin suggested that the left should do, studied closely – the old compradors and their new neo liberal façade and has brought the masses in to a new struggle on a new footing.

It has so rattled the Comprador establishment that its outstanding marketeer – the Ogling Ogilvy who contested the last Presidential election under the symbol of the ‘Ceylon Communist Party’ has demanded to know if NPP has any legislators who could read a business balance sheet. 

Steely resolve, and an abiding conviction of what needs to be done is the essence of transformational leaders. They make tough decisions that impact the powerful cocooned in the comfort of the status quo. 

Everyone in your team assumes that you have all the answers. But what happens when you don’t have all the answers? Because you are also on a journey of discovery you don’t have all the answers. Who do you turn to? When you don’t have all the answers readily, you must again struggle grappling with new types of crises.

The opposition to ‘Clean Sri Lanka’ in the form of mockery, ridicule, taunts and disdain serve to stress the urgency and the necessity of this campaign to ignite a collective national momentum towards realisation of an ethical state. It may well take some years, but it must be firmly set on track. 

The elite disdain and outright hostility towards the project underscore the ‘Iron Law of Oligarchy’. A government captured and controlled by an elite or oligarchy makes its democracy unsustainable. 

AKD must turn to Lenin

President AKD must turn to Lenin and learn from him. If not for his early demise Lenin would have taken the same path that Deng Xiaoping did half a century later – “It doesn’t matter if a cat is black or white; as long as it catches mice, it is a good cat.” 

Vladimir Lenin was a transformational leader. He died in 1924 when in his early fifties. Before he died, Lenin succeeded in setting in motion a transformation that catapulted a nation trapped in 19th century feudal misery into 20th Century modernity. Lenin electrified a land where people had not heard or seen an electric bulb before 1917. 

Winston Churchill did a pen portrait of Lenin that summed up the man and the age he helped change. The arch Imperialist Capitalist and relentless warrior combating the idea of the welfare state Winston Churchill said of Lenin: “He was at the age to feel. His mind was a remarkable instrument. When its light shone it revealed the whole world, its history, its sorrows, its stupidities, its shams, and above all its wrongs. It revealed all facts in focus – the most unwelcome, the most inspiring – with equal ray. The intellect was capacious and, in some phases, superb. It was capable of universal comprehension in a degree rarely reached among men.”

President AKD too is at a stage when he feels strongly about what needs to be done. His mind too is a remarkable instrument. He too has exposed the sorrows, the stupidities, shams and wrongs of the 76 years since independence. 

In 1922 Lenin finally resolved the civil war against all odds. He led Russia out of international isolation and announced his New Economic Policy that allowed wider scope for private property and the market economy. He explained – his new economic policy was the result of a concrete analysis of the concrete situation of the time! 

To explain his policy shift Lenin uses the analogy of a mountaineer who must retrace his path to the summit by backtracking from earlier attempts. Lenin thus explained what retreat means in transformational or revolutionary politics. It is not betraying the cause which ultimately is not utopia but the distilled essence of Marxist humanism. 

In his parable of the lone climber attempting to reach a hitherto unexplored peak very high, very steep Lenin says “Let us assume that he has overcome unprecedented difficulties and dangers and has succeeded in reaching a much higher point than any of his predecessors, but still has not reached the summit. (Just as President AKD has done – winning the presidency). 

“He finds himself in a position where it is not only difficult and dangerous to proceed in the direction and along the path he has chosen, but positively impossible.” 

The mountaineer

“The mountaineer is forced to turn back, descend, seek another path, longer, perhaps, but one that will enable him to reach the summit. The descent from the height that no one before him has reached proves, perhaps, to be more dangerous and difficult for our imaginary traveler than the ascent—it is easier to slip; it is not so easy to choose a foothold; there is not that exhilaration that one feels in going upwards, straight to the goal, etc. (This answers the wicked taunts of SJB’s economic punditry). 

One has to tie a rope round oneself, spend hours with an alpenstock to cut footholds or a projection to which the rope could be tied firmly; one has to move at a snail’s pace, and move downwards, descend, away from the goal; and one does not know where this extremely dangerous and painful descent will end, or whether there is a fairly safe detour by which one can ascend more boldly, more quickly and more directly to the summit.

It would only be natural for a climber who found himself in such a position to have ‘moments of despondency’. Probably these moments would be more numerous and harder to bear if he could hear the voices of those below, who ‘through a telescope and from a safe distance, are watching his dangerous descent’: ‘The voices from below ring with malicious joy. They do not conceal it; they chuckle gleefully and shout: “He’ll fall in a minute! Serve him right, the lunatic!”.’ (Such malicious joy was in abundance in Opposition benches in Parliament last week) 

They moan and raise their eyes to heaven in sorrow, as if to say: ‘It grieves us sorely to see our fears justified! But did not we, who have spent all our lives working out a judicious plan for scaling this mountain, demand that the ascent be postponed until our plan was complete? And if we so vehemently protested taking this path, which this lunatic is now abandoning! Look look, he has turned back! He is descending! A single step takes him hours of preparation! And yet we were roundly abused when time and again we demanded moderation and caution! if we so fervently censured this lunatic and warned everybody against imitating and helping him, we did so entirely because of our devotion to the great plan to scale this mountain, and to prevent this great plan from being generally discredited!’ (Doesn’t it remind you of SJB trio’s Economic Blueprint?) 

Don’t these words remind you of the Casandras who accuse AKD of following Ranil Wickremesinghe’s beaten track? 

Lenin continues his parable. “Our imaginary mountain climber cannot hear the voices of these people who are ‘true friends’ of the idea of ascent; if he did, ‘they would probably nauseate him’— ‘And nausea, it is said, does not help one to keep a clear head and a firm step, particularly at high altitudes.’

So, Godspeed President AKD.